They absolutely baited Apple to do this, I'm actually glad they did it. It's time someone takes a stand. I think this will be more significant than people think. Remember it was Netscape that helped bring about Microsoft's anti-trust.

It's kinda hypocritical since Epic has a very similar business model for anything that's built using the Unreal Engine.

Unreal Engine costs less and it's not mandatory to use it in order to make games.

For those reading along, Unreal Engine fees is 5% after the first million.

Or 0% on sales through EGS.

I assume both Epic and Apple are playing chess here. Apple must have anticipated incoming lawsuits as they cracked down on external transactions in gaming. It will be very interesting to see where the courts land, but it sure seems like Epic and similar have the upper hand on the PR battle.

Apple only really had two actions, both bad for Epic. They probably prepared responses and PR campaigns against both.

they did the same thing with that manufactured dust-up between Improbable and Unity in January last year. Improbable intentionally violated Unity's terms, Unity scrapped their contract, Improbable intentionally engineered confusion among its users, Epic came out with a signed contract with Improbable and an agreement to the tune of $25m like an hour or two later. Tim Sweeney the whole time was tweeting about how big and mean Unity is. I just don't believe his act at all.

The video:

https://twitter.com/Dexerto/status/1294010838928433154?s=20