Recent Apple filings reveal the immense behind-the-scenes support Apple provided to Fortnite-maker Epic Games over the last two years.
A court filing from Mark Grimm — a Game Developer Manager at Apple — highlights the lengths to which Apple bent over backward to accommodate Epic Games in recent years… As detailed by Grimm, Apple and Epic engineers over the past two years remained in “near-constant contact” to ensure that Fortnite could run optimally at all times and across a variety of devices. Grim notes that Apple provided Epic with a substantial amount of engineering support to “reduce Fortnite’s memory footprint” which allowed it to run on older iPhone models.
A separate filing from Mike Schmid, Apple’s Head of Games Business Development, sheds even more light on some of the behind the scenes assistance Apple provided to Epic Games over the years.
One particularly interesting tidbit from Schmid is that Epic would routinely threaten to release Fortnite updates on competing platforms first if Apple didn’t “accommodate their requests.” Schmid also said Epic on a number of occasions threatened to “terminate its relationship with Apple and remove its games” from the App Store if Apple didn’t comply with the company’s demands.
Schmid further details that Apple was so committed to meeting Epic’s demands and needs that it adjusted its Epic relationship team as to provide the company with around the clock support.
MacDailyNews Take: As we’ve said from the very beginning: “Epic Games wants all of the benefits afforded to it by Apple’s App Store for free.”