Tim Sweeney wants one app store for every platform, probably in the metaverse

(Image credit: Bloomberg (Getty Images))

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says the world needs one unified game store, and that Epic is working with developers and service providers to aid make it happen.

"What the world really inevitably now is a single store that workings with all platforms," Sweeney said in an interview with Bloomberg. "Right now software package ownership is fragmented between the iOS App Store, the Android Google Play marketplace, different stores on Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch, so Microsoft Store and the Mac App Salt away."

Epic's architectural plan to neaten that confusion is to do up with a organization enabling users "to buy software in one place, knowing that they'd have it on all devices and all platforms." How it will approach bringing collectively that disparate hookup of technologies and competitive platforms is an unaddressed question, but it's healthy to gauge that it has something to cause with the metaverse, the rickety-defined concept of online worlds that we're beautiful sure is a bad idea, although Sweeney himself is a sacred (and legally acknowledged) adherent.

Sweeney has been publicly advocating for more open online storefronts since mid-2020, when Epic sued Apple over "monopolistic practices" happening the App Store. Only speaking at the Global Conference for Motorized Application Ecosystem Fairness in South Korea, he insisted that there are more than important reasons to force online storefront nakedness than just money.

"Apple locks a 1000000000 users into combined store and payment processor," Sweeney said. "Now Apple complies with tyrannous foreign laws, which surveil users and deprive them of political rights. But Orchard apple tree is ignoring laws passed aside Korea's democracy. Apple moldiness be stopped up."

Republic of Korea recently passed a legal philosophy mandating alternative payment options on major digital platforms including the App Store, preventing weapons platform holders from forcing developers to use their built-in payment systems. According to the Korea Herald, Google has come in into compliance with the young law but Apple has non eventually indicated if, or even how, it intends to.

"I'm very proud to stand up against these monopolies with you," Sweeney said. "I'm proud to stand with you and say I'm a Korean."

This isn't the first prison term Sweeney has declared his kinship with Han-Gook: He made a similar program line in August, in short subsequently the Korean court reigning on digital storefronts.

As President Kennedy said at the Berlin Wall in 1963, today every last developers or so the world can atomic number 4 proud to say: I am a Korean! pic.twitter.com/XeVdB1W1WlAugust 31, 2021

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Nor is it his first wholesale contract about the cultural and moral meaning of Epic's dispute with Apple and Google. In November 2020 he was criticized for comparing Epic's rejection of their terms of servicing with historical fights for civil rights. "Thither were actual laws on the books, and the Laws were wrong," he said. "And people disobeyed them, and IT was non wrong to disobey them because to go along with them would be collusion to make them status quo."

A US courtyard besides ruled in September that an Apple policy preventing apps from advertising their ain payment systems is anticompetitive and would have to be changed. Apple appealed that reigning but was not granted a persist, meaning that the court-ordered policy change must go into effect in December.