The engine is released with the game, not as a stand-alone binary. The dev tools are a different story, but unrelated to the question.

And even if this did impact the engine, perhaps epic should have thought about that when playing chicken with Apple.

If I were looking for an engine to build a game on I'd have to think twice about using Unreal Engine in the future. Having the company that builds such a foundational component of the product in open war with one of the most important platforms it runs on is an added complication that would only harm me.

In this case, it seems the goals of Epic the game publisher versus Epic the component supplier really don't align, and Epic the publisher's needs are winning out.

Disagree, this lawsuit strongly supports Epic the component suppliers business as well, because one of those components they can supply and make significant money off of is payment processing.

There is a bit of a conflict between Epic the component supplier and Joe the game developer's goals here, because Joe the game developer doesn't really care whether it's Apple or Epic taking the payment processing cut. Joe doesn't necessarily lose either because Joe seems some benefit (just less) too due to competition lowering the cost of payment processing. It's just not clear cut.

In reality it probably the case that some game developers will win thanks to lower cost of payment processing dominating their cost benefit analysis, and others will lose thanks to worse unreal engine platform support dominating their cost benefit analysis.

I keep seeing two conflicting points of view in this comment thread: 1) iOS isn’t a big games platform and 2) iOS is an important platform to Epic.

Maybe iOS isn’t that important to Epic or their clients which is why they can do this.

3) Epic wants to establish a precedent against these policies for possible use in all markets. Apple is the clearest case to make, the other cases are more ambiguous, if Epic won't win this it won't win elsewhere.

The developer tools are free for anyone with a free developer account. So they still have access, just not with the account they used for distributing Fortnite. Any 3rd party dev using Unity will use it’s own account.

> The developer tools are free for anyone with a free developer account.

Developer accounts are not free. Of course $99 is not a problem for Epic or most game developers, but please be accurate.

The developer tools are free for anyone with a free developer account. Submitting apps to the store requires a paid developer account.

Again, there's no such thing as a free developer account.

Anyone with an Apple ID — which is not a developer account — can download Xcode from the App Store. However, this version of Xcode does not support prerelease versions such as iOS 14 and macOS 11, so it's not adequate for professional purposes.

Downloading Xcode at least used to require enrolling your Apple ID as a developer. I stand corrected if it doesn't now.