I’m very curious how Tim Sweeney will react to this. This is very much not the victory lap he was hoping to take (nor are the Apple rulings)
1. I think uptake of third party stores is quite low and there’s a strong incentive to stay available on the primary store
2. The App Store model has very much been that the paid apps are subsidizing the free ones. So it’s somewhat fair to charge for using the infrastructure, if you’re not contributing into the pot (and are siphoning away from it)
3. Those per install costs are brutal. I was thinking they’d do a dollar , but at almost $4, they’re outside what most people would spend. This is a strong way to keep F2P games from instituting external payment processing.
Developers pay Google to access its services. Infrastructure costs account for less than 1% of the profit margin and are practically negligible. Google acts like a pimp, obsessed with squeezing profit above all else.
If Google allowed other App stores on Android then maybe Amazon could make one. Or maybe they could add a setting to allow users to install their own APKs somehow.
It also involves around three or four "I know this could be dangerous" click-throughs. That is harder to get an audience of everyday, than settling for paying someone you are probably already paying.
The average person will not click through a security warning. And if they do, they don't know what they're expected to do on that settings page. They are trained _not_ to bypass security.
> I’m very curious how Tim Sweeney will react to this.
“Epic has indicated that it opposes the service fees that Google announced it may implement in the future and that Epic will challenge these fees if they come into effect.”
I’m sure they’ll oppose it but I’m not sure what footing they’d have if this doesn’t fall under googles collusion case, seeing as it’s for everyone in the same boat.
The term "paying users" referring to users that are paying the app developer as opposed to those who play for free. And with the money they earn from those users they are able to subsidize the cost of acquiring more users which hopefully acquires another paying user to continue the cycle.
People keep making the comparison between the Apple App Store or the Google Play store and the XBox store or the Fortnite store.
But these are likely irrelevant comparisons.
For one thing, the degree of monopolization simply doesn’t exist. Gaming is a market. There are many gaming platforms that are extremely popular. Xbox, PS, Nintendo, Steam, and then just open distribution on PCs which essentially means there is no lock in in this industry. And unlike the “web app” comparison folks try to make, open distribution can easily leverage the same capabilities as the store distributed games can (and in fact, they are more capable than games from some stores, like the Windows store).
But more importantly, gaming isn’t an essential part of life, which is basically what smartphones, dominated entirely by iOS/Android, have become at this point.
People depend on these platforms. There are businesses you cannot interact with if not through your phone. There are public transportation systems that are almost unusable.
And finally, maybe this is just me, but I think the idea that general purpose computing is the same as playing video games just strikes me as wrong. General purpose computing, which is what phones are, are basic infrastructure for modern life. They should be treated differently and we shoudoht allow 2 companies to monopolize and/or embargo them like Apple/Google are trying.
It's really too bad that essential public services can't be hosted on the web so that you could use them on any platform - smartphone, laptop, tablet, whatever - and would have an alternative to Apple and Google's game stores. Basic apps don't need fancy 3D graphics (and even if they did we have webGL etc.)
There is no single organisation that has done more to push the mobile web forward than Apple. Seriously, name one.
Nobody gave a shit about the mobile web until Apple launched the iPhone, where one of its main selling points was a “desktop-class web browser”, where Steve Jobs told announced that if they wanted to run apps on the iPhone, they should be web apps.
Then suddenly everybody started demanding “iPhone-compatible websites” overnight. Nobody was asking for “mobile websites”, which until that point were shitty WAP/WML things, or – in the best case – cut back m.example.com microsites. People wanted “iPhone-compatible websites”.
And then all the other phone vendors used Apple’s open-source WebKit code (open-source thanks to KDE, useful on mobile thanks to Apple) to release their own browsers, and the mobile web took off like a rocket because suddenly it was useful because people could use real websites.
And let’s not forget Steve Jobs telling people to avoid Flash and use open web standards instead.
There is a very clear before/after with the mobile web, and it’s the launch of the iPhone and all the work Apple put into making WebKit work well on mobile that provided that watershed moment.
Apple were championing the web in the time period you claim they were “intentionally undermining and artificially crippling it”.
Now, you may be underwhelmed by their performance in more recent years, but it’s simply factually untrue that they have had a 20 year campaign to undermine the web.
It seems like the better way to dispose of these comparisons is to just to treat them the same and require Xbox etc. to allow alternative stores too. Would thousands be killed if that were required? Simply don't allow devices to exclude competing distribution systems, whatsoever.
I'm a bit surprised that the DMA etc. didn't end up applying to Xbox, and how Microsoft has tried to make implausible arguments about how iPhone should be open but Xbox should be closed.
The killer app for jailbreaking game systems is and has always been running unlicensed games, a scenario which Apple, Xbox, and Nintendo vigorously object to. It's also why Sony killed Linux on PS3. On the other hand, you can run unlicensed games on Android and it hasn't killed Google Play.
> For one thing, the degree of monopolization simply doesn’t exist. Gaming is a market. There are many gaming platforms that are extremely popular. Xbox, PS, Nintendo, Steam, and then just open
Except there isn’t multiple stores on Xbox or PlayStation or Switch. Which is directly comparable to the iOS lock ins that Epic was fighting against.
> But more importantly, gaming isn’t an essential part of life, which is basically what smartphones, dominated entirely by iOS/Android, have become at this point.
True but also irrelevant. Monopoly laws don’t make those distinctions.
> And finally, maybe this is just me, but I think the idea that general purpose computing is the same as playing video games just strikes me as wrong.
Again, monopoly laws don’t make any distinction here. However to answer your direct point, some consoles are marketed as more general purpose devices for taxation reasons. All consoles support YouTube, most have other streaming services from Netflix to Spotify. They all come with a fully capable web browser. Even their hardware has been generic for the last few generations of consoles. So they are general purpose devices in all metrics aside from the variety of apps available. And you could argue the reason for this is literally because of their “App Store” lock ins. So your argument here is evidence against the point you’re trying to make.
> General purpose computing, which is what phones are, are basic infrastructure for modern life.
That’s not the definition of a “general purpose computing device” and I reject the idea that iOS and Android are equivalent to water, roads and electricity.
I do agree that smartphones are a MASSIVELY useful asset, but you don’t actually need a smartphone for modern life. Plenty of older people still manage just fine without iOS nor Android. They’ll use a laptop or PC to access the same services via a web browser.
Furthermore, the companies who are fighting iOS lock ins are not critical services. Epic, for example, is a gaming company. They don’t provide health or banking services. You can’t do your taxes in Fortnight. You don’t book your car in for a service via an app built in Unreal Engine. Epic build games not essential infrastructure.
This analysis is correct. Epic's business incentive has always been lowering platform fees paid to Apple and Google for Fortnite compared to what they are paying Nintendo and Sony for Fortnite.
There's nothing criminal or arguably even morally wrong about that. Nintendo and Sony do not make 10% of the hardware margins that Apple does. They are not analogous businesses.
> There's nothing criminal or arguably even morally wrong about that.
Morality is irrelevant and criminality is for the legal system to decide, not you.
> Nintendo and Sony do not make 10% of the hardware margins that Apple does.
Which, again, is completely irrelevant.
> They are not analogous businesses.
Only because you’ve decided they’re not. And your arguments have zero citations to any legal precedence. Yet we do have legal precedence of lock ins on other platforms and their related app stores.
So the problem we have is the legal precedence actually works against Nintendo et al and now it’s up to the courts to decide if those prior judgements are relevant to Nintendo and its ilk too.
Thus far all you and your likeminded peers have proven is that you have a personal opinion. But you’ve provided precisely zero legal evidence to back up your opinions. So why should we trust your opinion any more than the highly public legal precedence that was reached between Epic and Apple?
“but they’re different” isn’t a compelling legal argument for why they’re different. Regardless of how much you might wish it were.
I assume by hardware margins you are thinking of component and manufacturing cost. However, the largest cost that has to be amortized over the life of a hardware product is R&D cost, which is huge.
Even by the component and manufacturing cost metric, the Switch has always been profitable, though DRAM and flash storage costs are putting pressure on hardware margins at the moment. Still R&D is the largest cost that each company faces.
And the business you need to interact with through your phone and government services are not going through in app payments and giving Apple a cut. At most they are accepting Apple Pay and being charged standard credit card fees
Cry me a river for the Epics of the world selling loot boxes and other pay to win crap. It came out in the trial that 90% of App Store revenue is coming from games.
Neither Epic, Google or Apple are on the side of the angels
This comparison doesn't work at all. An APK for app A is compatible with Android devices of version X, regardless of the store it is sold on. A cosmetic for game B is not compatible with all games running on the same engine Y, for obvious reasons.
Asking Fortnite to accept other stores selling Fortnite-compatible cosmetics doesn't work either because Fortnite has not monopolized a trillion-dollar industry, meanwhile spending billions on lobbying to make daily life for the average citizen impossible without them, which the Google-Apple cartel has. Fortnite has also never gained market share by pursuing claims about being an open source platform or not being evil, again unlike Google. These differences.. make all the difference. Call me when my kids are forced to agree to Fortnite EULAs to participate in schooling all around the world.
> Unless all around the world is the usual "world === USA".
Not at all. US isn't even the leader on this. For example in many countries it's already much harder to do any kind of digital banking without a Google/Apple-approved phone than in the US.
In Europe as well, more and more places where it's completely the norm for schools and teachers to do all their communication through Facebook or Whatsapp. Sure those have web, but are arguably the worst of the three. Portugal nor most European countries are above this at all. If only they were. Look at all the national IDs rolled out, those too more and more mandatory Apple/Android 2FA.
Will Portuguese teachers never downgrade any students who do all their homework on e.g. OpenOffice and it doesn't look nice on the teacher's MS Office? Doubt it.
Most students in Portugal still deliver their work assigments in paper, and if they want a computer, parents buy one to have at home, usually shared by all that are going to school.
We have had national IDs since forever, with fingerprints, we don't go crazy about it like in some other countries, even though we suffered a dictorship with lots of human losses, colonial wars, and even though PIDE/DGS wasn't KGB or Stasi level, it also managed to impact our society.
I should know, I am part of the first generation to grow up in freedom, while hearing the grown up stories of how everything came to be.
So which non-Meta platforms do schools and teachers primarily use to communicate with parents and students? How well is the Apple/Google-less digital banking in Portugal holding up? I'm sure like you're saying things in Portugal are better than average for Europe, but it's not representative.
You're moving goalposts - my bigger point was about daily life becoming impossible without Google/Apple, and digital banking is one of the prime examples of this. On top of that Meta is the natural 3rd party in that group.
Considering Google Classrooms is used by a significant percentage of public schools, I have no idea why you think Portugal is special here.
Also, given the frequency of families having issues with the Cuco MDM used to lock out the Windows computers they handed to kids during COVID, and what kids do which such computers, I'm doubly unsure it was a smart idea to offer shitty Windows laptops vs. shitty Chromebooks.
Schools around the world give kids Chromebooks (or iPads) because they're harder to fuck and easier to unfuck. Windows still sucks at this, and no one came up with a coherent — locked down — Linux platform to achieve the same.
I am Portuguese, have family ties with teachers still into the active, I guess.
That kind of stuff is mostly US school system, schools in countries that go with USA into G7 meetings, or wealthy enough for that kind of stuff maybe.
Not every country has the pleasure to enjoy a school system swimming in money to offer computers to kids, in every single school.
Not even during COVID was every Portuguese family granted the pleasure to have a device offered to them, some lucky ones did, a large majority only saw them on the news, and as usual the burden was on the family to come up with a solution to all their kids attending the various school levels.
And lets not even go to such great stuff like Magalhães, e-escola, and who got to profit from it.
I'm writing from personal experience in a middle of the table public school, with a single IT guy helping out around 1000 pupils, who regularly get their computers locked with said MDM.
It's possible other school districts with a less diligent, but similarly overworked, IT guy just give up and don't even hand out the computers anymore, especially if they don't have enough of them, after being on their second or third kid.
Those are certainly above 6 grade, because I am aware of few schools, whose desktop computers, with luck get to a have a visit from some local computer store, on demand after lots back and forth with the regional ministerium office regarding how it gets paid.
None of them has hardly an IT guy, or girl on site, and as usual "em casa de ferreiro espeto de pau", acquaitances have been invited to have a look at their computers.
The IT guy is the TIC professor, who does it in excess of work. The guy is the son of the former TIC professor. And of course, I was roped in to help for my kids’ classes.
And yes, it includes kids from at least 2nd grade. My COVID kids got their laptop on 1st grade, but that's no longer the case.
>the degree of monopolization simply doesn’t exist
Yes, it does. Your only options are like Fornite, Roblox, or Minecraft.
Saying make your own game, is like saying make your own phone. There is tremendous value in the gigantic userbases these platforms have. This value is why platform holders can charge for access to them.
Wow. I guess Steam must be bankrupt and surviving off just four games. And I guess Epic and Steam just don't compete. And itch and GoG are just irrelevant with no market impact.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but gaming is not "choose between these two" level of monopilisation. And indies just won game of the year awards! Things are just not monopolised.
Nothing locks you into a specific phone. I have both a primary Android and iOS phone that I use.
>are so many other games out there to choose from.
But how many can you make a business on top of that can pay competitively? It's like how there are a ton of operating systems to choose from, yet only a few that are viable to build upon.
Games are there to be played. Not being able to build a business on top of a game does not make it irrelevant.
f you want to start a business making games then you really should consider using a game engine rather than something like Roblox because Roblox takes a massive cut (way more than 30%) when looking at what users pay vs. what you cash out. I don't
This whole conversation is about how there is very few options for games where it is financially viable to build content for them as a third party. I am not claiming that other games are not fun, you just can't make a successful business on top of them.
Yes, it's possible to make your own game, but it's also possible to make your own app store. There is value in being able to build on top of successful platforms. These existing app stores can demand a bigger cut than doing things yourself because they bring a lot of value and paying customers to the table.
> This whole conversation is about how there is very few options for games where it is financially viable to build content for them as a third party.
Because games are not platforms. Roblox is a platform - games ("experiences") are all UGC. Fortnite is a game that Epic is turning into a platform. Not sure what Minecraft is doing but it doesn't seem anywhere near as financially viable for creators pas Roblox.
It's an interesting thing to think about because Roblox does not exactly follow the App Store review guidelines. Code and assets are downloaded onto your device to run the games. If you could add them to your home screen then it wouldn't be so far off from a game-specific app store.
Stardew Valley. Runs on everything, not just "viable" OSs, made by a single person, and easily competes with an entire genre of gaming to pay the author.
The upper bound of building a business on top of Stardew Valley appears to be https://www.patreon.com/pathoschild which makes under $400 per month after Patreon's cut. That's not enough to work as a single person full time let alone hiring a team.
A $400/mo Patreon does not exactly outweigh somewhere between 18-35 million sales on a single one of the platforms it supports. I would not call that the "upper bound".
That 18-35 million goes to the game's developer and probably not even a single penny goes to those building a business off of designing content on top of the game. That figure is irrelevant.
Taking Fortnite as an example the relevant figure would be that creators on Fortnite can make over $10 million per year. Bringing up that Epic made a few billion dollars is irrelevant to what this conversation is about, which is games where it is financially viable to build content for them.
> which is games where it is financially viable to build content for them.
If that was your interpretation, then it would have been better to have mentioned it anywhere upthread. What we have, so far, is people talking about the gaming industry, and you calling it a monopoly. Nowhere before do we have a mention of third-party developers.
I got tripped up because the parent comment used the term "Fortnite store" when I think they meant "Epic Games Store", so I didn't mention the monopolization that I was talking about was in game monetization upon an existing game.
1. I think uptake of third party stores is quite low and there’s a strong incentive to stay available on the primary store
2. The App Store model has very much been that the paid apps are subsidizing the free ones. So it’s somewhat fair to charge for using the infrastructure, if you’re not contributing into the pot (and are siphoning away from it)
3. Those per install costs are brutal. I was thinking they’d do a dollar , but at almost $4, they’re outside what most people would spend. This is a strong way to keep F2P games from instituting external payment processing.