The app store fee battle has such an interesting history. Apple arrives with a new special-purpose custom hardware platform and follows the lead of earlier similar platforms including gaming consoles and prior smartphones/cellphones. They take a small fixed fee and royalty on sales in exchange for developer tools, certification, hosting, listing, access, etc. Google joins the game and does the same thing.<p>Fast forward a few years, and these new devices turn out to be transformative. Countless developers and publishers who have no experience with gaming consoles or Blackberries or BREW applications have heated debates all over the internet about how unfair these fees are. They see these devices more like computers than specialty hardware and are used to sorting out their own solutions for marketing and distribution. They'd never pay royalties to publish a Windows, Mac, or Linux application, so why should they pay <i>so much</i> here? Others try to make arguments, but the debate can't really settle.<p>But nobody can really afford to make a legal challenge against Apple or Google. For all the cost of pursuing action, there's just not enough money to claw back by winning.<p>And then Epic shows up with Fornite. They know <i>all about</i> royalties agreements on gaming consoles and even have their own software royalty agreements for products build on Unreal. They know there was no true malfeasance to it. If they made a hardware platform, they'd have done the same thing. Yet they tap into such a goldmine with Fortnite that they would be <i>dumb</i> not to pick not to try to challenge Apple and Google's requirements. Escaping the royalty requirements is worth ridiculous money to them, and public sentiment is mostly behind their cause because of all those desktop/web/first-time publishers that got pulled into mobile applications.<p>And so now he we are. One greedy behemoth swinging at two others, fighting over which of them gets the next billion dollars, and we just get to watch and hope things get cheaper for the rest us developers/publishers without spoiling the variously-curated ecosystems that made these markets exist in the first place. So far, it's worked out pretty well..