I think their point of view would be that they’re selling a global product and the value of serving a market needs to exceed the cost of the peculiarities of serving it.
Maybe there’s a complex solution here, but the naive one of global compliance to local demands needs an evaluation of cost vs reward. There’s also the somewhat possible concern that the EU might actually just be hostile to Apple and cutting losses now against possible future losses makes sense. (Again, remember we’re presuming order of magnitude increases in fines).
There's an extremely simple solution here. Just comply with the EU regulation in good faith. Sure, you lose some revenue that you'd otherwise get, but only for extremely popular games/apps like Fortnite etc, but your overall margins remain very thick. The vast majority of users would keep using only the App Store and vast majority of developers would publish there, so what's the big deal?
Instead it seems that what Apple is afraid of, is that this would lead to a chink in their armor, _eventually_ leading to their no-compromise attitude being re-evaluated in other markets as well, both by users (just a couple of TikToks from high-profile influencers would be enough to bring this issue into a more public light) and regulation bodies.
How much of that revenue is threatened by DMA? If they stand to lose most of their revenue or profits by complying with the laws, why bother?
It seems crazy that Apple is going to die on this hill, but I’m really curious what the accountants are sending the execs. I could see them willing to gamble a chunk of revenue to prevent every other market from trying to write similar laws, especially if they’re losing that revenue regardless.
