Yeah the sheer level of stupidity of that move combined with it not being clear to me that “Epic cannot use our developer tools” => “we will remove/prevent updates to any third party app that has used them” makes me think Epic may be embellishing here for the benefit of the public. I think Apple may have just done the “remove their account” part and Epic is adding as many nastily implications of that as possible.

I’m extremely suspicious of basically anything factual these companies say about this whole matter; there’s too much money on the line for there to be much voluntary truth telling involved.

Even if no UE-dependent games are removed now, they’re all at risk because Epic would no longer be able to fix any bugs for them, or maintain the engine. And, Apple has forced maintenance on developers quite often; it’s only a matter of time before some platform-breaking boundary must be crossed again, which none of the UE-dependent games would be able to manage without Epic’s involvement.

Oh I agree. My suspicion is that Apple’s intent was to revoke their developer account/iTunes Connect access but not attempt to enforce their inability to use XCode; there may be legal language to that effect but you’ve been able to install XCode and generate iOS provisioning profiles without a developer account for some time now. I can’t imagine that any Apple executives think the recent anti-trust hearings went so well that they think they can get away with this sort of snipe.

that's not what apple is doing

they're only revoking epic's devtools, and ability to make NEW unreal engine versions, old UE versions are unaffected