Epic vs Apple

This article is about Epic Games vs Apple ongoing battle and suing each other. Apple and google are accused of strip mining i.e not having burden of creation and minting profits with commission. Technically you will invent a game and market it , apple store and google play store will make easy 30% on your innovation. 

Let's look at the parties involved in this battle and their revenue, valuation and commission charges.

Category                            Epic                         Apple                           Google

Revenue in 2019                 4.2 Billion                260 billion                     45.8 billion

Valuation in 2020                17 Billion                 2 Trillion                       632 billion

Commission                        12%                          30%                               30%


This is battle of elites, this is not a case of David vs Goliath. Its a common practice since the beginning of human race to steal someone's creation and make money out of it. How many artists realized the value for their art while they were living ? All the enterprises mastered the art of making money from someone's innovation. Not having exclusive rights makes more sense in Pharmacy industry. As we don't want to see monopoly on critical drug from a greedy company(Ex: Valeant Pharmaceuticals).

Lets look at margins in few industries around us.

  • Average margin in Financial industry is 15% to 40%.
  • Manufacturing industry margin is anywhere from 10% - 30%
  • Amazon gets 35% to 70% of the royalties on the books from authors.
  • Hollywood Studios charge 53% of box office margin in US and 41% internationally.
  • Netflix buys a movie at the cost of production + 30% on top of it, and it retains most of the future licensing rights.

As we are comparing entertainment industry, last 3 examples above might make more sense. Companies will have more budget for marketing and advertisement than for Research and Development. Now a days cloud biggies are running out of innovation and getting into this art of strip mining. 35% of commercial application are open source. We know all the cloud providers are making their own versions based on open source software and minting billions of dollars with minimal to NO contribution back to the open source community.

So my conclusion is, this exploitation is everywhere, that doesn't make it right. You are a communist if you say limit profits for company, you are capitalist if you say reap profits from your efforts. There should be a happy medium. As humans we exploited forests, rivers, polluted skies, controlled other species behavior. Looks like we ran out of options, so we jumped right back into exploiting our own species.  

Now having said all that, will you and me be nice guys if we are on top ? will you voluntarily give away profits, commissions for the greater good ? History can only tell if you are Steve Jobs (no charity work) or Bill Gates(full of charity work).

On a side note while this battle is going on, Iphones with fortnite (epic games) installed are selling for thousands of dollars on eBay. We never change !!!

PS: Thanks to google for all the help with search and Apple for the nice Mac to write this article.


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