Epic’s court case against Apple reached a conclusion yesterday, at least temporarily, but the judge’s ruling didn’t only address the big issues of app stores and payment systems. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez also offered an answer to a question raised during the trial: what is a game? Most surprisingly, Gonzalez’s definition is pretty great.
The definition of what consitutes a game was important to Epic’s case against Apple, because whether something is a game or not determines how it’s treated in Apple’s rules regarding in-app purchases. The developers of Roblox argue that the games you play within their ecosystem are not actually games, but “experiences.”
As the court ruling states however, “Unfortunately, no one agrees and neither side introduced evidence of any commonly accepted industry definition” of video games. The document then quotes the definition offered by Epic…
