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Comment by sem000 | Hacker News Reader

The actual Epic store is a walled garden. You’re intermingling two separate things. Epic won’t let you out a game in their store without taking a cut.

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Most games on Epic Store are available on other stores too. How walled is this? And how much do they get for InApp-Income of the apps? Do they enforce it like Apple and Google?

Sometime (or often?) they have a time-exclusive offer for new games, but it seems they pay good money for this, so it's a simple business-descision for the gamedevs.

By that logic is your local supermarket a walled garden? They won't let you sell stuff without taking a cut.

> is your local supermarket a walled garden?

Yes? Of course? That’s the whole point of a supermarket. To curate and distribute in exchange for a cut.

You don't know what a walled garden is. A walled garden, or closed platform, is a platform that prevents you from going outside the ecosystem, or platform, in order to use it's features.

To continue the supermarket comparison, it would be like a system where you buy pots and pans and a stove and what not from Whole Foods, but you can only use food you purchased from Whole Foods, and anyone wanting to sell you food would have to sell it through Whole Foods.

Open to closed is on a continuum [1]. What we include or don't include in our analysis is a matter of preference. As such, there is no one true definition of a walled garden.

For example, Apple doesn't dictate which electricity provider I use to power its devices. Does that mean it's an open platform? Of course not.

The comparison of the App Store to a grocery store is apt. They both leverage their access to demand to control (and extract profits from) the supply side.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_platform

Whole Foods has store brands. You can't buy Whole Foods' store brand items at any other store. That aspect of exclusivity is harmful to consumers, since if they want to get the store brand items from different stores they have to pay money (fuel/bus/etc) to go to each store.

I guess the main difference between what apple and a supermarket is that with apple you buy some hardware and are then forced to only get software from one store.

It would be like buying a house somewhere and are then forced to only shop at one specific supermarket as long as you live there. No more buying your stuff anywhere else.

Or like going to a concert venue and not bringing outside alcohol. Or going on a plane and having to buy airline food. Or going to a movie theaters and not being able to order popcorn from elsewhere. Or having your wedding in a church and not getting to bring your favorite rabbi in to do the service.

All business is bundling and unbundling.

I can go into my local grocery store, and if I don't like something about the Oreo's I can go across the street to a different grocery store and get my Oreo's there. Epic Games only lets me download Fortnite on my PC or Mac through the Epic Games Store, so no they are not the same as buying groceries.

That applies for brands that are sold across multiple stores, but what about store brands? I can't get kirkland signature products outside of costco.

If your local supermarket A-Mart sold A-Cars that refused to drive into other supermarkets parking lots then yeah. You could argue that you don't like other supermarkets practices and want to ensure you or your spouse or your parents don't accidentally drive there so you buy A-Cars for all of them. And it isn't a monopoly, these cars have only about 50% market share, if you want to go to another grocery store why not buy their cars?

Anyway, the point is that coupling things unnecessarily is dumb. There is no need to enforce coupling of hardware and software like Apple does, the only reason is to ensure that Apples strong points also lets them sell their weak points.

>If your local supermarket A-Mart sold A-Cars that refused to drive into other supermarkets parking lots then yeah.

But that's not what epic's doing? You can install EGS and steam side by side. Since there's virtually no lock-in, it's closer to "two supermarkets you can drive to" than "whatever app store you have preloaded on your phone".

I agree, this was to show the difference between Apple and Epic.

...

Not sure what point you’re making here.

I guess so? They invested and developed their customer base, they deserve a cut of what my products I want them to sell like they take from every product they sell?

This is how the supply chain has worked since the beginning of time.

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