Surely maintaining first-class hardware, software, and marketplace ecosystems has at least a little associated cost?
Apple is charging what they are because they can (obviously). But equally obvious not everyone agrees that they are able to charge this because of product quality, but perhaps due to (partly) market monopoly.
Seeing as it's still in court, and various antitrust discussions, it's definitely not clear cut either way and cases can certainly be made both ways.
Is Google "double-dipping" because they're selling you a phone and then using it to advertise to you?
The iPhone has the Apple Tax on apps priced into it already. If they didn't have the revenue from Epic, they'd have to either find sources of revenue (like spying on you to sell you more stuff) or reduce the quality of the software / hardware.
No.
> Were Nintendo and Sony "double-dipping" because they charged consumers to buy their consoles, as well as charging cartridge makers for the chip required for the game to actually work?
No.
> Is Google "double-dipping" because they're selling you a phone and then using it to advertise to you?
Yes.
I can go to any other store and get the same food at a price reflecting the competition between them where one gets kick-backs on the backend as well and another doesn't.
With consoles the game makers (non-exclusives) can take it or leave it in regards to specific consoles as long as there is enough of them.
Android and iOS are two separate phone makers (or at least OS in one case), but that isn't enough to sustain market competition on any granularity, so they can make arbitrary choices with regards to charging at all ends and still have a captive market. Consoles would probably be here without PC.
> The iPhone has the Apple Tax on apps priced into it already. If they didn't have the revenue from Epic, they'd have to either find sources of revenue (like spying on you to sell you more stuff) or reduce the quality of the software / hardware.
[citation needed]
Your argument here seems to be something like this: "Game makers have an alternative to all consoles, in the form of PCs. They therefore have a legitimate choice to leave the platform entirely if they found console makers' charges abusive. The fact that they don't is evidence that the charges console makers make to game makers is not abusive; or at least, evidence that no intervention is required."
This thread is specifically about the ~$200M Apple get for Fortnite. In the case of Fortnite, they have at least two alternates to iOS: Consoles and PCs. So Epic certainly does have an option to leave the iOS platform entirely; and thus, by your logic, the fact that Epic chose to make an iOS version of Fortnite anyway is evidence that the "Apple tax" is not abusive -- or at least, evidence that no intervention is required.
No, you have cause and effect backwards. They don't because they can't without losing out on cross-platform games.
Consoles have one job, games. They can capture consumers on exclusives, or being competitive on cross-platform games.
iOS have half (not percent-wise, but provider-wise) of a phone-market, in which games exist.
Gamers can't choose a gaming platform outside of what phone they already have, without switching phones and all the extra second-order effect that has. So much less elasticity there.
But as far as I'm concerned they can look into Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft anti-competitive behavior too, I wouldn't be hard to persuade the effect exists there too, albeit to a lesser extent.
You can't just match your competition, you have to exceed it in some special way before people will switch.
Epic aren't doing anything shady, here.
GGGP:
> I think the big difference between is how Epic treats its customers and how Valve treats its customers. Epic could've gone the GOG Galaxy route ("use it, or not, your choice"), but they decided to force people into their watered down launcher before it was ready. Even Xbox is being more open lately.
> You can't just match your competition, you have to exceed it in some special way before people will switch.
GGP:
> how are they forcing anyone?
I answered that question. That Steam is also doing it is whataboutism, but also entirely besides the point. Steam however is a much more full-featured client, which also factored into GGGP's argument.
But a more pointed answer to GGP would've been that Epic has paid external developers for (timed) exclusives.
their client is super garbage. like battlenet if you leave it open it hogs your cpu. the fact that a game can turn the store color into a white client is insane to me.
Don't blame Epic for spending money to bring customers to their product. Epic aren't using shady tactics to do this, and Valve is free to do everything Epic is doing.
Also, as a game buyer, you DEFINITELY want a multi-source purchasing ecosystem; you definitely want to avoid a monopoly if the price you pay for games is important to you.
(True the developers themselves agree to that exclusive contract, so they share some of the blame of disappointing people, but if you're an indie developer it is hard to say no to that much money)
[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-07-03-epic-games-wil...
[2] https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-games-boss-defends-exclusivity-...
counterpoint: no, it's fine, and it's actually better than the google play store, far less random trash and far less malicious apps/rootkits being distributed.
EDIT: Looks like they're finally in the process of changing this in a "Preview" version now.
that's always such a weird one with this site's libertarian/pro-business bent. it's good to make a successful business and make money... no not like that!
there is nothing stopping anyone from setting up their own competing ecosystem (another walled garden, even). Google did exactly that, featurephones still exist, etc. There are legitimate end-user reasons for doing it this way (namely, facebook and others would immediately start their own app stores to end-run around app review so they could exploit permissions and exploit user privacy for profit, just as they already got caught doing).
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...
People are mad because they don't like Apple's business model, which doesn't involve them, so they want Apple to be forced to do business with them on their own terms. Very anti-libertarian, which is again ironic but not out of character for libertarians. Bioshock was right, libertarians are pro-freedom of business right up until someone else has a bigger business.
This is very much in the range of Apple's freedom of business. Go make your own software ecosystem and you can do whatever you want with your app store. Again, just like Google did.
The problem is that you need to compete in the market of smartphones to be able to compete in the market of app stores. Its quite similar to Microsoft pushing Internet Explorer with Windows a few decades ago - Microsoft was using a competitive advantage in one arena (operating systems) as leverage to gain a monopoly position in another arena (web browsers). The effect of that business strategy is it raises the cost of competition. Competitors now need to compete in both markets (OSes and browsers / phones and app stores). The expense of doing that knocks out almost all your competitors.
All else being equal, less competition is bad for innovation and bad for consumers.
Having both Steam and the Epic games store on windows is inconvenient, but both stores are forced to compete with each other on price and features to retain customers. In the long run this is means cheaper games and better platforms.
This is obvious in the smartphone market too - the iPhone forced Android to become a way better operating system to compete. (Early versions of android were awful.) And Android in turn innovated on notifications and widgets and lots of other stuff, which forced the iPhone to raise its game. There's no competition for the app stores - and predictably the iphone app store is fine, but it hasn't improved much in years.
Epic makes video games. They want to compete with the app store without competing with the iPhone. Whether you agree with them or not, I think they certainly have a case and deserve their day in court to argue it.
They have their own twisted logic on why Apple should have to open up and they shouldn't, but none of these companies are doing it for the morals, they want to use the courts to lever open Apple's bank vault and will then immediately turn around and argue why those rules shouldn't apply to them. They also don't really care about the impact it will have on end-users w/r/t large apps immediately starting their own "app stores" to bypass app review and start exploiting user data.
Apple's an easy target because Apple as a corporation is far more unpopular than, say, Microsoft or Sony, but these other companies use the exact same business model, and when it comes down to it they will cite the exact same reasons. "Oh we wouldn't want malware, sexual content, or malicious software to take root on the Xbox" and so on.
Maybe a better example would be the Nintendo switch - and I’m sympathetic to the idea that I should be able to install and run whatever software I want on my device. I wish I could install Netflix, but I can’t and that’s really annoying.
I hear you about big companies forcing you into their app stores so they can exploit your user data. That’s a real worry; and I’m not sure what the right approach is there. Does this happen on android, where you can enter dev mode and install other app stores? I love that aspect of the iPhone - although I also wish I could have sexual content on my phone without Apple judging me for it.
Apple only controls 13% of the smartphone market. They're not a monopoly here. They're in fact the minority player in the market, significantly so. Monopoly rules only come into play when a monopoly actually exists, and a business exploits that monopoly to their competitive advantage.
Is 13% a monopoly power?
100% is a monopoly power, yes.
The situation itself is nuanced. There are two extreme positions here, and I don't think the right answer belongs to either extreme view. We don't want the government to outlaw innovative business plans. And we don't want large, established companies using anticompetitive tactics to hurt competition and innovation.
But as I understand it, the precedent here is based on the question of "Are smartphone apps the same business / marketplace as phones". For an xbox, I could imagine the courts saying that the product is essentially a games service, competing with other games services (eg the playstation). So thats acceptable. But microsoft bundling IE with windows a few decades ago is different - those are two marketplaces. One for operating systems, and another for web browsers. In that case, its anticompetitive to use OS dominance to unfairly outcompete in the web browser marketplace.
Are phones more like windows, or are phones more like an xbox? I see your point, but personally I think they're more like windows. And the law should treat them as such. Competition is good for users in the short term, and generally good for an industry in the long term too.
Apple actually claimed they did this until recently, right?
Before Steve Jobs decided to control everything, most devices and operating systems supported downloading software from 3rd party sources and running it. After all, you owned the device and you licensed the OS to run your tasks and applications.
Jobs was the villain that came up with this robber baron scheme. It's parasitic.
Tightly and artificially control anything that gets put on the devices your company sells? Genius evil.
Next up we're going to be paying for the content we stream on the Internet. Just wait for the next wave of tech land owners. You'll pay more for certain classes of traffic.
Before you rush to defend it, ask yourself if you'd still be happy if Microsoft had won the war and there was no iPhone.
Game consoles are the canonical counter example. Even consoles without cartridges, never supported software that didn’t pay a cut to the console manufacturer (+ a really expensive dev kit). It’s not some evil genius idea that Jobs just cooked up.
You have over a dozen platforms to choose from when you want to play Assassin's Creed. You only have two choices for the computing device you use most frequently.
The pocket computer you have is where you do banking, calls, photos, dating, research, social networking. A lot of people spend most of their lives on these computers.