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Fortnite beat Apple's Tax

Author

Troy Fields
May 10, 2022

Welcome to Lootbox - a weekly newsletter covering the business side of video games.

What's in this Lootbox?

  • ⛏ Fortnite Returns

  • 📉 Gaming Stocks Go Down

  • 🏇 Remember ZED RUN?

  • 📷 Funny Picture

⛏ Fortnite Returns

Fortnite 🤝 Xbox

Fornite is back on iOS thanks to a new partnership with Xbox and their cloud gaming offering. Fortnite originally launched on iOS back in April 2018, but was banned by Apple in August 2020 after Epic introduced a discount of in-app purchases made outside of the app store to avoid Apple's 30% tax revenue fee.

Apple and Epic have been dueling in never ending lawsuits ever since, the main argument being Apple plays favorites. You can use a separate credit card or apple pay inside the Starbucks or Chick-fil-a iOS apps and there's no 30% in-app purchase fee. Same with shopping on the Amazon app. Why is gaming held to a different standard?

Apple took home $13.54 billion from gaming revenue in 2020, and $6.77 billion from all other App Store revenue in 2020. By revenue you could actually argue Apple is the largest gaming company in the world.

Xbox Cloud Gaming gets around this by streaming the game to a browser that can be played via the mobile devices. Installing is just adding the home screen link from the xbox.com/play website and you'd never guess its being played through a web browser.

📉 Gaming Stocks Go Down

Unity is the only real competitor to Epic's Unreal game engine and went public in September 2020 at $75 / share. After having a very strong opening and solid quarterly growth Unity surged to as high as $210. Today its trading around $50 just one and half years after its IPO. 

It seems like all stocks are in free fall right now, and video game companies are not immune.

🏇 Remember ZED RUN?

This past Saturday was the annual Kentucky Derby race where Rich Strike pulled out one of the biggest surprise win of all time with 80-1 odds. If you happened to make money on the derby don't forget all your other investments are probably down.

Real horse racing is a lot of fun, but do you remember the virtual web3 / crypto horse racing platform ZED RUN? Founded in 2018 as one of the first NFT games ZED RUN allows users to buy, sell, and race their NFT horses for a chance to earn money. I wouldn't recommend real or virtual horse betting, but A16Z (one of the largest VC firms) sure thinks there's a future by being part of ZED RUN's $20M Series A back in July 2021. 

📷 Funny Picture

Ninja and a bunch of other influencers / content creators played a game of poker with professional poker player Phil Hellmuth. Phil was getting rolled by the Twitch / YouTube stars and got really passive aggressive about it. Ninja walked away with a net profit of $144,300.

What'd you think of today's email?

Thanks for Reading :)

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