This particular company decided to grow financially by cutting apple from a revenue stream. Apple invested billions of dollars in rnd, PR , legal protection, security, servers etc... Behemoth like Epic decided to ignore that, at the same time still using apple services and platforms. Such a simple case to me. The funny part is I never heard from small company that gain traction from apple store that it's bad. It's a social lift for them. But once you grow , you forget about it... and start complaining...
And they didn't even start with the lawsuit, they just broke the terms of service explicitly and then surprise pikachu faced when Apple slapped them down.
They weren't surprised at all by the lawsuit. They wanted a lawsuit. The only person who could change the TOS was a judge and Epic could only sue if Apple enforced the TOS on them.
Plus, if you don't think Epic had already talked to lawyers and lobbyists in Washington DC and already been given a heads-up that they might win, then you don't know business that well.
They were well prepared for this, with what must've taken months of planning. They added the payment option, got banned, filed the lawsuit and published their 1984 parody ad, all within 24 hours.
