I think he's still at heart a developer. That's why all his initiatives that aren't Fortnite are so developer friendly.

But he still is a CEO. So there will naturally be some evils he seeps into to make the company (and himself) richer. He still has his own interests, but my second hand experience is that even these layoffs are relatively respectful compared to most of the industry.

I recognize that CEO side. But it's a real shame many people mostly turned on him in order to defend Steam. Steam sure isn't a saint either.

Assume for one moment that they were all great people over there.

I suspect that they would STILL be in the same boat that they are in. You see a silo where I see a service provider.

Does apple make money on doing what they do.. You bet.

But the lesson here is that they make that money because of scale, and without it replacing payment processing, fraud management, and the customer service you need with it is a HARD problem. Epic needs more than Fortnite to justify running all that on their own or it's going to turn into a black hole: because payment processing for "digital goods" is a nightmare.

I suspect that both apple and googles extension into payments at point of sale, has contractual ties to their App Store payment processing. Something Epic will always lack.

The real pain in the ass here is the incumbent card processors, and their fee structures.

I suspect that the industry is going to need to go back and re-visit micro transactions in the coming years.