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Nineteen Eighty-four, let me give you an example of something towards that theming. Recently a politician I don’t fully agree with, never have and never will, made a light comment that was meant as a joke about the recent thunderstorms in the UK. This was at 10 PM, about an hour or two after the storms kicked off. He thought nothing of it and went to bed. In those preceding hours, a month’s worth of rain fell in some areas in the matter of hours, lighting stuck homes and businesses on fire and burning them down. Car parks were wastelands of cars strewn everywhere. It was horrible for quite a few people.

However, about 12-hours following this politician’s comments on Twitter, people I would agree with normally were calling for his head. Just before his head was being called for, a train horrifically derailed and killed three people (including the driver) as they were heading towards this politician’s constituency. He had committed the cardinal sin of commenting on something that later resulted in death, mass damage, and left a few homeless; Something that hadn’t happened yet. That is big brother and little brother working hand in hand to call out something inconsequential. Hundreds, if not thousands of people made similar comments that same night, but it is his status and his political affiliation that made people want his head over others.

Nineteen Eighty-four is a dystopian nightmare about political control of people’s dogmatic thoughts and opinions. The rich run the country through their money, and the working class is being trodden on but don’t mind because it is for the better. That is Nineteen Eighty-four, that is something that you’ll have ignored in high school or will ignore in high school; I get it, I didn’t like school either. However, it is nevertheless important as many use it as a weapon in arguments on political ideology. It is also what many use to show the downsides of social media, such as I did above to highlight the theming of the novel.

What I don’t think it has ever been used for before was an orchestrated corporate catfight, that was until last Thursday. I spoke about it Friday, Epic Games updated their popular free-to-play online battle royale game, Fortnite. This provided players on mobile a direct way of paying the company to get an in-game currency called “V-bucks,” this system offered a permanent ‘20% discount’ by circumnavigating Apple and Google’s fees. As it turns out, this is against the terms of service in Apple and Google’s eyes and thus they dropped the game from their mobile storefronts.

Moments after the game was removed from the stores, Epic released a statement with the intention to take Apple to court along with a video released on Vimeo claiming 2020 is 1984. They are right, in a year when people are being pulled off the street and placed into unmarked police cars, not read their rights openly, and thus are missing for sporadic amounts of time, that is Nineteen Eighty-four-like. When people will sooner call for someone’s head on a comment made long before a disaster happens, that is Nineteen Eighty-four. A corporate eye-scratching contest? No.

Yet still, there will be the defenders of this billion-dollar company that is owned by one of China’s biggest companies, which is also a billion-dollar company. There will be those defending the business as if it requires the protection of “J0hnnYTheS3x73ssG8Ym372” on Twitter. It doesn’t, it is more than safe from persecution by anything or anyone. Which is why it is so surprising we’ve seen sites like Polygon jump to defend and bemoan this with article after article after article about this one instance of stupid marketing and corporate hairpulling. Of course, it is not just Polygon, it is PC Gamer, Eurogamer, and Rock Paper Shotgun, to name a few.

The issue here is, this is the press that’s meant to be fighting for consumers, but as one article denotes, “‘Epic Games just wants more money’ is too simple of a narrative.” Really? According to a report by GamesIndustry.biz, last month the company made $43.4-million from the App Store and $3.3-million from the Google Play store. Add a further twenty percent onto each of those totals and you’ve got yourself millions of dollars cut from fees alone. Epic isn’t looking to change the App Stores, they are in all likelihood setting-up for their own stores to compete with Apple and Google.

They did exactly that with Steam. They have lowered the fees their developing partners have to pay, they are giving those that use Unreal (an Epic developed game engine) a bit more of a cut, and they provided smaller developers a better place to host their games. I have a lot of issues with Steam’s practices, including selling games with missing .exe files, and games filled with xenophobia, transphobia, homophobia, and more. Let’s not forget that they allowed a game on their platform to feature a very young unconscious woman laying on the ground with her underwear laying next to her, and a grown man standing over her.

Of course, Epic is the true villain in some people’s eyes because… there is no store basket, there are still no user reviews, there are no achievements, you can’t gift people games, and you can’t platform your xenophobic hatred for the world to buy. Oh, those dastardly cretins, when will they learn to let abominations of complete hatred onto their storefront unchecked, just so people can feel empowered to hate a gay trans brown person again. I can only hope that the sarcasm bleeds through those words, at least so I don’t have someone calling for my head for a joke I made long before Epic inevitably does that.

I’ll happily say that Epic is doing a better job with their storefront and monitoring what is on it than Steam ever has. I have no qualms about that. Though, that does not mean I have no issues with the storefront or the practices that they employ in their aid to “be competitive,” as they would prefer things to be. I’ll point out that exclusives aren’t being competitive, just as they aren’t when they are on consoles, but that’s the rub. If you are only complaining about exclusives now, where were you several years ago with consoles had exclusive DLC?

Yet, what no one seems to have clocked onto in their many hours of supporting and declaring war on Epic is their roadmap on Trello. The idea to get into the mobile market isn’t a new one, it has in fact been on the cards for a year and a half. Whether or not the “Android Store” in the roadmap is directly meaning a store for Android users to buy PC games on the go, or an Android store for mobile users to buy mobile games, it is there plain as day. I said it the other day, if the company wants to compete with Apple (and in turn Google) they need a storefront for users to download that competes with those, not just a game on their stores.

It might very well improve the lives of developers that are losing hundreds or thousands of dollars from Apple and Google’s “tax,” as I’ve seen one person recently put it. That alone would be a good thing, but Epic isn’t the savior. This entire Nineteen Eighty-four or “Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite” business was a cheap and easy marketing ploy that is downright dangerous and stupid. Mobilizing a young player base with little to no idea of what Nineteen Eighty-four is, nevermind the ad that the propaganda video is parodying that requires you to be in your 40s to have originally seen.

Epic are the only ones to benefit from this campaign, so let’s go back to the quote “‘Epic Games just wants more money’ is too simple of a narrative.” Then, what is the narrative Epic wants to portray? That they can provide a better mobile storefront? That would in all likelihood make them more money than a nearly $50-million check each month from some microtransactions. The company’s major defenders, such as dating app Tinder’s parent company Match Group, stand to make more money with a smaller percentage of “in-app purchases” going to Google and Apple. On that, did you know Tinder charges nearly $300 “per item?”

The only way Epic wouldn’t be making money is if they were to lose the case and were ordered to pay damages, paying those damages to billion-dollar companies. It is stupid to say, “it is not just about the money,” when that is what kicked off this entire play about pieces of feces in the first place. There may be a fallout scenario wherein smaller and more independent developers on mobile get a bigger slice of their own sales. However, Epic, Facebook, Tinder, Spotify, and more are always going to make more money out of that scenario.

It is not Nineteen Eighty-four because Epic is having a bit of a whinge about being forced to forego the same percentage as everyone else on the App Store and Google Play store. They are not oppressed. I’ll go out on a limb and say you wouldn’t know what oppressed was if it sat on your face; If you somehow think they are. This is, in all seriousness, corporate slap-fighting over money that no one fighting for it on Twitter will see. Very little, if any, will go into the development of games. Very little of that will go into a programmer, artist, and designer’s pockets, and what little does will hardly cover bills.

The sad truth is, the only thing akin to Nineteen Eighty-four is the games industry’s treatment of its workers. Meanwhile, Yves Guillemot will continue to run a company after being completely ignorant of harassment, or he simply knew about it and ignored it. Bobby Kotick will eventually get his bonuses and stock options after firing people, and those that still work for him can’t buy lunch at work. The corporate Android CEO of EA Andrew Wilson and other execs ‘gave up bonuses‘ this year because the company made less money, yet they still made $4.95-billion. Or to put that in a bit more of a perspective, four billion, nine hundred and fifty million dollars.

This entire mess was dangerous and irresponsible propagandizing by a corporation using the feral minds of its impressionable young audience. This simply should not be how they are learning about Nineteen Eighty-four, as somehow being associated with this dreck. It is plain-faced avarice under the veil of evangelism of one’s own so-called “oppression.”

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