Surely the question has to be at some stage who decided a 70:30 split was reasonable? When does something become a "universal standard" and who has the power to dictate that? If they have that power, is the power fair and equitable to everyone participating in the marketplace, especially wherein a sole proprietor's platform constitutes a large enough stake of that market? Probably not.
This may be just because it's Sweeney's turn on the stand and it will flip when it's Apples turn, but it really seems like there's no way this is going in Epic's favour.
It's hard to argue against the idea that Apple benefits from exactly the same kind of impulse purchases through IAPs in a myriad of apps targeted squarely at children / young people, so I'm not sure how that angle would hold water against the case that Apple are profiting from the same kind of predatory monetisation mechanics such as loot boxes (although Fortnite doesn't include them, right? I mean you can unlock random stuff through gameplay, but not pack/box opening, unless I've missed something).
I see something from the Save the World mode but they made the boxes transparent so you could see what's in them before spending V-bucks or llamas or whatever the strawberry float it was. If Epic wanted to include non-cosmetic Pay to Win mechanics or lootboxes as seen in other games including "family friendly" stuff like Nintendo's apps for example, they would have already done that.
I might respect to a limited degree that Epic haven't dived head first into that considering they did a long time ago make semi-competitive / pre eSports goldrush FPS arena games where there seemingly wasn't any way to pay to win (or indeed pay for cosmetics besides DLC or community mods or whatever which is something else than micro-transactions, low barrier to entry, all that gooseberry fool).
I would argue that Apple knows *verrrrry well* the impulsive nature of app purchases, never mind in-app purchases, and that is why they are protective of the industry standard revenue split that they helped to make a standard.
Wasn't the entire freaking video game industry up in arms with the App Store concept itself over the idea of small impulse purchases crashing/devaluing a market for higher priced "AAA" titles? In terms of, "how can we possibly make any more from a multi million $ development budget while charging just a few $ for the product"? I'm talking around roughly 2009-2012 when the whole thing blew up after weird experiments with things like the Ngage and crappy little Java apps which were mostly awful (even if today, I sometimes try those and they're surprisingly functional little games).
Isn't that exactly what so many massive developers distanced themselves from for literally decades (Nintendo for example, forgetting the fact for the moment they're an enormously backwards and in many cases conservative, yet somehow also at the same innovative company) because they were terrified about the impact that would have? As well as potentially flooding the market with "casual", "low quality" games (video games crash of 1983).
Apple knew full well what they were doing when they created that ecosystem of "solve X problem with a $1 app" and this made millionaires out of people. It disrupted the entire economic model for not just one but entire industries - the entire software industry and perhaps then (or at the same time) the services industry too (things like takeaways for example or music streaming). All of which have to go through Apple's IAPs.
The judge pointing out any business wants to serve customers in the least frictional, most convenient and natural way for that user on that platform is kind of, well, strawberry floating obvious, surely.
I think this is going in an overall positive direction as the testimonies are making it pretty clear apple are eating a huge amount of developers revenue despite smart phones very much being not only a "general purpose device" but the *primary* daily computing device for most people. These devices should be open by default.
I don't agree with the Google revenue take either by the way but Google don't manufacture the vast majority of devices and the OS is open source.
Apple make plenty plenty of money selling their hardware and closed OS.
Green Gecko wrote:I think this is going in an overall positive direction as the testimonies are making it pretty clear apple are eating a huge amount of developers revenue despite smart phones very much being not only a "general purpose device" but the *primary* daily computing device for most people. These devices should be open by default.
I don't agree with the Google revenue take either by the way but Google don't manufacture the vast majority of devices and the OS is open source.
Apple make plenty plenty of money selling their hardware and closed OS.
The difference being that with Google you can install applications which can then update themselves independantly of the Play Store.
