Comment by nathankunicki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nathankunicki | Hacker News Reader

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And if this thread were about my employer and their policies, I may choose to weigh in on them also.

Saying that, console games are more often than not the size of a Blu-ray disc, with triple-A games exceeding 40-60Gb in size, sometimes larger. Some popular games come on multiple discs. An order of magnitude larger than the less than 100Mb size of most iOS and Android apps, which are downloadable over a mobile connection. The hosting, bandwidth, CDN, and sales costs for the digital versions of those games and their patches can't be cheap, and are often subject to flash traffic surges, particularly when million of players decide to download them (and their updates) the second they're released. This is to say nothing of the myriad of hosted services that are provided that are unique to consoles.

I don't know what business deals are in place, nor can I make a statement on the perceived value that the publishers who publish on consoles place on what's provided, however its worth noting that even before Fortnite was removed from the app stores, the target of Epic's complaint did not include Playstation, Xbox, or Nintendo.

Entirely fair, the comment was a bit of a snipe and for that I apologize.

There is definitely more of a "community" aspect around gaming, wherein everyone wants to get the midnight release or download the DLC the moment it is ready -- I can see how that creates technical differences in terms of the value console platforms may deliver to a developer.

I would be unkind, though, if I didn't say there does seem to be a rough equivalence. The value provided might be different, but we can clearly see the lines get more blurry with hybrid devices like the Nintendo Switch.

I would assume Epic is targeting Google and Apple because they have much higher gross margins on services (I think 60-70%, which is pretty normal for SaaS, vs around 30% for something like Xbox Live), plus the additional scrutiny mobile phones are under in general. Probably makes the case much easier. The cut does seem pretty hefty when considering most of that money is just going straight into profit margin. Irrespective, I wouldn't be surprised if decisions in the mobile realm find there way as precedent in other, similar cases.

Thanks, I appreciate that. And while I do see their offerings as vastly different in many ways, I do see the parallels you mention.

Speaking personally, and as as a lifelong gamer, I place great value in being able to play my games decades from now. I own collections of discs and cartridges, new and old, which I still enjoy from time to time and look forward to being able to share with my kids one day. I do worry that when the various digital storefronts phase out (as many have done), the hard disks which the DRM'd digital copies live on will eventually die, and the games will disappear forever.

It is somewhat comforting to me that the major consoles still have alternative avenues of publishing and distribution - that of the veritable disc and cartridge, which at least in my mind, helps alleviate many of the anti-competitive concerns. That developers can choose between consoles, publishers, retailers, etc, and that consumers can choose to resell, trade, or give away their games, like good old fashioned property - something which is becoming rarer and rarer these days.

This ecosystem (particularly the physical one) provides a level of competition that doesn't exist on phones, and so, at least in my mind, (and along with the differences I mention in my other post), presents a major difference between the business models.

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