No! This is explained right at the beginning of the article:
> the question as to what is anticompetitive and what is simply good business changes as a business scales. A small business can generally be as anticompetitive as it wants to be, while a much larger business is much more constrained in how anticompetitively it can act
The word “monopolize” is used in a specialised way in antitrust; it doesn’t encompass every exclusive right of sale, because that would disrupt many small businesses and law is intended to prevent huge businesses from dominating the economy.
No. My point is not that they are a small business, it’s that they are smaller than Apple and selling into a different market. Thus it does not “follow,” from the proposition that Apple is a monopolist, that Epic is also a monopolist.
I think you've missed the point here. Neither Apple nor Epic have enough market share in their primary market (smartphones/games) to be considered monopolists.
So instead, people move the goalposts to an aftermarket of the product (iOS apps) and claim that Apple has a monopoly over that market instead. But every company has a natural monopoly over their own products, and by the very same logic you could claim Epic has a monopoly over the aftermarket of their product (Fortnite skins).
Selling virtual items is not especially common due to the exposure it creates to fraud and abuse. Fortnite doesn't allow selling or trading - games that do like Team Fortress 2 and Counter-strike Go are home to lots of scammers who try to trick teens and other uninformed players into giving away their valuable loot :(
Who are you going to buy from without giving Epic a cut? They're the only ones offering Fortnite items.
Apple doesn't just require you use their payment processor - which might in theory be acceptable - they also demand 30 cents on every dollar. Payment providers everywhere have shown that fraud and abuse can be mitigated to an acceptable level with transaction fees as low as half a cent on the dollar. So Apple forces you into an agreement to use a payment processor that is 30-60x more expensive than the competition simply because they can.
Correct for credit card transactions but not for gift card credit which A LOT of people use. Far more than you’d assume. Apple doesn’t get all $50 when you buy an Apple gift card. I’d be surprised if they even got net $40 per $50 card.
The physical cards cost money to produce and the retail stores will insist upon a decent cut. And then the cards are often discounted by 10, 15 or even 20%.
The difference is that if Fortnite abuses its power, it is relatively easy to build another MMORPG competitor. If Apple abuses its power, it's practically impossible to build another mobile platform to compete today. Even Microsoft failed with that.
The bottom line is that Fortnight can have practical competition (that for example offer 3rd party plugins or lower prices), while the iPhone only has Android as competition, which is taking the exact same 30% cut.
> it is relatively easy to build another MMORPG competitor.
Oh no it isn't. There are very few successful (and even fewer wildly successful) MMORPGs and countless failed attempts.
Games are not really fungible. It's not like I'm going to go out of Fortnite to buy items in WoW instead and treat them as the same. They are two completely different markets.
> The bottom line is that Fortnight can have practical competition (that for example offer 3rd party plugins or lower prices)
No, unless things change, you need to use the Epic store.
Sure, but if the community got sick of Epic's walled fortnite garden, they can play other games. Could be WoW, could be Call of Duty, could be Pubg, could be the latest Mario. It doesn't really matter. Fortnite competes for your time with all other games, and the main thing keeping people there, besides basic enjoyment of the game, is that a lot of people play with their friends. And not many people will say that certain in app purchases are essential item (unlike, say, having an email app on your phone).
iOS on the other hand has a single serious competitor, Android, and if you have an iPhone you can't install Android on it when you get mad at Apple - you need a whole new phone. From a developer's perspective, you would miss out on all the iPhone users if you ship and Android app and not an iOS one. In that sense, Apple has significant monopoly-like power over the app market; solidified by the fact that you can't just install Google play store and start downloading Android apps on your iPhone if you get fed up with Apple' App store. The switching costs are too high for most users to consider it, except when buying a new phone.
A lot of this comes down to what a meaningful market is. E.g. Border's and Barnes and Noble learned the hard way that they were in the same market as online book selling - you couldn't usefully look at their book store models and ignore Amazon in the last ~decade.
