Epic Games is holding back Fortnite from being available on Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) service, according to a new deposition made public as part of the Epic case against Apple. The Fortnite developer views Microsoft’s xCloud service as competition to its PC offerings, and the company is deliberately not offering Fortnite on xCloud as a result.
Joe Kreiner, Epic’s vice president of business development, was questioned over why Fortnite isn’t available on xCloud, and confirmed it was a deliberate choice. “We viewed Microsoft’s efforts with xCloud to be competitive with our PC offerings,” says Kreiner in the deposition. The court document makes it appear like Kreiner may go on to explain why, but the next part of the questioning has been redacted.
[GeForce Now] is likely a key reason why Epic has favored Nvidia over Microsoft to host Fortnite in the cloud. Microsoft doesn’t currently allow rival game stores on Xbox or xCloud in any form, and all transactions go through Microsoft there. In fact, Kreiner even admits that Epic Games hasn’t tried to negotiate with Microsoft over the requirement to have to use the Xbox maker’s store and commerce engine.
His hostility against Apple, MS, Google, etc is strange, expecially when he sides with companies which use same or worse policies (Sony, NVIDIA, I won’t name Tencent because lmao).
Sony gave them $450mil so far in the past year or two. Tencent owns a huge chunk of their stock too. I’m actually not so sure they will lose against Apple. We will see. Either way, this seems a strange move but maybe they plan to partner with someone for cloud stuff who competes with MS? Maybe PlayStation would work with them instead of MS (Sony’s plans to discuss Azure stuff have yet to go anywhere in 2 yrs, after all).
Reason I say that is the full explanation for why they are doing what they are is apparently redacted, suggesting it is reflecting internal plans of EPIC’s. Can’t see any other obvious way for xCloud to compete with EGS (Game Pass competes, but xCloud itself? Hmmm…).
He has made enemies everywhere now, I don’t see a bright future for his company the instant after Fortnite will wane, engine royalties are not enough to sustain his plan of countering Valve, otherwise he would have attempted this move many years earlier.
His move against Apple has no future, because he publish the game on equally closed ecosystem like Xbox, PS, Nintendo, etc…no surprise he has already lost on court 1-2 times, lol.
It seems he is doing everything he can to sell out to Tencent immediately after his grand plan go south.
When did EPIC lose in court so far? All I recalled was them losing their effort to force Apple to keep Fortnite on their ecosystem after EPIC blatantly violated the ToS, but the actual case itself was looking good for EPIC at that time as the judge recognized their central argument had merit. Haven’t seen a follow up since then. If there was one, I def missed it.
The issue with the argument you noted against EPIC in the Apple case is that mobile phones are essentially required for modern living and so Apple’s moves against EPIC and other storefronts would be viewed as anti-competitive. That is, if the courts agree there is a distinction b/t mere entertainment like consoles and a device required for modern living like a cell phone.
They are blowing tons of cash on EGS, but also getting plenty in investments (as I said, Sony invested enough in the past 2 yrs to entirely offset their EGS losses to date). Hard to know how much $$ it takes for make a storefront successful.
Btw, this isn’t EPIC being inconsistent at all. It is smart of them to behave differently w/ecosystems that let you bring in EGS hooks (like Nvidia does) compared to ones that don’t. xCloud doesn’t allow that, nor did iOS. If they went after Xbox or Sony or Nintendo they’d have no case to make at all since their entire legal argument is that cell phones are universal and that sets them apart from consoles/PC’s. Any ecosystem where EGS hooks are allowed in a streaming version, EPIC will be there streaming.
I saw a Hoeg Law video where he explained the liabilities of Epic court strategy, frankly I don’t remember specifically the case they lost, but it was vs Apple in a US court.
As long as Fortnite is a thing, they are good, otherwise I don’t see nor Sony nor anyone else splashing huge cash as investment into Epic, companies will license the engine as they have always done and that’s it.
I consider Tim Sweeney inconsistent because NVIDIA GeForce Now is essentially a mean used by NVIDIA to try to polarize the gpu market, it’s really obvious when your pc cloud instances are based only on a specific hardware, I thought that pc market was free, no?
It’s no different than xCloud, also MS does make deals for revenue sharing concerning cloud stuff with big entities (see EA Play), like Tim Sweeney has done with NVIDIA, so imo this is only a case “I like them, but not you”, as he often makes transparent on Twitter.
I think that one of Microsoft’s long-term plans is to use game pass + xcloud to create a compelling store that competes with Steam / Epic Store on gaming sales for PC. Also, not a secret that Epic is trying to create their own store on iOS / Android (which would also be threatened by gamepass + xcloud, same as Apple is blocking xcloud so that apple arcade has a chance to grow). In a Steam+Epic+Microsoft battlefield, epic has no chance to win and, hence, they will be cautious to help Microsoft grow.
Yeah I think the case they lost was just the one where they demanded Apple reinstate Fortnite into iOS store, which is a preposterous thing to demand and EPIC rightly didn’t win that battle, but the underlying case (the one EPIC manufactured with the ToS stunt) might have merit to it as the judge noted. That one (the big one) revolves around the question of whether iOS is prominent enough in everyday life that its app store amounts to being its own industry, and if so EPIC demands the ability to compete in that space with EGS.
Btw, Sony has already been dumping cash into EPIC ($450mil in well under 2 yrs). And wrt to EPIC being consistent, they are being consistent in terms of how they are framing their issues with xCloud and iOS and how that differs from Nvidia. They are not at all ‘the same thing’.
And all cloud infrastructure has to choose a given hw config for the computing platform. Nvidia offers streaming in ways that allow EPIC to steer gamers towards EGS, so EPIC is ok with them, as that was the central sticking point with xCloud and iOS. If MS or Amazon or hell even AMD offered that, EPIC would be streaming there too. The issue isn’t revenue sharing, it is about whether EPIC has a means to target players for direct payment to EPIC or EGS. EPIC brought up the revenue cut issue because that is the example of Apple being anti-competitive according to EPIC’s argument. EPIC would like to get EGS itself on iOS as its own storefront so EPIC can offer devs better rev share than Apple offers.
“We’re still having conversations with [Microsoft] about exchanging ideas. We’re still talking to them about exchanging ideas, and there’s some very interesting stuff, so when the time is right, we’ll announce our cloud strategy."
That sounds like quite literally nothing has happened in past 2 yrs in this space. They’re having conversations about exchanging ideas…if 2 yrs on they are still just talking about talking, that is not anything remotely material. That honestly sounds more like Ryan has no clue what is happening and wants to just answer the question as vaguely as humanly possible to get past it.
They just signed a memo of intent to explore possibly doing that in the future (as of 2 yrs ago).
“Under the memorandum of understanding signed by the parties, the two companies will explore joint development of future cloud solutions in Microsoft Azure to support their respective game and content-streaming services. In addition, the two companies will explore the use of current Microsoft Azure datacenter-based solutions for Sony’s game and content-streaming services. By working together, the companies aim to deliver more enhanced entertainment experiences for their worldwide customers. These efforts will also include building better development platforms for the content creator community.”
Jim Ryan’s quote sounds like none of that has panned out at all as of yet.
The article you quoted is incorrect. There was no ‘deal’ signed. It was just a memo of intent, i.e. an agreement to come to the table to try finding ways to work together. That is not the same thing as making a deal, let alone migrating PS Now over to Azure. Nowhere in that article from last May does it suggest PS Now presently runs on Azure…
