Fortnite no longer appears in Apple App Store

Apple has removed Epic Games’ Fortnite from its Apple Stores, saying that the company violated in-app payment guidelines by allowing for a direct payment features . Yahoo Finance’s Final Round panel discusses the details and what it means for the scrutiny over Apple’s App Store practices.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: But this comes at a very interesting time for the app store. And just some news crossing within the last hour or so is that Apple has kicked Fortnite off the App Store. Epic Games, their parent company, had been trying to, essentially, get their users to sign up and pay them outside of the App Store so they didn't have to pay the fee. You'll remember on this program we talked to DHH with the HEY Email app a couple of-- I think it almost a month ago now. And they had their whole tiff, Melody Hahm, with Apple taking the rake, that 30% rake, on purchases made in the app store.

And I think this really highlights-- we go back two weeks to all those tech CEOs on Capitol Hill. It really highlights that I think Apple is kind of the worst actor here in terms of how they use their market position to take a cut of other companies' business that's built on top of their service. I think we can all agree that Facebook is a bad company for all of society. But Apple might be clearly using their market position here in a way that's more questionable than the other peers they were up there with.

MELODY HAHM: Yeah, which is an interesting turn of narrative, right? Because for so long, we kind of couched Apple as oh, but they do care about our privacy. There are so many more kind of levers in place.

But I think with an incident like this, and as the conversation gets more and more entrenched, I think, it's not just rogue actors, right? These are big players, like Epic Games, the owner of Fortnite, that are blatantly going rogue and saying, hey, this is an unjust system. And even on the day of the antitrust hearings and leading up to it, we spoke with lots of different analysts and people who were making comments about the structure of tech giants today and how monopolistic they really are.

And I think Apple is always likened to a tollbooth, right, where you kind of have to go through the tollbooth. It doesn't matter if you have an E-ZPass. It doesn't matter if you're paying cash. You have to pay 30% of your-- that 30% commission in order to exist, in order to survive, which is a common thread across a lot of the companies.

I do want to read the company's statement in full from Apple, basically admonishing Epic Games, saying that they had to, quote, "take the unfortunate step of violating the App Store guidelines that are applied equally to every developer and designed to keep the store safe for our users. As a result, their app has been removed. They enabled a feature in its app which was not reviewed or approved by Apple. And they did so with the express intent of violating the App Store guidelines regarding in-app payments."

And Myles, I think this is just kind of, I would say, the second chapter of an ongoing novel that, I think, is being written right now. And I imagine that Epic Games-- yes, they're being chastised. But this is not going to be the end of this sort of tit-for-tat battle.

DAN ROBERTS: And guys, one thing on Apple and the App Store, after those hearings two weeks ago or three weeks ago, whatever it was, there was a little bit of a general consensus that Apple of the big four kind of got off lightly. A lot of the questions toward Apple really weren't about its size and breaking it up. And so people kind of said, well, look, of those four companies-- I remember I wrote up one analyst's comment along these lines-- Apple has the least obvious assets to break up.

That is, you look at Facebook and you look at Google and you can point directly at big, big things those companies have acquired that if lawmakers really do this-- which, do we really think they will ever-- they could say you now have to sell off those assets. Apple, not so much. But then the App Store is really a big exception. It's sort of a different form of antitrust concern.

But I think as more of these examples proliferate-- HEY, which we talked to, and now Fortnite-- it ain't good for sort of the optics of how the App Store works, that 30% fee.

MYLES UDLAND: Yeah, I think it all fits into-- whether we're talking about the App Store, we're talking about an Amazon Marketplace type business, the maturation of all these industries have created a lot of large companies built on top of these services. And now they're saying wait, I could be 10%, 20% larger if I just challenged Apple. And now I'm a big guy.

I mean, Epic Games is now a big enough, strong enough company. They feel like they have the leverage to take on Apple. And they're, of course, not the only company who kind of works in that ecosystem.

So very interesting times ahead, whether it's this push and pull with lawmakers, and also just good old-fashioned competition. Some companies think they're overpaying for some service that they can only get from one company. Well, that sounds like a monopoly to me.