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Comment by Bud | Hacker News Reader

On the contrary, there is a very solid basis. Epic has access to Apple's platform and dev tools because it has (or had) an agreement with Apple whereby it paid a percentage of profits earned in exchange for said access.

Epic, btw, has the exact same kind of agreement with Sony, Microsoft, and Google, for access to their gaming platforms. All three of those companies are extracting the same 30% fee that Apple is.

But now Epic has decided to grandstand and pretend that Apple has a "monopoly" and protest paying Apple, while still happily paying the exact same fees to its other gaming partners, including to Sony (for PlayStation), which just invested $250M in Epic.

So to say that there is "absolutely no basis" for Apple's action just isn't true.

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>Epic, btw, has the exact same kind of agreement with Sony, Microsoft, and Google, for access to their gaming platforms. All three of those companies are extracting the same 30% fee that Apple is.

Tim Sweeney has stated in the past that he feels like there's a better argument for game console makers taking a 30% fee.

>"There's a rationale for this on console where there's enormous investment in hardware, often sold below cost, and marketing campaigns in broad partnership with publishers. But on open platforms, 30 per cent is disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform, such as payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service.

Basically, he feels that these platforms might actually be doing enough work to earn a 30%. It's not that crazy to criticise one company taking a big slice and approve another company taking a same slice if they are bringing different value.

And the iPhone doesn't have an enormous investment in hardware/R&D/marketing? The only point would be the sold below cost, but I even thought this was illegal (dumping) no?

My problem with this is it's a very ad hoc argument without a brightline standard to anchor your judgments. It's not really clear why anyone who can get a slice of your work deserves any slice, and society has conventionally allowed the market to determine this.

You appeared to have carved out a convenient exception for the Playstations and Switches of the world because your intuition tells you that the industry isn't healthy, and that wobbling it a little could kill company interest. But we still have nothing to anchor the belief that 30% is right for gaming consoles but not elsewhere.

> Epic, btw, has the exact same kind of agreement with Sony, Microsoft, and Google, for access to their gaming platforms. All three of those companies are extracting the same 30% fee that Apple is.

You don't have to agree to Epic's terms to access the platforms from Sony, MS and Google. You do, however, have to agree to Apple's terms to access their Platform.

Nitpicking, and I'm not even sure that's correct. Regardless, it's not relevant. What Epic is griping about here is the 30% fee, but they're not acting or speaking in good faith about that. They're pretending that fee is somehow onerous, but they pay that exact same fee to every other platform, too.

The Epic Games Store takes a 12% commission on all games sales though.

https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/tim-sweeney-epic-games-...

And I'm sure they're not happy about the fees on other platforms, but they can't fight everyone at once.

They can believe that many actors are injust but can be simply choosing their battles. And phones > consoles in terms of impact. They're also less arbitrary about which purchases take a 30% cut or not compared to phones.

Epic had to agree to Sony's, Microsoft's, and Google's terms, however, which seems more relevant.

Isn't that extremely coincidental that they all just stumbled upon that same 30%? I'm sure there is no collusion whatsoever.

It's the status quo, the first one to make it lower will force everyone to go lower, and none of them want that.

There is no incentive to stay competitive by cutting down on your slice of the pie.

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