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.
By Tim Higgins and Brent Kendall In the high-profile court battle set to begin Monday between Apple Inc. and Fortnite creator Epic Games Inc., the judge will grapple with a central question: how to define a market in the digital age. The case pits the world s most valuable publicly traded company, which helped usher in the app economy more than a decade ago, against a privately held videogame maker that wants to topple Apple s so-called walled garden. Epic says the App Store is a monopoly because Apple is the lone distributor of apps to more than one billion iPhones and controls the only payment system for digital services in those apps. That power, Epic says, lets Apple dictate anticompetitive commissions, including a slice as high as 30% of revenue and other terms that harm developers and increase prices. Epic has filed an analyst s estimate that Apple s operating margins for the store were as high as 80% in fiscal 2019, an estimate Apple says is wrong.
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By Sarah E. Needleman Facebook Inc. s booming advertising business drove revenue and profit sharply higher, as the company pledged to navigate Apple Inc. s new ad-targeting rules and accelerate investments in e-commerce, mixed reality and tools to help creators make money from their content. The social-media giant on Wednesday said its first-quarter earnings report reflected the past year s trend of people spending more time and money online and advertisers redirecting their resources to take advantage of that shift. The parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp said the average price per ad and the number of ads it delivered during the January-through-March period increased.
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Required fields From an early stage, the plan depended on Epic s payment system being rejected, read an email between Epic executives disclosed in court records. At that point: The battle begins. It s going to be fun! Epic co-founder Mark Rein predicted there was a greater than 50% chance Apple would immediately remove Fortnite from its platforms, according to an Epic employee deposition cited in court records. They may also sue us to make an example. Mr. Rein declined to comment. While it worked on the technical attack, Epic also planned to cut prices on certain items in the console and PC versions of Fortnite by 20% essentially creating a reason for players to eschew the mobile alternative offered by Apple.
By Tim Higgins and Sarah E. Needleman The billionaire behind one of the most successful videogames of all time came to view Apple Inc. as an existential threat to his dream of the future. So Tim Sweeney decided to fight. He gave his dispute with the world s biggest company a code name: Project Liberty. The clash was a bold gambit from a man who built an empire around Fortnite, the online multiplayer shooter game filled with cartoonish characters that became a phenomenon beloved by teenagers around the world. The ambition of Epic Games Inc. s chief executive was that Fortnite s legions of devoted young fans could turn it into a thriving social network, and help realize his vision of the metaverse, a shared virtual world where people might one day live, work and hang out.