Hey Sports Tech Fans,
A lot of deals done this week, including Turner sports deal with MLB valued at $3.75 billion and Microsoft’s deal to buy game publisher Bethesda for $7.5 billion
There was a huge raise of $450 million for Zwift the fitness/esports competitor to Peloton.
The platform combines exercise, like a bike ride, with a 3d world that represents your progress and efforts in real time. This allows you to compete in a virtual Tour de France against others.
The deal comes at a similar time to Apple launching Fitness+ which puts a lot of pressure on publicly traded Peloton who have blazed a trail in this gamified, connected fitness space.
I was going to do a deep dive in the the Epic Games v Apple and Google lawsuit this week but I came across a great video from Linus Tech Tips that goes into detail about the law suit and its implications. You can find that video below in the esports section.
The TLDR of the situation is that Epic Games (Fortnite developer) added a third party payment option inside its app in August on both iOS and Android devices.
This was an attempt to circumvent the 30% take that both app stores take off of all app purchases and in app purchases.
It’s not the first time this type of beef has arisen with the likes of Netflix, Prime Video, Spotify and email client Hey have had similar issues with the 30% tax on their sales.
Some have negotiated deals with the app stores to reduce the take, but others like Spotify still have ongoing issues.
Even while writing this, news came through of Spotify and Epic games have formed an app fairness alliance. This story will run and run and with Apple under investigation in the EU for anti-trust issues, it could be a massive story that changes the app world forever.
In other news, Amazon is getting into the cloud gaming space with the launch of Luna. It is yet another battle ground that pits Amazon up against Microsoft and Google who both have cloud gaming products of their own as well as the three way battle to be the dominant force of cloud in general.
Have a great sporting weekend,
Will
