But it is not allowed to install games on iPhones or iPads. Apple’s App Store is an “absolute monopoly,” Sweeney scolds.

With “Fortnite,” Sweeney’s company Epic Games has developed one of the App Store’s biggest revenue generators. Many millions of players worldwide fight in teams against each other for survival, “Battle Royale” – battle royale – is the name of the format. Sweeney has now also instigated a battle royale. Two weeks ago, he provoked Apple so openly that the company kicked Fortnite out of its App Store.

What’s more, Apple wouldn’t even allow games that other developers had developed with the “Unreal Engine”. A ban on Epic’s computer game development program would have affected numerous major game companies.

Complaints about Apple for years

Epic Games had already prepared its antitrust lawsuit against Apple by then. They didn’t want to get back any commissions paid so far, but they wanted to force Apple to allow competition on their devices. It was not about preferential treatment, but fair conditions for all developers.

On the first day of the trial on Monday, the judge made an urgent decision that meant a partial victory for both sides: Apple was allowed to block Fortnite because Epic had deliberately violated the known app store rules – but the apps developed with the “Unreal Engine” had not.

In fact, many app developers large and small have been complaining about Apple for years, from music streaming service Spotify to dating app provider Match to Microsoft, which is backing Epic in the current dispute. Yet Sweeney had already instigated a similar dispute against Microsoft a few years ago.

The college dropout really wouldn’t need such cabal. Epic Games is valued at $17.5 billion by its investors – including Sony and Blackrock – and Sweeney still holds the majority of voting rights, making him a multi-billionaire.

But Sweeney is an unusual billionaire in many ways. A nature lover who prefers hiking in the wilderness to conference stages, he didn’t set up his company in Silicon Valley or Los Angeles, but in the dreamy college town of Cary, North Carolina, between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean.

When Sweeney needed capital in 2012, he preferred to take on the Chinese digital group Tencent rather than the traditional California film studio Warner Brothers, because the Tencent deal was the only way he could retain a majority stake in Epic Games. Sweeney’s vision goes beyond Fortnite and computer games. For years, he has been talking about the “metaverse,” a further development of the Internet in virtual reality, which goes back to the science fiction author Neal Stephenson.

In the virtual world of the metaverse

Sweeney sees Fortnite as the first step into a metaverse. Battles are no longer the only things played in the virtual world; friends also meet there to talk. In the long term, the metaverse should develop its own economy, in which developers can develop products and services purely for this virtual world. In April, during the first weeks of the Corona curfews, 28 million players already attended a concert by rapper Travis Scott in Fortnite.

“Apple has banned the metaverse,” Sweeney wrote back in early August. At the time, Apple had announced it would not allow game subscription services like Microsoft’s xCloud or Google’s Stadia because it could not review every single game in them.

This principle, he said, makes more complex virtual worlds virtually impossible many times over. In Sweeney’s words: How is an “app driver’s license” supposed to administer a dynamic world in which new virtual banks, concert halls and theme parks can be created every day?

It’s a question that goes far beyond a computer game. The trial will continue in September.