Good luck, Apple!
For god’s sake, why?
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As of today Apple’s market capital is $1.94 trillion dollars. Trillion. If Epic thinks it’s got the horses for this race, well, good luck and god speed. 
Epic has some big caveats though. For example, it’s an absolute nightmare if you install on an account that doesn’t have administrator privileges, like a kid’s account. The installer asks you for an admin password, and then promptly fails to use it and dies with a permission denied error. Well, not promptly, it takes several minutes before it realizes that it can’t write to disk. And this happens every time the game wants to self-update, roughly three times a week.
Also, unlike Steam the Epic Game Store is actively hostile to Linux.
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Look, Apple, I get it. When you first started the App Store, you had good reasons: the first was that AT&T was paranoid about your brand new pocket computers spreading viruses, both you and AT&T said so at the time.
That was always bullshit by the way. AT&T was worried they were going to lose their cut on ringtones, which was true. Apple went along with it because they didn’t have a choice, AT&T was literally the only company willing to play ball on this completely radical “iPhone” concept that seemed super risky to the suits. Even then they basically demanded that people be charged twice for the things (buying the phone outright and also charging the device subsidy). They tried as hard as they could to make it a failure.
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I recollect PUBG was complaining about Fortnite “ripping them off,” but the complaint was silly. They were upset that someone else made a more popular battle royale game, is what it amounted to.
Yeah, but that’s the reality of having actual competition in online game stores, unfortunately. (Although really one doesn’t actually need the other launcher because the games all end up on Steam anyways…) I also expect we’ll see more library integration, like with GOG.
Because Apple isn’t just taking a 30% cut of everything sold through their store, they want a 30% cut of everything people sell through their apps that are on the Apple store, too. Presumably on the consoles, as with PC, players can directly buy Fortnite goods directly through the app and aren’t forced to buy them through the console store. Apple’s App Store rules actually do allow apps to sell things directly to users, assuming the goods are things that can (also) be used outside the app (like music that can be played on other software, or physical goods). Since Fortnite is multi-platform and goods bought for the game transfer with the user’s account to all platforms, it would seem to obviously qualify for Apple’s exception.
Actually, it seems like Epic have a pretty straightforward case here, with Apple ignoring their own rules. I’d not be surprised if they settle out of court soon, in Epic’s favor.
I just started using Steam for chat/voice chat, but yeah, there are a lot of social features that are poorly implemented or could be nuked entirely to be the benefit of Steam. (Though I’m not sure all Steam users would agree with me.) Though whatever the quality, the argument that Epic needs an identical feature set to compete doesn’t make sense if one storefront/social network has users (and your existing game library), and the other doesn’t.
Integrating with third-party apps would be an interesting approach. (Risky, long-term, as they’d become dependent on them existing and maintaining a certain feature set, if nothing else.) I suppose GOG has done this in a very minor way by allowing users to bring in game and friend lists from other launchers like Steam, to have unified lists.
I don’t think the Epic fans realise that they are Oceania fighting against Eurasia. Or is it Eastasia? Does it even matter anymore?
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