tim sweeney

Auto Added by WPeMatico

Epic Games appeals last week’s ruling in antitrust battle with Apple

Fortnite maker Epic Games is appealing last week’s ruling in its court battle with Apple, where a federal judge said Apple would no longer be allowed to block developers from adding links to alternative payment mechanisms, but stopped short of dubbing Apple a monopolist. The latter would have allowed Epic Games to argue for alternative means of serving its iOS user base, including perhaps, through third-party app stores or even sideloading capabilities built into Apple’s mobile operating system, similar to those on Google’s Android OS.

Apple immediately declared the court battle a victory, as the judge had agreed with its position that the company was “not in violation of antitrust law” and had also deemed Apple’s success in the app and gaming ecosystem as “not illegal.” Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney, meanwhile, said the ruling was not a win for either developers or consumers. On Twitter, he hinted that the company may appeal the decision when he said, “We will fight on.”

In a court filing published on Sunday (see below), Epic Games officially stated its attention to appeal U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ final judgment and “all orders leading to or producing that judgment.”

As part of the judge’s decision, Epic Games had been ordered to pay Apple the 30% of the $12 million it earned when it introduced its alternative payment system in Fortnite on iOS, which was then in breach of its legal contract with Apple.

The appellate court will revisit how Judge Gonzalez Rogers defined the market where Epic Games had argued Apple was acting as a monopolist. Contrary to both parties’ wishes, Gonzalez Rogers defined it as the market for “digital mobile gaming transactions” specifically. Though an appeal may or may not see the court shifting its opinion in Epic Games’ favor, a new ruling could potentially help to clarify the vague language used in the injunction to describe how Apple must now accommodate developers who want to point their customers to other payment mechanisms.

So far, the expectation floating around the developer community is that Apple will simply extend the “reader app” category exception to all non-reader apps (apps that provide access to purchased content). Apple recently settled with a Japanese regulator by agreeing to allow reader apps to point users to their own website where users could sign up and manage their accounts, which could include customers paying for subscriptions — like Netflix or Spotify subscriptions, for instance. Apple said this change would be global.

In briefings with reporters, Apple said the details of the injunction issued with the Epic Games ruling, however, would still need to be worked out. Given the recency of the decision, the company has not yet communicated with developers on how this change will impact them directly nor has it updated its App Store guidelines with new language.

Reached for comment, Epic Games said it does not have any further statements on its decision to appeal at this time.

Powered by WPeMatico

Epic Games announces Unreal Engine 5, shows off boundary-pushing PlayStation 5 demo

After eight years of Unreal Engine 4, Epic Games is finally ready to talk about Unreal Engine 5, which they’re announcing will launch in preview early next year with a wider launch by the year’s end.

Unreal Engine 5 is all about harnessing the performance of next-generation consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. The consoles support wild resolutions and frame rates, but Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was most excited about how the new hardware handles data storage, something he says will lead to “state of the art performance” better than any gaming PC.

For Unreal Engine 5, the big evolution appears to be dynamic rendering, allowing developers to drop massively complex objects with millions of polygons into their games and lean on the engine to determine how intricately the object can be rendered onscreen. In the case of the PlayStation 5, that’s pretty damn intricate. Epic Games showcased the new engine running on the PS5 in a truly stunning demo.

“We’re turning scalability from a developer’s problem into our problem,” Sweeney says.

Sweeney says the demo is the representation of what happens when the polygons being rendered shrink to the size of individual pixels. “This is all the detail that you can get until you get a higher-resolution monitor, or until 8K or 16K come along,” he says.

Unreal Engine 5’s major advances are centered around a pair of new products called Nanite and Lumen. Nanite deals with said dynamic rendering product allowing for massively detailed scenery, while Lumen is a new pipeline for dynamic scene illumination, allowing for more life-like lighting of digital assets.

The new update will also push connectivity further, bringing Epic Online Services into the fold with toolsets that can help developers make their online gameplay leverage multiple platforms, connecting mobile, console and PC, just as Fortnite has.

Alongside news of the big update’s release, Epic Games has shared that Fortnite, which will unsurprisingly be leveraging Unreal Engine 5, will be a launch title on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. While the game’s cartoonish art style won’t be pushing boundaries quite as much as hyperrealistic titles like the one above, adding the next-gen consoles means more platforms on which to reign supreme.

Powered by WPeMatico