By Sarah E. Needleman The second week of the trial between Epic Games Inc. and Apple Inc. has centered on expert-witness testimony debating whether smartphones are interchangeable with other.
Epic Games’ economic expert testified that Apple restrains competition in its App Store in a closely watched antitrust battle between two tech giants. In his testimony, economist David Evans noted that Apple’s App Store profits are “vastly higher” than those of most online stores.
Customers leave an Apple store on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, Calif., in 2019. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)
OAKLAND, Calif. (CN) The federal judge overseeing the antitrust fight between Apple and Epic Games had a lot of questions for economist David Evans, chairman of Global Economics Group and Epic’s main economic expert, who took the stand Monday to testify that Apple’s restrictions on developers are causing anticompetitive harm in the iOS app distribution market.
The Epic Games v Apple lawsuit continues.
The pair managed to spend actual time in court talking about a banana and its clothes.
Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction and yes, it turns out that both Epic Games and Apple managed to argue about whether an animated banana should have to wear clothes or not. That s the point we re at in what could be the lawsuit that shakes the App Store up in a big way.
As the trial meanders its way into its second week we saw testimony from Matthew Weissinger, Epic s VP of marketing. That s the point at which one of Apple s many attorneys decided they wanted to raise the subject of Peely, an in-game character that s essentially a banana with arms and legs. But Apple had an important question – should it wear clothes?
Epic Games claims Fortnite as big as it s going to get when it comes to the audience on consoles.
That s according to the testimony of the company s marketing director Matthew Weissinger, speaking yesterday on the sixth day of the ongoing Epic vs Apple antitrust trial.
Weissinger was asked whether there was a platform that represented the biggest growth potential for Fortnite, to which he responded: Mobile.
When asked why, he said: I mentioned it on Friday, but we ve reached basically full penetration on console and mobile offers the biggest growth opportunity. Everybody has a mobile device and they have it with them all the time. Not everybody has a console and not everybody has a gaming PC.