Epic Games CEO ignites a firestorm by comparing his Apple lawsuit to civil rights movement

CARY – Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has ignited a firestorm on Twitter by drawing a comparison between his company’s antitrust suit against Apple to the civil rights movement.

Reaction came swiftly after Sweeney made his remarks in an interview about the suit that followed Apple’s banning of Epic’s globally popular game Fortnite in a dispute over fees that Sweeney calls a “tax.”

Some samples from the tweet storm:

“Epic seriously Who you think you are?”
“So is @EpicGames the Martin Luther King Jr. of Game Development?”
“Love Epic but this was a stupid thing to say no matter what.”
“Way to go tech bros! Don’t mistake inconvenience with systematic oppression.”
Two posts questioned Epic’s own business relationship with China tech giant Tencent which is a big investor in the privately held gaming and computer graphics technology firm.
“[Y]ou wanna talk about monopolies but have a major investment from [bleep] Tencent epic?”
“Claims to fight for human rights while directly funding a comapny that opresses human rights.”

In response, Sweeney defended his remark.

“Hey critics, please read what I said and tell me if it’s actually wrong: When the rules were wrongful, it was right to disobey them. That’s the comparison to the civil rights movement.”

Sweeney was talking about Epic’s “workaround” it created to bypass Apple’s fees. That move led to the Apple move, and now the fight is taking place in federal court with a trial set for next spring.

Here’s the quote as Sweeney posted at Twitter:

Image from Twitter

But his argument was shot down by some:

“No, this is a massive false equivalency fallacy to compare prefering open systems to civil rights. Please stop.”
“I somehow want both Epic and Apple to lose this fight. Neither deserves to win.”

Another poster noted the news that Apple is cutting its fees in half from 30% in a decision CEO Tim Cook announced this week:

“Apple as an answer dropped their fees for small devs to 15%. I see that as a win!”