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Comment by subharmonicon | Hacker News Reader

New headline: “Billionaire doesn’t like to pay for infrastructure that helped make him a billionaire.”

To his credit that’s a substantially large club, he’s not alone.

(Edit)

To elaborate, he’s balking at a company having control over a platform that they built and charge for to help maintain the platform.

Every company wants to own and drive the platform, and that’s been the desire since at least the 80’s.

Tim would like to build a metaverse and own that platform, and doesn’t like that today he’d have to build it on top of other platforms and pay a price to do so.

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> infrastructure that helped make him a billionaire

This is simply not true. First because Fortnite was a desktop first game.

But philosophically, I really struggle with the idea that just because something sits on the app store then Apple deserves the credit for any success.

It's like saying that Fortnite owes MS windows and Intel for their success. Sure at some level, but not in any real or practical way.

Can you imagine if Windows took 30% of all desktop software sales since the dawn of Win 3.1, and what a worse place computing would be in?

I think we moralize this too much. Apple doesn’t get credit for the app or the infrastructure or whatever. Their role in the transaction is their ownership of valuable digital real-estate that companies salivate over and their business is keeping that real-estate valuable. And boy do they charge a premium for it.

Nobody has to hawk their goods on iOS and if there wasn’t money in it nobody would. If Epic didn’t stand to make assloads of money they wouldn’t saber-rattle every few months or fight these legal battles. If anything the fact that everyone complains about their pricing but still publishes on iOS means they have the pricing exactly right.

> Nobody has to hawk their goods on iOS

But this ignores their market position on mobile phones and the barriers to creating an open competing mobile phone.

It's like if there were two car companies and you could buy tires from them, but if you wanted to buy tires from a third party you had to pay Ford or Chevy 30% tax because you were putting them on their cars.

And you want to tell the tire companies too bad, you don't have to sell tires.

It’s really straightforward. Platform owners make investments in supporting development on their platform. Xcode? Metal? Would there even be any apps, developers, or users on iOS if they didn’t make this investment?

Tolls and taxes bother me but I don’t pretend to not understand them.

>>Would there even be any apps, developers, or users on iOS if they didn’t make this investment?

Pricing power comes from market power.

Apple has market power because they were first in the new generation of touchscreen phones.

Some app developers have hugely benefited.

Some app developers already have an audience and just want their software to be available on all platforms and Apple is using it's market position to extract a toll. I think it's abusive given it's market power.

Epic doesn't care about metal or xcode and if there was an open phone that had market position (like Windows PC) Epic would be fine to port it's software to that system.

Apple's toll comes from it's market position, not it's investment. The investment created the position -- but For how long does the consumer need to pay Apple's toll for being first 15 years ago? Forever? Apple recouped it's investment many many many times over.

And get revenue by forcing developers to pay a yearly license to develop for the platform plus forcing them to buy your overpriced hardware.

I think you have to pay BestBuy for shelf space to sell your games.

Epic’s Fortnite was massively profitable before mobile ports came around. Most companies are balking at a 30% surcharge on everything purchased for essentially app reviewing and listing in a store. Why doesn’t Apple charge all financial apps 30% on those transactions? Why aren’t the taking a slice from every streaming service?

It’s not clear, at least to me, how many apps end up paying 30% versus 15%.

To your point about financial apps, most can and do offer their services on websites as well. Those websites aren’t relying on infrastructure and SDKs paid for by Apple.

If the current percentage isn’t fair, what is?

Honest question.

> most can and do offer their services on websites as well. Those websites aren’t relying on infrastructure and SDKs paid for by Apple.

Isn't that true for fortnite too? I bet 90% of the code and infra involved in an in-game Fortnite purchase belongs to Epic and is common to all the different platforms they support.

Apple is merely hosting downloads and not much else for Fortnite or any other online only game, they aren't running game servers. Yes they make the hardware and provide SDK's, so does Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Nintendo, Sony, etc. and Epic owns Unreal engine and likely has games on all of those platforms. 30% or 15% on all in-game purchases is kinda ridiculous because Apple (or other platforms) aren't doing anything other than collecting revenue in those cases so the surcharge should reflect that, like 4-5% seems fair to cover credit card surcharges and payment infrastructure and volume discounts would make sense there for a behemoth like Epic.

> If the current percentage isn’t fair, what is?

Whatever Apple can negotiate with Epic after Apple is forced to allow Fortnite to bypass the app store and the 30% cut.

I don't know what number that is, but it's not 30% for Epic. I'm sure plenty would pay it, but plenty would not.

> Epic’s Fortnite was massively profitable before mobile ports came around.

Massively profitable isn't enough when you could be ... supermassively profitable!

> Most companies are balking at a 30% surcharge on everything purchased for essentially app reviewing and listing in a store

That's probably why Fortnite is not available on Google Play or in the Nintendo eShop. Few companies are willing to pay Google's or Nintendo's platform fees.

Can’t push an app with a 3rd party store as an option. Can’t install outside the AppStore. I think the argument for some regulation is fair. The mobile space is restrictive at the end of the day and users lose because of it.

I think ultimately this argues for far more than regulating the mobile space.

Users can end up losing anytime there are dominant players, but I don’t think Tim is arguing for anything to help users, he’s arguing to help himself and that’s my point. This isn’t some kind of altruistic mission he’s on.

If you need people to be on an 'altruistic mission' to support them doing something, you're really narrowing your options.

If someone does something that helps a situation we should support it.

Epic CEO wants government regulation to make it so he doesn’t have to pay for something he values just doesn’t have the same ring.

Replace "Epic CEO" with "someone" in that sentence and you're talking about like half of all activism.

This just in: CEOs named Tim like making money and want more of it.

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