Week in Review

Saturday, August 15, 2020 • By Lucas Matney

Howdy friends, welcome back to Week in Review. This past week, I wrote about Apple going to war with the gaming industry, this week I’m diving into how Apple is still going to war with the games industry :)

If you're reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, and follow my tweets here.

The Big Story

I’d be remiss if I didn’t gloat (just a tad!) on the timing of my big story last week. Apple’s war with the gaming industry (which I expounded on further after my newsletter went out last week, read that here) earned its return volley this week with a frankly shocking show from Epic Games.

The game studio baited Apple to ban its hugely popular title Fortnite by making a server-side update, changing the payment structure in its apps to sidestep Apple’s payment rules. That, of course, did indeed lead Apple to ban the app from the story, which Epic Games followed up on by filing a lawsuit and releasing a pretty great dig at Apple with a revamped take on their iconic “1984” commercial.

You have to see it to believe.

For those that have been listening to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, this isn’t the most surprising development, he’s been raving against the 30% store tax present on Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store for a while and thumbing his nose at those companies pretty publicly.

Note: the company also filed suit Google which similarly banned the app though the app can still be installed from Epic’s site on Android, but with their video they are clearly aiming their users attention and anger towards Apple.

Fortnite is a massive cross-platform presence and while existing players already have the apps downloaded, they notably won’t be able to update the app, preventing them from accessing new content and Fortnite seasons. Ensuring that iOS gamers aren’t getting the same content or updates to mobile-friendly games, especially as they reject cloud gaming platforms like xCloud, Apple is really setting itself up for a reckoning with the games industry.

The thing is, this Epic Games lawsuit alleging monopoly is most definitely going nowhere. But that’s really not the point, Epic Games is trying to take advantage of their massive presence among gamers and young people and effectively turn Gen-Z against Apple.

Most developers simply have no choice but to sit back, but if Epic Games can find one more substantial studio to take the same risk with a top title, they just might start a full-on App Store boycott among games studios.

Help Create the Future of Eyewear

Trends of the Week

How the world’s weirdest event is going virtual
I wrote one of my favorite stories I’ve ever put out there this week. Burning Man is an iconically odd event that’s steeped in Silicon Valley lore, but like so many other organizations, they’ve had to sidestep their physical event in 2020. To go virtual, they’ve enlisted a creative bunch of developers to rethink social apps, all of whom are doing this work for free. Read my feature here.

Uber takes on California
One other big David versus Goliath fight that sparked up this week came as California ruled that Uber must classify its drivers as workers. It’s obviously going to lead to massive impacts on its business in the state, but the company’s leadership seems ready to throw its weight around by noting that the ruling would likely lead to a temporary shutdown of the service. Read more here.

Image Credits: BLM Nevada / Flickr under a CC BY 2.0 license.

TechCrunch Disrupt

It's been a wild year for modern software companies, often called software as a service (SaaS) firms due to how they deliver their product, from a strong start to the year to a rapid devaluation in the face of a global pandemic and a return-to-form after it became clear that software wasn't a category that a consumer recession would harm.

Indeed, SaaS and other cloud companies have seen their valuations reach new heights in 2020, pushing the larger stock market up as their own worth soared. These frothy, booming times make the larger effort to take software into new parts of the larger global economy all the more exciting.

After all, if public SaaS companies are worth more than ever, startups themselves are inherently worth more, which means that even more capital should pour into the young companies that want to transform software eating the world from catchphrase into reality.

To dig into the SaaS market this year, we've compiled a panel of well-known investors to chat with TechCrunch at Disrupt this September 14-18. We're bringing Canaan Partners' Maha Ibrahim, Andreessen Horowitz's David Ulevitch and Bessemer Venture Partners' Mary D'Onofrio to help explain the changed world to us. (Astute readers will recall that D'Onofrio makes regular Extra Crunch appearances as a SaaS guru.)