After last Friday’s hearing, analysts begin to calculate Apple’s chances of losing the lawsuit against Epic Games, the company that produces games such as Fortnite who has chosen to break away fromApp store not to pay the Cupertino giant a 30% commission on each product that came to the owners of the IPhone.
Nick Rodelli, a well-known litigation analyst who works and CFRA, estimates that Epic Games has a 33% chance of beating Apple, and a 55% chance of winning the case anyway. According to the expert interviewed by the Financial Times Apple is at a disadvantage because in front of the judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers, who withdrew yesterday to decide, said she did not know what the profits generated by the App store are.
According to Epic Games, the sale of third-party applications brings the Cupertino giant an operating margin of 78%, a percentage so high that it demonstrates its monopoly position. Apple, while disputing the calculation of Epic Games, has not provided a precise indication, asserting that there is no allocation of costs and revenues that allows it to estimate the profits generated by the sale of the app on its site. An argument, which allowed Epic’s lawyers, to reiterate that Aple is reluctant to provide details because he tries to preserve his anti-competitive position.
Gaming group lawyer Gary Bornstein has cornered Apple CEO several times, Tim Cook, who was often forced to reply that he did not know “the details”. Cook was not even able to explain why Apple pays Google $ 10 billion a year to divert anyone looking for an app on his iPhone’s search engine, directly on the App store. And he wasn’t even able to argue why, after Epic’s grievances, Apple cut the commission from 30 to 15% for certain apps on its store. According to Cook, the cut of the commission it would have been a simple market policy, which followed the choice of Google who had done the same: Apple would have adjusted its commission to that charged by the search engine.
Last year, Apple argued that Epic Games’ criticism of the App store threatened the entire Apple ecosystem. Epic Games asked to apply the same rules to the iPhone that apply to the PCs of the Cupertino house, which replied that the phone is as safe as their PCs are not.
Judge Gonzales Rogers tried to find a compromise halfway between the parties by saying “can you find only one Antitrust case where the solution you are looking for has been guaranteed by the Court?”. But the lawsuit went so far that it will be up to the Californian court to set the poles within which, then, Apple and Epic Games will be forced to sit around a table.
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