Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable
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matthewball.co
I can't stand that almost all of the games seem to have a pay to win aspect, or are heavily advertising every chance they get.
As a gamer dad, I try to show my kid better games to play, but because they aren't free, his friends can't play. Just drives him to keep playing and wanting more Robux. It's compounded when his favorite Youtubers play...
Seriously don't understand how Roblox isn't being investigated for predatory practices. I imagine they can hide behind the fact users are making most of the mini games, and they are just providing a platform.
Because if you held game companies responsible for deliberately fostering addiction in their customers to earn a profit, we'd have scores of industries behind them in line to be brought to heel the same way and the stocks for tech companies, game companies, tobacco companies, casino companies, alcohol companies, etc. etc. would all implode.
There's no danger of that of course because we long ago decided as a society that we're fine with vulnerable populations being put through an economic woodchipper to fuel our retirement funds, and that's been status quo for so long that I sincerely doubt there's any way to actually change it.
That doesn’t make sense as a concept. The point of the slap on the wrist is that it’s ineffective/insufficient punishment to change behaviour. You’re essentially saying they got a big small penalty.
Everything that a business of that size does is legal because if the authorities actually wanted it stopped, it would be stopped.
This is not judgement, to be clear. I enjoy the occasional smokable like anyone else, but I do that with full understanding of the health risks associated with it.
The state "gets" tobacco tax revenue to help pay for the burden of medical treatment for those with smoking related illnesses. Lung cancer isn't free to treat.
If you've read it, then please provide the citation.
Smoking not only has its own direct impacts (lung cancer, emphysema), but it also makes many other conditions far worse than they would be without smoking, and therefore more expensive to treat.
So it's all about tax revenue to defer this cost.
Not if they have good lobbyists. In the US we still have beer ads on TV though tobacco commercials have been gone long enough to barely be remembered.
And on some level I agree. We shouldn't hold companies accountable for raising our children. Simply mitigate their ways to target them And exploit their data (something Fortnite got dinged hard for).
"We" did? Who's "we"? I certainly never agreed to this. Citation needed.
kids haven't been able to buy mature games from brick-and-mortar stores like Gamestop since I was a child decades ago
kids used to be able to smoke cigarettes too
Considering this evidence was produced during a time when the public opinion was looking for any excuse to blame social media companies and that the field of research producing those studies has an accuracy of a coin flip I'm unconvinced. I'd need to see a lot more than out of contact quotes from Facebook research or these questionable "we asked kids to taste xyz, they're totally more depressed and it's totally social media's fault."
>kids haven't been able to buy mature games from brick-and-mortar stores like Gamestop since I was a child decades ago
They pirated them instead because kids don't have money.
That being said, I would rather kids be banned from the internet outright rather than the internet becoming yet another watered down place.
> They pirated them instead because kids don't have money.
I mean sure, a kid can break a window and rob a gun store too... we're not talking about creating rules that are impossible to circumvent, the answer to imperfect regulation isn't no regulation.
> That being said, I would rather kids be banned from the internet outright rather than the internet becoming yet another watered down place.
Content filters have come a long way, this isn't what anyone is suggesting.
This is one of the reasons why I have difficulty taking this rewatch seriously, because that is not what the internal research at Facebook said. That was a media headline that misrepresented the results.
They measured 12 different indicators problematic use of Instagram, body image issues, sadness etc. For teen girls 32% of respondents said that IG made their body image issues worse, what the media didn't say however, is that 45% thought Instagram had no impact and 22% said it made their body image issues better.
And that was basically the worst indicator out of all 12 of them. For example, the same research said that on the question of loneliness 12% of teen girls said that IG made it worse, 36% said it had no impact and 51% said that IG made it better.
On every issue Instagram eat mainly either neutral or positive. And that's the internal research that places like WSJ used to say Facebook causes negative mental health effects in teen girls.
>Content filters have come a long way, this isn't what anyone is suggesting.
No they haven't. It's still the same garbage it always was just dressed up in fancier words. You can look at AI and see how well censoring it works. It's crude and ultimately doesn't work, just makes for a worse experience.
When I was a kid, everyone was absolutely riddled with self-doubt and insecurity. Jealousy and bullying was the norm. There wasn't a soul in my middle school who didn't deeply, deeply hate themselves.
This was before social media. Imagine that, but now kids ALSO get to form unrealistic expectations and envy at home on their devices.
> no video games for kids?
What are you talking about? You can still get your friends together and play mario party or super smash or kirby or whatever. That never went away, we still have co-op games where it's free to play for the other kids.
We just shouldn't have gambling for the kids. Probably.
Yeah, they don't add those free to play mechanics because they force you to buy an extra piece of hardware for $400 to play those games. It works great when you're rich, I guess, but then these f2p games shouldn't matter in the first place.
You only need one (1) switch. I can play smash with 8 people, on my couch, and 7/8 DO NOT have a switch. You need at least one (1) switch because the game cartridge cannot magically be projected onto my TV.
This is how it's always been and, in nintendo land at least, has only gotten better. I mean, I certainly couldn't play 8 player anything on the NES.
Considering how much you said your kid has spent, that money could’ve been spent on buying copies for all their friends and you’d still have plenty left over.
From the amount of money sunk into this one game it sounds like there are already weird money dynamics in his social bubble.
Couch co-op is the way to go.... but as the dad be prepared to lose control of your living room.
I mean, I'm fully grown and I still get together with friends and play Mario Party and Smash. I just bought extra controllers and boom, good to go.
The games are like you say, and there's some that are indeed the model of what I expected: games that kids and amateurs made with their tools. Car jump games. Simple platforming. Basic shooters. But then there are games that seem like they're some dark pattern mobile devs side projects lol Games where you do nothing but collect stuff or pets and there's lots of gratification devices happening and suddenly there's just a literal pay wall. Just the worst of f2p gambling addiction built right into player built roblox games over and over and over again.
But on to the adults, my favorite example was joining a 'shooter' game that was really just a shooting gallery of sorts but it had voice chat enabled and wtf there's some eastern european accent going off on gay people and talking about how the targets should have sombreros so 'we' can shoot "lazy" Mexicans.
That experience was replicated through a few games and I just wrote Roblox off completely as infested with people trying to help kids find hate based ideologies or get them addicted to gambling. I warned their mother, she didn't listen til she got her credit card stolen.
Sure you may miss the 5% of chat that is actually tactical and relevant to the game, but it's a very small price to pay in order to avoid edgelords and other toxic people.
Here's a chat log from a game I played yesterday: https://www.dotabuff.com/matches/7902208511/chat
Some wholesome banter and that's about it.
In fact most people in dota have maxed out behavior scores.
You have to try pretty hard to be muted in the game or have behavior or communication scores lowered significantly.
I can assure anyone that just because you're sitting at 12k doesn't mean your experience is going to be good or an "entirely different experience"
It could be more aggressive at lowering score tho, true. Used to be. They "buffed" the gain per 20 matches last December, but it was great before (And even lowered the scores of streamers that had it coming).
You get these people everywhere.
There's John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which says that if you give normal people anonymity and an audience then they become (let's call them) assholes. I feel that, in order to buy this, you must accept that there are a surprisingly large number of assholes, much larger than I want to believe.
Are the number of racist idiots just much greater amongst Gamers™? (To be clear, I play a lot of video games myself. I prefer to believe I am not a racist.)
I'd love to say that there are a lot more young people playing video games, and they're just trying to be edgy, but I had a chat with some guy who was talking about getting his appliances repaired by "lazy [racial slur]" people. That's probably not a fourteen year old, right? I've seen that a lot.
I understand that it probably just takes one or two people per game to make the chat unbearable, but if I'm on a team with six or eight people, and I consistently get at least one of these fucking idiots per match, isn't that still an uncomfortably high percentage of the population?
I think there's also a loop where extremes are pushed. Ie it's common to celebrate victories in games. This then tilts players. Players lean into that tilt, and teabag. Teabag eventually is mundane, so you spread verbal toxicity. Toxicity then isn't enough, and etcetc.
It seems a loop without external pressures like in-person-reputation to inhibit how far it goes. A cycle of abuse that's all anonymous, fueled by the general competitive arousal of PvP/etc games.
Note that i'm mostly speaking to PvP games where that competitive environment also contributes to it. However i imagine "cycle of abuse" has it's place in most of these anonymous environments.
This "gamer rage" is a more recent enabling by technological anonymity, as well as instantaneous, cheap global communication. Actions without consequences, but without needing millions to cover up the petty actions.
I knew he did some bad stuff and spent a long time behind bars, but I didn't see that coming.
Also, if you go to any YouTube video that involves a non-white person committing a crime, the comments are stuffed with thinly veiled, or outright, racist remarks. People are just garbage.
I'd blame Trump & crew, but I suspect his rise is as much a symptom as a cause.
The other day I got fed a mattress ad in my Facebook feed, and it featured a mixed race couple relaxing together on a bed. The comments were just full of some of the most outright vile content I'd ever seen, and I'm not young. Full-on neo-Nazi stuff. I made the mistake of calling someone on their crap, and got threatened, person went through my profile snapping public pics, etc. etc. it was just insane.
I just... despair :(
Why? The theory is that they become assholes, not that they started that way. The microphone is corrupting.
An aspect of the Greater Internet Fuckwad theory is also the level of exposure behavior gets in an online context - so very many more people are present in a way that invites sharing and comment that just doesn't exist in a grocery store. Think about how unusual it would be for me to reply in depth to an offhand comment like this (that was not directed to me) at a bar. Or how many people you might socialize with in a tf2 or l4d lobby over the course of an hour compared to in a grocery.
There is also a component of self selection when it comes to the spaces you are comparing against; you probably wouldn't want to go to bars and groceries where that behavior was present well before you actually got to live examples.
In my experience individual communities can also have very different feels. For example I used to play League of Legends and eventually switched to Dota2 because it felt very consistent that at least one person would behave in an awful fashion in the league lobbies. Whereas when playing Dota that sort of behavior was the exception.
You have clearly never read the comments on newspaper websites back when they still had them. Sturgeon's Law applies to human beings in general.
With that said I think the percentage of assholes by percentage of population is always going to be higher in video games with voice chat simply because it becomes a outlet for a certain type of person.
- Other people watching (no social cost)
- No facial expressions or body language from others triggering mirror neurons that serve as empathy precursors.
- No risk (violence, loss of property, loss of status... etc.)
There are simply too many people that don't consciously monitor their own behavior for right and wrong. Absent those other layers and pressures, we all tend to make unconsciously selfish decisions. That many young people don't think about the morality involved in those behaviors is a failure of upbringing, not nature (IMHO).
What consequence is there for saying crappy things online, in a video game, especially playing with kids? At best one would get banned? Then go to some other site/game and repeat the same bad behavior.
The truly nicest people are those who are nice even when there is no one around to watch them.
So there is a natural mechanism that tends people towards some level of civility when they're in meat space with each other.
Incivility towards the other not present is then about fitting in via tribalism. After all, those others could be dangerous so we had better make sure our tribe is all on the right page about mistrusting them.
Incivility towards the other who is present is then about an attempt at social dominance. "Don't mess with me because there are others like me who will avenge me." Perhaps.
Online there is only reputational harm and emotional harm. And when anonymous there is only emotional harm.
When the fear of an unexpected stabbing is truly removed we see the true heart of our fellows. Alas, not the most aesthetically pleasing view.
It helps to remember that for every college professor level person there is someone out there for whom tying his shoes is a significant cognitive challenge. For every really smart person out there, there is someone who is cognitively incapable of meaningfully participating in society.
The bell curve is a bitch.
The same reason that many on the internet are toxic.
I don't agree. HN is one of the best examples. We're as anonymous as we can be here and still this is one of the most friendly online environments I know. Clearly community culture plays a big role too. And it keeps offering refreshing content, I learn new stuff here daily, unlike in the commercial bubbles.
Same on Libera chat. Didn't turn into a cesspool. In fact the former freenode suddenly did but the community immediately turned their back on it en masse. It was beautiful to see.
Also, the early internet.
What defines a community is how it deals with them and as such as steers the sentiment of the entire community. The "they learned to restrain themselves" is exactly what should happen.
And I doubt getting banned is much of a deterrent. After all one can sign up without even as much as an email address. I know many people throw away accounts daily. Imagine doing that on Facebook or X. It would really go off the rails.
Yet the community here is still very pleasant.
Um....wow! Are you and I on the same site? There's a lot of ways I'd describe HN, "friendly" isn't one of them.
Genuine meanness and cruelty is WAY more common here than friendliness and there's an overall tone of reactionism, cynicalism, and negativity for the sake of it. People here are very cocky and confident talking about things they don't know anything about.
Would members of an uncontacted tribe clutch their pearls all the same?
So tired of one cultures anxiety being made the norm everywhere to serve the hallucination 300 million Americans the other 8 billion don’t need should be special.
Americans have expropriated other nations labor and resources and rely on their slave labor without batting an eye about it. Really sick of holding them up as some shining beacon of freedom and dignity.
You rely on worse to survive but omgurd wurds hurt so much as someone else’s back and knees after digging up others food, and their lungs after testing vapes, and their hands after sewing together your Nikes.
The elders are right about my peers; oblivious and entitled. Just parrots of cognitive dissonant TV memes like “Do your own thing. Drink Sprite like the rest of the group we’re showing. Engaging in norms of your society like everyone else is unique!”
Americans are an insane and dangerous people; temporary meat suits convinced of their permanence and righteousness while carrying on about being above biases and exploitative behavior.
If there's a paid game your kid really likes, perhaps you can talk to his friend's parents and buy the friend a copy of the game. ...I say talking to the friend's parents first, because just gifting a game to the friends would be creepy.
But buying friends copies of a game we want to play together is something my friend group routinely does and we're all adults with disposable income.
lol well this certainly depends on how it's done. Walking up to them in a trench coat and handing them a disc? Probably creepy. But you could also just, like, send them a gift key on Steam...
Some other, more expensive, activities (e.g., tennis lessons together, when the family of one of the BFFs isn't affluent) are harder for more people to do this, but video games are relatively inexpensive.
I Do this for young relatives.
Ive been shown WhatsApp threads of the young teens who play the DRM-free games i upload - my google drive ID is effectively referenced as some kind of deity lol
Side benefit: No online play or interaction with the outside world, only with your own group (usually)
But I have to keep telling myself those kids or parents wouldn't have paid for them anyway.
Maybe consider buying a few copies at least in the future?
At least this example is limited to a neighborhood.
Now, if we're talking AAA titles from companies who will post record profits at the same time as record layoffs, while also giving the C suite a bonus bigger than the GDP of a small nation... Then yeah, sail the high seas. Those same companies thoroughly don't believe buying is owning, so I'm fine to call piracy polite borrowing.
I personally got a Miyoo for my kid but ended up getting one for myself. The fun and nostalgia are there.
It'd be cheaper to buy games for his friends to play than to support his robux addiction.
Moderation used to work well, because relatively small communities (forums and game servers) included moderators, who were users that also actively participated in discussion. That model is incredibly rare today. Instead, we have a tiny coalition of corporate giants who own (monopolize via copyright) the overwhelming majority of discussion content and interaction platforms. On these platforms, traditional moderation has been replaced with corporate censorship and automation, which in turn are driven by corporate goals (advertising) instead of genuine participation by moderators.
It's my assertion that this is a natural outcome of copyright itself. Copyright demands that content be exclusively owned and profited upon; therefore interaction must be siloed and incentivized accordingly. Even free (as in beer) interaction must bow to this pattern eventually.
I have been using some of similar messaging to smoking and saying things like that playing too many video games will destroy the health. Of course, I am not a good role model when it comes to living healthy lifestyle. And kids probably don't even understand what health really means.
How does one protect their kids against these predatory practices?
Maybe fix that?
Like strict zero money after buying the game. Not on custom skins not on early access characters. We just don’t .
Just don’t give the money and don’t argue about details.
Alternatively, that one custom skill gets unlocked after getting a good grade at the end of the year or for birthday/Christmas/whatever.
Given the current state of gaming and where it’s heading I would love to ban gaming altogether but I feel social pressure from other kids makes it very hard.
I've gotten into various sports mostly done in mountains and some additional filler training like weightlifting and running, my quality of life and satisfaction from it skyrocketed. Obviously you get much more healthier, attractive and happier as side effect, but over time your mindset also changes a lot.
These days, displays in our home are kept to the minimum since content is mostly toxic and made as addictive as possible (as mentioned all over this thread). As time progresses we will gradually ease it off, but games will be last thing on a long list. There is not much skill to learn so they are not missing out, clicking all around can be done by infants.
It helps that we are surrounded by people where such approach is the norm and mark of good invested parenthood, and letting kids get addicted to various dark patterns online or in gaming is seen as on cca same level as being absent alcoholic parent or similar fail. Not that I don't see it often ie when traveling, kids glued to screen to me looks very sad while their parents often look like epitome of laziness. Physically and mentally weak, socially awkward, stuck in eternal dopamine kick chase, largely defenseless from sophisticated actors milking their parents credit cards.
(and speaking of parents: who the hell is letting a kid use their credit card? I bought an extra $.75 butterfingers one time and it was probably the most mad my mom ever got at me. More than when I dinged the car while learning to drive. I NEVER spent her money again without asking).
Games help motivate me to read (being into RPGs with little/no voice acting will do that), they arguably enhaced my logic puzzle ability and reaction time, they gave me something to bind over with like minded acquaintances.
I think it really comes down to a case by case basis.
The type/quality of the games definitely matters IMO. My six year old really enjoys DCS World and Kerbel Space program. Roblox is a total no go in my house, but I rarely deny my kid from wanting to land a jet or build a rocket.
The way I was raised we understood that most kids do things that come back to bite them later and we could choose to be better than that.
I don't feel guilty for teaching my kids to avoid drugs and alcohol—the friend groups that would actually fully exclude them from aren't worth their time anyway. I feel the same about Roblox. It's a dangerous drug produced by an intentionally exploitative company.
If refusing to participate causes a particular friend group to become inaccessible, that says something about the amount of time that friend group spends on the drug and therefore says something about the utility of the time my kid would have spent with them anyway.
Also, buy a Nintendo console. It solves 99% of all problems. I haven't seen these dark patterns in any Nintendo title and personally I think it's the best gaming environment for kids.
Beyond limiting infinite amount of paying by not giving the kid infinite amount of money, you can limit their time in the app or on tablet by rules like "max X hours per week".
Right around the time of the mobile phone gaming took a very, very sharp turn to pure sociopathy. It had always been flirting with it, but now the mbas are full on putting as much sociopathic addiction rigging, social bullying, and manufactured demand as possible.
That started at a certain moment in history, when paying online became trivial, so everyone who didn't produce pay-to-win was leaving a lot of money on the table. You need to find games that are older than that.
Some of the good old games are free, for example Starcraft or Wesnoth. There are many cheap games on Steam, but you need to review them first, or maybe find a review on YouTube. If the game is sufficiently cheap, for example up to $5, you could simply buy 5 copies and tell your kid to give donate 4 of them to his best friends.
Who gave to your kid the money to spend on Roblox?
This feels like an example of the phenomenon highlighted in another recent post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263855
Namely, that as long as Roblox's cash flow is increasing year-over-year, they probably don't care about profit. (And if cash flow ever does stop increasing, they can always get back to sustainability by pumping the brakes on reinvestment spending.)
It's pretty cool to get shareholders to pay your employees so you can be called "operating cash flow positive" as if their comp isn't an expense.
What it does mean is that, in aggregate, Roblox has issued $1B in new shares to employees in the last 12 months, diluting shareholders by 4% or so. This is the most significant factor making the company cash-flow positive while remaining not profitable. It's essentially the same as investors putting more money into the business constantly.
Roblox pays very competitively (see levels.fyi). The apparent strategy is to try to hire lots of long-tenured L6+ Googlers (seriously, it's crazy how many former Googlers I work with).
Looks like a lot who wanted the high pay, but coast along and leverage their past experience to not be dared questioned.
(Btw, some people also leave Google for other reasons.)
This has not been my experience at all.
A former mid size company that I worked at had the same scenario and it was definitely not good. They over engineered not just the systems but literally everything else, including the promotion process which involved the whole horse and pony show and was a constant distraction to shipping features while the companys finances struggled.
does not seem like fu to me
Doea this mean 700k base salary (real cash) + bonus (stock options)?
On a side note, do senior engineers get company cars?
Another commenter mentioned that cash/equity now has a 33/67 split meaning $700k tc would likely be $230k cash and $470k stocks
stock-based compensation
This is a point that's sometimes less obvious with cash flow games. It's possible to have positive cash flow even with negative unit economics, _even when no economy of scale can sufficiently improve those unit economics_ [0], so long as you have enough growth and a good cash flow situation.
That's one of the criticisms Uber has had over the years; are they capable of sustaining their apparent pre-reinvestment profits if they cut out that spending? It's potentially a bit different from the Amazon situation because most of the money is going straight into speculative bets, acquiring competitors, ads, ride subsidies, and other activities designed to lock in the market, and it's unclear if that will give them a meaningful moat, as opposed to, e.g., capital investments in a fantastic, in-house distribution and shipping mechanism.
Can Roblox actually become sustainable by cutting spending somewhere?
[0] Imagine a product with -50% unit ROI. For every dollar in revenue you have two dollars in guaranteed costs. However, suppose the product is paid for fairly early relative to those costs (e.g., the business offers a steep discount on yearly subscriptions if you pay up-front, the costs are incurred linearly throughout the year as the subscription is used, and there's a till-the-start-of-next-month plus 30 days lag on billing for computing resources used). You haven't actually used enough resources to be in the red till 6 months after the subscription starts, and you're not actually on the hook for that last payment till 7 months have elapsed. If you're also able to hit a 2x annual growth rate in your paid subscriber count (not realistic for large companies, not uncommon for a few years with good product-market-fit in gaming or some SAAS products), you've paid for the year's losses before the year has ended and still have an extra month at the end where the money is sitting in your account. As your company doubles its subscribers, your coffers will continue to double as well, even if you have indefinitely negative unit economics.
In the real world you usually have smaller numbers being considered (smaller losses, less growth), allowing the game to go on for many more years.
Basically, the company invested sufficient into long term assets, big infra investments like cabling, towers, etc. Because of accounting rules, they could choose to amortize all of that investment in a straight line over 30 years, OR accelerate depreciation in the short term.
I believe the company always chose the latter, and the net effect of this was that every year the company would show a loss, 100% related to said infra investments. However, when you carved out depreciation, the company was clearly making increasing amounts of money. Further, all that fiber was capturing new clients, which was free cash flow which they would turn around and capture even more customers with a new round of investments. In effect, the use of accelerated depreciation helped the company manage its tax obligations while expanding aggressively. By deferring tax liabilities and reinvesting capital, the company was able to capture market share and grow its customer base.
Eventually they had to show income and therefore pay the IRS, but by that time they were at the leading edge of the race and investors rewarded this company's CEO handsomely.
(I learned about it from HN here a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263855)
I read this in a book over 10 years ago, and now 2 articles about the same trick within the same week.
They had lot of profit-less years of growth and they have captured a big part of the market share.
If he'd bought stock then, he'd have ~10x'd his money in that time, whereas the S&P500 has ~3x'd.
I would have bought stock myself back then, but I was a broke college student.
My first guess was that once it became a known good strategy, it proliferated, and therefore LLMs are pulling companies that did the thing but didn't pioneer the thing, but suggesting that gave me yet another wrong answer.
I think I'm just going to file this under "apparently a pretty terrible case for the technique and I should adjust my heuristics as to when it's worth trying" at this point.
If you want any part of any government to investigate, shouldn't you suggest some agency that's supposed to be working for consumer welfare or so?
not all undisclosed arrangements constitute securities fraud - only those whose intent is to defraud investors do.
As for anti-competitive measures, the investigation ought to be from the consumer protection agencies, like the FCC, or from the justice department regarding anti-trust.
Edit: They are also vulnerable to insider whistleblowers. Any whistleblower would be eligible for rewards of 10-30% of any penalty ultimately assessed by the SEC. The SEC has paid tens of millions to single whistleblowers in the past.
"We depend on effectively operating with third-party mobile operating systems, hardware, and networks that may make changes affecting our operating costs, as well as our ability to maintain our Platform which would hurt our ability to operate our business.
For the three months ended June 30, 2024, 30% of our revenue was attributable to Robux sales through the Apple App Store and 16% of our revenue was attributable to Robux sales through the Google Play Store. Because of the significant use of our Platform on mobile devices, our application must remain interoperable with these and other popular mobile app stores and platforms, and related hardware. We are subject to the standard policies and terms of service of these operating systems, as well as policies and terms of service of the various software application stores that make our application and experiences available to our developers, creators, and users. These policies and terms of service govern the availability, promotion, distribution, content, and operation of applications and experiences on such operating systems and stores. Each provider of these operating systems and stores has broad discretion to change and interpret its terms of service and policies with respect to our Platform and those changes may be unfavorable to us and our developers’, creators’, and users’ use of our Platform. If an operating system provider or application store limits or discontinues access to, or changes the terms governing, its operating system or store for any reason, it could adversely affect our business, financial condition, or results of operations."
ANY publicly traded company that relies on the Apple AppStore for a significant portion of its revenue has an implied ‘so long as Apple continue to allow us to do this’ caveat hanging over their revenue forecasts.
Roblox is in clear violation of this clause, downloading and executing entire games written in Lua. Apple does have an exception to this policy for HTML5 games and streaming games but Roblox does not qualify because it is not HTML5 and not streaming. Many people have had their businesses destroyed for far less serious violations of App Store policy.
I believe there are also other rules against putting an app store inside your App Store app. Clearly Roblox is an app store for games, with its own currency. Apple has not been reasonable on this point with other companies: they originally didn't even want to allow cloud game streaming apps to play multiple games in a single app. Their ridiculous plan was to require a separate Apple App Store listing for each game that a streaming platform supported, and they only relented under pressure after Microsoft went public with their complaints: https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/11/21433071/microsoft-apple-... And after that debacle they explicitly added exceptions to their policies for game streaming apps. They have never done so for Roblox-like apps, which are still plainly forbidden under their publicly posted policies.
They are called "Behavior Packs": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/minecraft/creator/document...
You can purchase content that runs behavior packs from the store, but it's all through soft currency purchased with per-platform stores.
Link to some of the content: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/catalog
As for the "not as powerful as Roblox", we're working on it :)
One app effectively violating that policy is WeChat with their mini programs, but they get away with it due to the fact that iOS without WeChat would be doa in China.
Apple clearly doesn't think these are the same thing either as demonstrated by their explicit policies allowing the former and their attempt to block cloud streaming apps from providing the latter, later turning into explicit policies specifically allowing it for cloud streaming apps and only cloud streaming apps, not Roblox-like apps.
There are Lua scripts intended to run on the "client" (such as camera scripts) but I was under the impression (I could be wrong) that even they were converted by a server into instructions sent to the client, not run as a Lua scripts in a local Lua interpreter on your iPad.
Or perhaps the lua code is sanitised by the server such that the lua code run on the client is not the same as submitted by the user. Many App Store games do have an embedded scripting system of some kind, just not one that can run code directly inputted by an end user.
The whole point of Apple's rules here are to force app functionality and features to be reviewed when submitting an app to the app store. Anybody can go and make complete games ("experiences") in Roblox and they will immediately be available on iOS without being reviewed by Apple. It's a full game engine that lets you write custom code, use custom assets, and replace everything. Take a look at Frontlines (https://www.roblox.com/games/5938036553/FRONTLINES) as an example of a game that looks nothing like Roblox.
If you were to release an iOS app and push new features and content to it OTA then you risk being kicked off the store if you get caught because you bypassed their review process and the store page may not be accurately describing the app anymore.
Google Search is different yet, since they aren't the primary host.
On Twitter you can find actual porn straight up.
Why was a perfectly fine Unicode Blackboard X filtered out of my post.
I don't have an iPhone, but I know that you can access it via the official app from Google Play.
Reddit is allowed too. imgur, snap, etc.
I assumed you're fine as long as your raison d'être wasn't porn and the content was user generated / supplied.
0: https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-...
But perhaps the most catastrophic misfire of all was the notorious ‘porn ban’ that came into place on December 17, 2018 – a policy partly driven by a US law [1] that made websites liable for sex trafficking that might take place on their platform. The ban covers ‘female presenting nipples’, genitals, and any depicted sex acts. Until then, the platform had remained a refuge for a devoted community of users, but this decision affected swift and dire consequences.
(regardless of the content of 18+. Don't know how mobile has had 15 years to do granular content warnings based on decades of other medium but app stores still assume 18+ = porn).
the exact language of their T&Cs?
Not to be too flippant, but we can guess all we want, but the individual apps signed up to specific terms at the time, and you can almost guarantee that Apple (or anyone else) reserves a lot of leeway to themselves as to how they enforce or otherwise police those T&Cs.
All the conjecture in this bit of the thread seems a bit pointless given none of us are reading it, let alone reading the specific bit that whichever app in question might be held to.
Hence my start to it, as well, these seem to be allowed ...
“To start, Roblox is not a single game. It's a platform that hosts millions of user-generated experiences, such as historical roleplaying games or virtual labs to simulate physics experiments. Because of the diversity of content you'll find on Roblox, we use the term experience to refer to what you play on Roblox.” https://create.roblox.com/docs/education/resources/frequentl...
From the epic trial, Apple addressed why it allows them in a pretty tortured manner: https://www.polygon.com/22440737/roblox-metaverse-game-exper...
I think the best argument is that you’re a single player across games, kids speak of “playing Roblox”, there are portals between worlds, etc. This comment makes the point that all games feel the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41287780
It’s pretty different from what Epic wanted to do by offering completely separate games in their App Store without paying apple commission.
Here's a key part of this: Executives also have kids and they want to play Roblox on the go!
It could also further jeopardize Apple's standing with regulators, since they profess to apply their rules fairly and equally without secret deals (which is transparently ridiculous but Tim Cook said it in congressional testimony so it would be perjury if proven wrong).
>“I look at the experiences that are in Roblox similar to the experiences that are in Minecraft,” Kosmynka said. “These are maps. These are worlds. And they have boundaries in terms of what they’re capable of.”
Wow. The damage control was even worse than I thought. So I guess the new UE Fortnite Network would be approved no problem since "it's not a game, it's a UGC platform" (not that Epic cares about app stores anymore). Because Epic isn't making the games anymore. Just offloading the labor to others a LA VR Chat.
I think you're onto something. All of the nieces and nephews of mine that play Roblox do it on an iPad.
You're reasoning as though the policy is for Apple to follow. No. It's for developers to follow. Apple can put whatever it wants on the App Store, the policies are guidance for developers to give them a fighting chance that their apps will be accepted. If Apple wants an app, it'll go on the store. If they don't, it won't.
The insane spending sprees/binges shrink a lot, when they are expressed in "how much vacuuming and floor washing am I willing to endure?"
Have you ever read "Punished by Rewards" by Alfie Kohn? He states that rewarding for the things you mentioned inhibits the desired behavior in the long run.
However even though most people don't enjoy their work we must learn to get past that in order to achieve our goals, might as well learn this early imo.
Personally I hated most of school, pretty much every subject that wasn't math or programming. Rewards did motivate me to learn those things I didn't like.
So maybe only reward them for doing stuff they already don't like doing but would be good for them. If you see your kid doing well in math but poorly in history only reward them for history.
There's a reason everyone isn't driving a Honda Civic.
Everyone has their thing. I'm sure you spend money in ways that are just as puzzling to others.
Key is proper financial management. If I make $10000 post tax (which isnt an impressive figure for a community like this), put 15% in savings, 30% in rent/utilities, and 5% into food, I still have $5000 left. Spending $500 on games won't really phase me.
I 100% agree this isn't something kids would do and balance, though. And I recognize others have addictions and much worse financial planning.
Tons of really great stuff in eastern work culture that I miss now back in europe. But that "results-first and call it a systematic right" thing never sat well with me.
Source?
>Meanwhile, Chinese and Korean kids widely DEMAND pay to win, and see people who complain about Pay2Win as "Losers in life", because, to them, it's just two valid paths, and if someone pays to win at a game, then it's just a mark of status. Btw, did you also know that parents in central china have protested over the right to cheat?
The article says:
>In response, angry parents and students championed their right to cheat. Not cheating, they said, would put them at a disadvantage in a country where student cheating has become standard practice. “We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat,” they chanted.
The comment is claiming cheating is "a mark of status" and "just two valid paths", whereas in the qz article parents wanted to cheat because not cheating would put them at a disadvantage. Those aren't really comparable, because in the latter case they're presumably not supporting cheating in and of itself, only because they don't want to be put at a disadvantage. A parallel would be how in the US, democrats are against voter ID laws, because it would disadvantage minority voters. They don't (presumably) want election fraud (although republicans do think so), they just don't want a regime where their side is disadvantaged.
And if you read my last comment more carefully, I wasn't faulting you, only the original characterization.
>If you wanted to discuss whether cheating is good in this specific scenario, you should have put that as your comment to the parent.
I think it's fair game to call the claim misleading, even if the parents are technically protesting for the right to cheat, for the reasons outlined in my previous comment. Again, going back to the example of democrats being against voter ID law, it would be misleading to characterize that as "democrats protesting for the right to commit vote fraud", even though they're technically supporting making election fraud easier.
When I was younger and still played online games regularly, I was initially stoked about cosmetic micro-transactions in (competitive) online games. Not because I wanted to buy them, but because these would fund the continuous development of my favorite games without affecting their integrity (no "pay to win" mechanisms).
Later I found this was a Faustian bargain. It turned these games and communities around them into something that I don't want to participate in.
These days I don't mind as much. Because among the sea of predatory, tacky or otherwise low quality crap there are way too many high quality, original and interesting games (typically made by small teams) that I will ever be able to play.
I don't know anything about Roblox specifically. On one hand the comment above is tragic, but on the other hand my understanding is that motivates kids to play around with Lua. If that's the case, then I'm all for it, because for me and many others that kind of thing is how we found our way into our profession as developers.
And yes, Factorio is great.
She would play games and want Robux. So she would go on her iPad and download iPad games that pay out Robux. The iPad games are total junk that only pay Robux after my kid watches ads. Some of those ads are for crappy games that pay Robux. Repeat the cycle.
I was appalled by the whole thing and deleted Roblox. She has gone back to Minecraft and does not seem to miss Roblox.
Addiction triggers and reward center abuse. This, to me, is no different than bright slot machines.
these are gambling mechanics... if I just pay $1 more I can make it to the end! if you pay $5 you can be better than everyone else! if I buy just one more lucky box it will have the rare item!
arcades had this, but they also had additional friction as a physical location... now little timmy can sit at home every waking hour badgering mom for another quarter to put into the machine and there's the social pressure of bobby and mary having the exclusive $10 youtuber hat
all the typical trappings of life exaggerated and optimized to extract money in exchange for good vibes... from children
Nope, that was the decade prior. I guess Street Fighter would be a better example where it monetized both ways. Eat quarters at the arcade, or spend $200 in 1980s moneys for the NES/SNES and anywhere from $50-80 for the full version. The arcade in many ways was as much an ad for "well you know can play this at home 24/7!"as much as an quarter muncher.
>all the typical trappings of life exaggerated and optimized to extract money in exchange for good vibes... from children
I'm not opposed to rating it M. But all those kids on COD and GTA tell me that that won't be the silver bullet that solves everything. At some level the parent needs to intervene and not buy that for them (like me for GTA).
Of course the key here is that kids don't always get what they want when asked. I don't understand how some kids can just get unfettered access to a credit card and spend hundreds on such stuff.
Easy.
Step 1: Find where your parents leaves their wallet lying around because they don't expect their child to attempt credit fraud.
Step 2: Punch in the numbers on the card into the appropriate boxes in the app because tech companies really don't have a interest in putting up any real barriers to prevent kids from spending money.
Step 3: Profit!
1. My parent was careful with money. every transaction would be tracked, so anything unusual like Robux would show up quick.
2. 99% of the time a CC would be in a purse or bedroom. Both strictly off limits unless permission was granted (or emergency)
3. I was on general pretty much only allowed to use any allowance (which wasn't much) for food or the occasional school supply. Anything else would require permission. Money given was for necessities, not leisure.
It could just be the outliers popping up in news. But I just can't imagine so many social barriers breaking down over a video game.
I don't think this is a major break down of society type of thing, more of something modern parents need to be aware of since making a lot of ill advised app purchases seems to be becoming one of those things all children end up doing at least once before being taught not to (or finding out the consequences of disobeying).
short rant over
Or placed in a less snarky way, capitalism spoils ideals.
Like, a framework for building first-person FPS-ish game modes and handling all the asset management, sync, etc, like GMod being built around Source does and just letting developers build the game modes without worrying about the annoying tricky stuff.
> allowing you to own everything - unlike Roblox, Unreal/Fortnite, and Unity.
makes me worried it's not in the same spirit that GMod is in. Specifically the use of the word "own" there.
My main criticism right now is this idea of jumping on the LLM buzzwagon. It’s sad that they don’t understand that their success is 100% human-driven, and that using LLMs beyond QoL stuff will be their downfall. The moment we get fully AI-generated games and worlds, it’ll be over.
Why are people OK with this? Because there's a place to spend "money" inside this virtual space?
The paradigm could be replaced with literally anything, yet the prevailing mode of "play" in these spaces is convert meatspace credits to in-game "virtual property"; costumes, weaponry, etc.
These kids arent' making anything, they're aphids.
Top Roblox devs are making millions of dollars. [0]
[0] https://okmagazine.com/p/teen-ceo-brandon-millionaire-throug...
Because like it or not, this space has basically become a "third place" for many kids. In that regard it has to compete with console games about as much as a lonely arcade machine in some old bar does. They aren't coming for the games alone.
>The paradigm could be replaced with literally anything, yet the prevailing mode of "play" in these spaces is convert meatspace credits to in-game "virtual property"; costumes, weaponry, etc.
Yup, but as we know from growing up and seeing the rise of social media: the best, sleekest solution isn't always thr Victor. It's all about network effects.
All the games in one of those categories are a variation of itself, some are better balanced and the grind is fair, some will reach a point which the kid will give up and some have a very interesting trick that will soon be copied by all the others.
Why do we play it? For him, because it's familiar, he knows what to do and how to master it. For me, mindless gaming that I don't have to put any effort to it.
The time that I spend with him is very valuable, and there is a reversal here because its me entering to his world and not him to mine. He feel proud when he is better than me into something, the obbies are challenging even for someone who spent his life playing platform games, I just can't make the jumps and he can, so he comes to recue me taking my iPad and going for it.
I do enjoy some of the games, Islands is very well done but the devs quit it, Wacky Wizards is very quirky and with endless potion combinations, Death Bumper Car is really crazy and frustrating, but fun to play together, The Space Simulator is a space mining that is really hard in some places and interesting challenge... there is a lot to find. Sometimes I just can't play the game and I will tell him that I didn't like it, he feels defeated because he was trying to invite me in to his world and I shut it down, sometimes I just suck it up and play the bad game, I think the important part is to remember that this is a world that they have more control than you, let them lead. :)
Essentially Roblox store is built upon outsourcing game making to kids and so the games themselves are appealing to kids, but also they carry as much merit as a 4th grader can put into them.
Roblox isn't a competitor to Astro's Playroom or Ratchet and Clank. Roblox is like, the next generation of ActiveWorlds, or like a user-generated version of Uru. It's a 3D Chatroom that solved the problem of "what do you do when people want something to do, while standing around chatting in the 3D chatroom?" by saying, "we'll give a bunch of tech tooling to the players, and maybe 0.1% of them will do something interesting with it". And that's enough.
The closest PS5 equivalent would be something like, the Dreams game from Media Molecule.
----
As a parent (with a kid, who loves Roblox), I totally get it. I lived on ActiveWorlds as a kid, I saved up paper-route money to pay for my own "P-10 World" back in the day. The next summer, I used paper-route money to buy a "catch-a-call" device, so I could be on ActiveWorlds via Dial-up without tying up the phone line from my parents. I had an entire alternative identity and active social life on there in middle-school & high-school. I would bicycle all the way downtown to local community college, to take VB6 classes with college students over the summer, to learn how to program against their ActiveX control API to write my own ActiveWorlds Bot, to interact with folks in my private ActiveWorld. I ran an ActiveWorlds "TV Station" (in AW, you could set a JPEG image to 'refresh' regularly like a webcam, and I would point the URL at a custom PHP script I ran on an old cPanel-based shared hosting plan, that would rotate JPEG images out in appropriate order every 1 or 2 seconds, in pre-programmed ways, so you could have 'shows' broadcasting, and you could switch to 'live' (screenshots) on 'air' and such)
I treat Roblox similarly for my child. (They can play on it, but never use real names, reveal no personal information, there's some time limits to ensure you don't go crazy, talk through appropriate content and what stuff warrants adult intervention, etc. And gently prod them that, if they're ready to deep-dive on Roblox, all the tools people use to make their favourite "obbys" are things they could actually learn and write themselves, with some time and patience and practice...)
There's also the socialization part. My kid's friends are all on Roblox. They don't get together IRL because a lot of them moved away when their parents had to move, and others just live way across town and "meeting at the park" is so 1980s. When new kids come to school, they share their Roblox and Fortnite usernames and that's where they hang out after school to socialize.
Everything popular seems to start as a clone of non-Roblox games, and then goes off on it's own direction from there.
Not Roblox's fault, but it's not a good place for kids to make friends; any kind of contact information must be censored. They can play there with friends made elsewhere.
There's a certain amount of jank in every roblox game, and that's part of the charm. But it's undoubtedly also a reason why people with fatter wallets don't spend more time in roblox.
If you've never played a roblox game this might be hard to understand, but those of you who have spent time in these worlds with your kids you will know exactly what I'm talking about.
Perhaps more finance-related, but the monetization of roblox games is also extremely haphazard - providing more guide rails and designing payments more "in platform" would go a long way towards spending confidence.
There's some indication of more polish coming, as recently many games have been rewarded (Pressure, Shovelware's Brain Game etc.) from having more polished animations. Devs respond quickly to seeing other games succeed and take notes. The tools are also getting better. It's gradually getting less nightmarish to try to import a working skeletal animation from Blender to Roblox Studio.
Could Roblox games benefit from more polish? Absolutely, but it's less important than having quick access to a high variety of games with consistency in how you play them.
Perhaps the most massive benefit of jank-tolerance is that it lets devs "gradient descent" towards a game players want. If you released a janky proto on Steam, you'd miss your shot, get an "overall negative" review and be done. On Roblox you can release a janky proto, see its metrics, improve over time until you have something people want.
On the other hand, as a Roblox-father also, I do enjoy some of the more polished games, but I almost always fail to get my son to be excited about them enough for us to spend our shared playtime in them instead of the other crap. No free lunch I guess.
Also if you look at the return potential, revenue from most top games is very small compared to the costs of high quality games.
>Arguing that it's a "gift" when they're taking a 75% cut is just offensive.
20220707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014754 (Problems at Roblox)
> Roblox is horrendous. It is as dangerous as any dark corner of the Internet, except that it appears child-friendly to parents.
75% may be too high, but comparing it to say Steam’s 30% cut for distribution only is a grossly imbalanced comparison.
> the company taking 75% of profits and having a pretty massive minimum bar (100,000 Robux / $1,000 USD) which must be passed before the person gets to withdraw anything at all, which is then effectively double taxed because the company will then only give $350 for 100,000 Robux when cashing out to actual money
And that 75% math is how much you earn, not a minimum or whatever you’re talking about. If players spend ~$1,000 of Robux in your game, you get paid ~$250.
In addition to being mostly pay-to-win the platform has a pedophile problem.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-roblox-pedophile-pro...
I was surprised reading the article that Roblox already spends 28% of revenue on Safety and Trust. Maybe Roblox is just that gigantic a platform to where that's still not sufficient.
It's a headache and a source of fights, so, I thank the responsible (/sarcasm).
I do like Roblox from a creator perspective (I'm not a creator) since it's rather easy to guide your children into building games rather than "just" consuming them. Something which is very hard with basically everything else they do digitally.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Roblox employee, but speaking only on my own behalf, and don't work on anything related to age guidelines.)
Sometimes a game is shown and when kid tries to access it he gets a “this game isn’t allowed by your age category” or some such. This is an unbelievably dishonest way to tempt kids into content that’s not for them. If the content is not usable for them it should just not show, period.
If you work at Roblox maybe escalate the fact that content filtering by age category is totally worthless and could use fixing.
I'm not calling you out for making a typo, I'm simply amused at how much punch (no pun intended) it loses when spelled "right". I guess it's true that Ks are Kool.
Another reason why having the current ecosystem, where app stores pretty much dictate the destiny for a growing company. creating another device assuming it magically becomes a success, there is most definitely not a long lasting venture either. Bypassing the app store to achieve what exactly? okay this device plays roblox 'and what else can it do?".Discouraging to see companies like this be dictating how they grow and succeed. Only to grow in this manner and be topped out as there is no next phase after this growth, the atmosphere they're in is polluted and cloudy. The next phase in BIG tech is most likely not going to resemble this depiction, for more reasons than i can list here. The big players in tech are losing their ground day by day. Epic Games is relisted back on to the app store, not long ago they were fighting apple over the very same hurdle that Roblox is facing today. Epic Games did however get their way with Google and went on to send a clear message to the rest of the big tech players out there.
I think a big change is near and if not than its needed.
Lmao.
Microsoft tried that and failed. Amazon tried that and failed. The market has enough room for iOS and Android and nothing else.
That "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Don't worry, though, your iPhone will soon be your own to do whatever you want with, thanks to the DMA. It already is, if you live in the EU.
Lucky you that the EU actually does stuff to big tech.
This article tries to, foremost, sell you on the idea that its author is someone you should listen to for financial analyses.
It's not for you and me, we just see a garbage "game", but holy shit is there a large demographic that loves what Roblox gives them.
Of course it's bad: it's factually and objectively bad, there's plenty of investigative journalism that unequivocally demonstrates it's absolute garbage and enables the worst kind of crimes the US can imagine. But, and this is important: that has nothing to do with whether it sucks or not. In fact, it "doesn't suck" enough for millions upon millions of people to use it every single day. Roblox is terrible BECAUSE it doesn't suck: the whole reason it's so bad for humanity is PRECISELY BECAUSE it's awesome enough for a large enough demographic to keep using it, while being opaque enough to the demographic that should be correcting this behaviour to not get it so that Roblox can keep getting away with it.
The absolutely biggest problem with Roblox is literally that it doesn't suck. If only it did, kids would stop playing it!
Roblox has, objectively, a terrible effect on the world. This is demonstrably true. It's not an opinion. But saying it sucks is. Words matter.
There are hundreds of millions of users a month who strongly disagree with you.
Bloxburg feels like the least janky experience. But overall just moving around using virtual joysticks on a phone is really janky.
Another POV is that the overall catalog of games is very large. Many high quality options to go through before playing your first Roblox game. Even on phones, even free to play. With your level of experience you know that of course every kid would have more fun playing something like Clash Royale or something in the Apple Arcade, the issue isn’t that kids are stupid or tolerate crappier stuff like you imply elsewhere, but that you are not allowed to market expressly to them even in platforms like TikTok where there are many kids.
* Total expenses: $1,131,492,000.
* Average daily active users: 79.5M, or $14/DAU/qtr.
* MAUs are closer to 375M, QAUs likely somewhat higher let's say 400M?
* So if we're talking about how much they spend per quarter per unique player, it's closer to $3.
* Last quarter they brought in $955M in bookings (revenue is pointless to look at due to the required accounting practices)
[1] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001315098/785cb7e...
I posted this in another comment, but the deferred revenue recognition was forced by the SEC [1].
[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-sec-told-roblox-to-chan...
I'm not sure if I'm understanding this point correctly. From my understanding, wouldn't roblox consider their revenue in a given month to be 1/9th of this months purchases + 1/27th of last month's purchases + ...
If so, why would their revenue recognition make them unprofitable? Every month they only realize 1/9th of revenue from that month, but that would be offset by the other 8/9ths of revenue coming from the last 27 months. Wouldn't it just make their recognized revenue a frontloaded rolling average?
If all you’re doing is characterizing it as a 3D engine, you’re missing pretty much everything about the platform that makes it work. Nobody looks at VsCode and asks why it’s hard to program that, or Facebook, or Unity, or MMOs, or Stripe. This platform is all those things in one. And I may be wrong on some of the details, but the stuff those devs get to work on is undoubtedly more difficult than the React apps 90% of developers do in their day job that they also had to grind leet code for.
Of course, unlike Roblox, Minecraft was profitable
But, I don't really understand how this works, and I would love to host it in a way that their cousins in another state could join. Do you know how I research this?
I get a bit confused between the curseforge mods, the java edition. Should I start by downloading a JAR of the server and host it on a cloud server somewhere, and then firewall it off to only permit my NAT IP and the cousin's NAT IPs? At some point maybe I can run it all within a wireguard/tailscale network.
How do I get started in my reading? I'm worried I'll get overwhelmed by reading /r/MinecraftBuddies, but perhaps that is a better place to ask?
https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/post/how-to-set-up-and-r...
There's tons of options to host servers in the cloud with near absolute control. I used to use a SaaS company called Minehut (https://app.minehut.com/) before I got into cloud computing and using AWS EC2 (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gametech/setting-up-a-minecraft... - like $8/month).
If they're interested in learning the nitty-gritty on cloud computing and hosting (they probably do if they're already learning Curseforge), then get them into the AWS method. If you want something one-and-done, opt for Minehut.
Roblox took the scummy approach of monetizing child labor and taking a cut.
I am so glad, despite the other bad things Microsoft has done with Minecraft, that they haven't taken the Roblox path.
And it was more fun to run the server than play the game
[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-sec-told-roblox-to-chan...
There are a handful of counterexamples like Madden NFL but only very few.
In 2010, a 10 year old game was quite old, but a recognizable ancestor of new releases.
In 2020, a 10 year old game was kind of old. You could tell the difference if you had high end hardware and were tuned into certain details, but the new games were essentially the same kind of stuff as the 10 year old games.
The pace of advancement is slowing and game design has reached a mature plateau; games having greater potential to last longer each year. If a game can last more than a few months then there is a reasonably good chance it can survive for several years at least (presuming the publisher doesn't decide to cut it off to sell a new version, which is a popular tactic.)
Which is why large companies are so ideally positioned to do internal ZIRP funding of growth…except they are often culturally unable to do it.
And how is this Roblox better than the (pre MS) Minecraft?
Which large corporation is paying anything close to 4% for credit card processing? Based on what's available to me in my small business, I'd be astonished if anyone doing any significant volume was paying as much as half of this percentage.
I can imagine there are a lot more problems with kids' spending on Roblox, which would bring the processing fees way up.
There are numerous polished games on the platform, but the most of the players are younger kids on hand-me-down mobile devices, so the most popular games tend to be easy to run casual games. Here are a few examples of what you're looking for:
* Frontlines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA71d3O1ID0
* Primal Hunt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_lenB5MTTU
* Riotfall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E0kEFxBTEM
It's a hard problem, though I agree there is some low hanging fruit that Roblox seems ignorant to. I think the biggest reason for its success is an extreme lack of competition. Nearly every time someone makes a good enough (use friendly) sandbox engine, they wrap it in copyright and market it wholesale; and that makes decisiveness (polish) a high priority.
2018 but its still worth listening to.
https://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts/when-the-platform-is-y...
The width of the text seems odd. It's too narrow on a medium viewport but too wide on a large one. Around 75 characters per line is usually the sweet spot for legibility. The font sizes also seem to be quite peculiar, being done with seemingly unneeded complexity: `font-size: calc((var(--normal-text-size-value) - 1) * 1.2vw + 1rem)`. Not quite sure this is necessary?
My computer also seemed to really struggle rendering the page as it stuttered constantly while scrolling or resizing.
Additionally (and this is moving into nitpicking territory), the navbar strikes me as a bit busy and overwhelming with its 15 items. Perhaps some culling or drop-down menus are in order. I can't say I'm a huge fan of what looks to be a distorted AI-generated header image either.
>Find good games through reddit recommendations
>Play the games, most are novel and remind me of WC3 customs
>Show our non-gamer friends the quirky games
Its pretty cool, but there is soo much garbage to get past.
"New"? Roblox came out nearly 20 years ago...
It went from "cult classic" to "viral phenomenon".
The best times I've had at startups were when we were lean, and profiting >50%. The business was easier, we had more flexibility for decisions, morale was great... But then they all seem to grow into 0-10% profit corporate behemoths where each employee can't even tell if the job they do is worth their paycheck, it just becomes awkward, slow, uninspiring work.
And then you find yourself robbing more single parents checking accounts than anyone on earth, but not even profiting. How depressing.
Once you grow, and it becomes clear you have a viable market, competitors move in and prices start to get ground down.
They took the exploitative practices of microtransaction based games, targeted them at children, then decided to use child labor to create content inside an expoitatively taxed monetization system, then decided to abdicate all their responsibility for responsible community management to protect these children by shutting down their own forums and pushing everything to Discord. Now we have children working for unvetted strangers with no labor protection and no oversight.
I guess if your costs are high enough, you can eat any amount of profit.
They clearly need to get their expenses under control (if they care about generating an actual profit). There's only so much you can grow once you get to a certain threshold, and they must be getting near it.
Spending 2b on opex seems kinda crazy (3.2b revenue vs 1.2b income). Most games are opex-light, capex-expensive. Their capex is definitely not cheap either, though that seems to be a tradeoff they choose to have.
Of course, this all presumes the people running the company care about generating a profit (by no means a guarantee!). I'm sure all of the employees are making out like bandits, based on other commenters, and if management is happy to spend the money, well, that's all there is to it. It would be hard for anyone to argue with their success in growing their userbase, if nothing else.
1) Make tons of cash.
2) Invest the cash back in the business.
3) Record this investment on the financials as an expense.
4) The expenses inflated by investment spending means you declare no profit and probably pay no tax on that profit you just hid.
The alternative is:
1) declare profit
2) Pay tax on it
3) Reinvest what's left after the taxman took a cut.
Which would you choose if you were raking in loads more money than it was costing you to run the business and you had growth opportunities?
Should this be a choice?
If not, how would you "fix" it?
It's entirely normal and above board. Desirable even.
You also have not managed any explanation at all, which is a shame. Could be interesting.
Your comment suggests that reinvested cash is being "hidden" as expenses, but in reality, these reinvestments are usually recorded as capital expenditures (CapEx) rather than operating expenses (OpEx), depending on the nature of the investment. While CapEx can be depreciated over time, it is not typically expensed immediately in the way operating costs are.
The implication that companies can completely avoid taxes by reinvesting is misleading. Even though reinvestments may reduce taxable income through depreciation or other deductions, this is a legal and common accounting practice, not necessarily an attempt to "hide" profits. There are also tax laws in many jurisdictions which limit the extent to which such deductions can offset income.
Your understanding also conflates profit with cash flow. Profit is an accounting concept that reflects the net income after all expenses (including taxes). Cash flow, on the other hand, reflects the actual cash generated by the business. Reinvesting profits does not "hide" cash flow but rather allocates it to future growth.
Companies don't simply choose between declaring profit and reinvesting to avoid taxes. The decision to reinvest is often driven by strategic goals, such as expanding operations, developing new products, or acquiring other businesses.
Reinvestment reduces the company's taxable income and thus the taxes owed, but it does not eliminate taxes or "hide" the profits. The company benefits from reinvesting by potentially generating more revenue in the future from the new product, which should generate more tax revenue down the road instead of restricting growth now.
Here is an approximation of your comment translated from accounting into software development, minus the part where you misunderstand essential terms:
> It’s ridiculous that software developers waste so much time writing tests for their code. If the code is written correctly in the first place, you wouldn’t need tests at all. Instead of wasting time on tests, developers should focus on just writing perfect code from the start. It’s clear that the whole idea of ‘unit testing’ is just a way for developers to justify their jobs and take longer to finish projects. Shouldn’t we just hire better developers who don’t need to write tests?
When you’re expanding rapidly and want to grow market share above all. Growing that market share with customer acquisition is economically an investment in the future revenue of the business. Advertising is one example of how this might be done.
You can classify investing in your business through advertising spend as an operating expenditure for accounting purposes. And potentially for tax purposes as well.
Now your large positive cashflow does not generate an accounting profit. Because you spent it on something that won’t be capitalised on the balance sheet.
There it is, the answer to OP’s question.
Note you can’t do that buying property plant and equipment (but some structured finance and leasing people might like a word - airlines don’t own their aircraft.)
Perhaps you can think of some examples where you’ve seen huge, massively cash-flow positive businesses in our field that weren’t generating accounting profit. Facebook, Amazon, ..?
The only other way you could sustain repeated loss ina new, growing business is capital raising.
Someone else on the thread mentioned Aswarth Damodoran’s “Free cash flow to equity” IMHO it’s worthwhile avoiding jargon when explaining things simply and concisely.
If I have a huge market opportunity and I can grow the business by spending the cash flow, I should do that instead of distributing that cash flow as profits. That opportunity will most likely not persist.
What you are proposing is that businesses should pay taxes on their income irrespective of expenses which is just a good way to break a lot of perfectly good businesses, and reduce the ability for businesses to capture new markets.
There are a number of ways where tax law could better capture the participation of large businesses, but this tack you’re on is not one of them.
One cannot avoid using technically correct terms (“jargon”) when discussing this as the categories of capital are critical to both the essential function of a business and the point you’re trying to make.
Q Where does the money come from if there's no profit?
A There would be profit, but they spent it investing in their business. Answering the implicit question "how can you spend profit investing to make it so there is no profit?" Which is the obvious follow up.
That's it. I did follow it up with "what would you do given this choice in your own business?", "should this choice be possible?", and "how would you change things if you don't think so?" Because once you've understood what is going on these are the next obvious discussion points that come up. I expressed no opinion on any of them.
What I have done is been really, really clear about what is actually going on in the face of some pretty poor responses for the benefit of anyone who hasn't seen this before even though it's a very common situation. What I avoided was a credentials size war and still haven't stated any, letting the argument run on merit. Maybe caring at all about it has been a waste of time. But yeah, that's another way of saying do we just give up on HN as being a community decayed too far to still be interesting and useful - especially to the startup-curious. I kinda hope not but YMMV and I could well be prone to wishful thinking.
Is that the main source of income? How do game makers get paid?
Wow. I've never though about this before, but this is an awful second-order consequence of the high app store fees set by Apple and Google. It essentially incentivizes App makers to treat users as products not customers!
(Not too surprising for Google, but certainly goes against Apple's public stance).
But there’s no evidence that the App Tracking Transparency was a direct result of failure to come to terms with Facebook on some type of revenue share.
Even if a portion of the comprehensive set of protections included in ATT was specifically to target Facebook, Apple did not use it to punish Facebook.
Apple’s customers did.
Because when given a choice, 85-96% of all people across the entire planet did not want Facebook tracking them.
If one was to speculate on The decision-making behind platforms’ leadership, it follows to consider Google’s reluctance to follow in the footsteps of Apple with ATT due to google’s own direct reliance on ad revenue.
Apple is no saint, it’s made many compromises on user privacy in the face of business.
But there’s no doubt in my mind that the position of selling products and services, including the distribution of others’ software is by far more consumer friendly than the quiet identification, data collection and targeting of individuals.
In any case I suspect that is too much overreach and would only attract more attention from regulators.
Two wrongs don't make a right, and this is fixing the wrong problem. (The problem being that once I purchase a portable pocket computer, I want it to be mine to use how I want with whatever software I want without asking the manufacturer for permission).
Get money from your users: 25% platform tax
Get money from advertisers: No platform tax
- Get money through the platforms' users and their payment methods, without having to worry about asking for users' credit card information, billing, chargebacks, or individual invoicing: 25% platform tax.
- Get money through your own means, similarly to what Amazon did with Kindle books: no platform tax.
Fair enough. So I guess if I don't mind worrying about all those things, I can simply reach my own agreement with a PCI-compliant payment service provider to charge customers through my app directly and therefore avoid that 25% platform tax, right?
...right?
You refund 100% but Apple and Google keep their share.
It's wild that Apple or Google make as much from my games as I do. Obviously it still works out well enough since I'm not abandoning the platform, but strange anyway.
What I meant by "wild" is that in this case, the dev of the game is the one receiving that ~30% slice. Apple+Google get about the same as the dev does.
Apple seems to do a lot less, but wants ~1/3 of every transaction.
Not suggesting that this warrants a 30% cut, but unlike payment gateways Apple also provides discoverability and distribution.
Apple seems to be incredibly poor at discovery, so that's not a point in their favour.
Distribution could be done by any number of other CDNs, as will likely be done by the new EU based App stores.
What's the bet those won't be charging ~30% transaction fees to cover things? And they won't even have the same scale as Apple. ;)
If that's what you're meaning, then I simply don't know as I've not heard that before. :)
The commissions are capped by law in some parts, but not others.
As a small sample, in RO i think a large store chain pays like 0.5%. The consequence is credit card reward programs are either non existent or something like 0.1% cashback. The other consequence is you can pay by card almost anywhere.
On the other hand I've been to NL and small stores simply did not take Visa/MC because it was too expensive for them. Guessing the visa/mc charges weren't capped there.
Culturally, though, small retailers may still believe that credit card fees are higher than they actually are.
They may be concerned about refund and chargeback processes.
Or, their gateway either cannot offer credit cards on their POS terminals for technical or compliance reasons, or the retailer simply hasn’t enabled the payment methods.
It’s not regulation in NL that blocks small retailers from taking V or MC.
In DE or NL, you operate via an intermediary ( like payone, etc ) and a single terminal. Maybe here comes the difference.
PS. Larger shops/markets ( like kaufland, carrefour, etc ) have also just one, but I guess they negociate the fee.
No, I was born and live there.
My groceries kiosk has just the single terminal.
Where I shop, only Dedeman, Altex and the eMag showroom still ask me what bank is the card from, and they're nowhere near small...
Edit: Hmm. Cozy? Small world...
But yes, is a mix/jungle of options. But I find fascinating that paying with cards has a far more adoption than some places in western world.
I think that law also cames with caps on card charges. Or at least there was so much competition between banks for the new market that purchase charges dropped on their own.
Whereas Apple's relationship seems more predatory/antagonistic (at best).
Like, one may argue that the 30% isn’t valid (and it’s 15% for the majority of devs) but to say Steam does more is absurd.
I’m curious if people who hold this opinion have actually been involved in the process of releasing apps on either platform.
And to be clear, I know valve does contribute to gaming on Linux but that’s single digit market share, so is definitely a far cry from the 30%.
I'm not sure why we are focusing on the 30%, the problem is that facebook, a very rich company, get charged 0.
> the problem is that facebook, a very rich company, get charged 0.
Just like every other company using the same business model (i.e. ads instead of IAP)?
Are you meaning iOS there?
Of so, please remember they pulled significant amounts of code from Open Source Software in order to lighten their development load. :)
Again, I’m not saying they’re above criticism but I am saying this feels like a very one sided presentation of facts.
Not sure what you're asking?
"Significantly" doesn't seem to be correct. At least, not for the (GPL licensed?) stuff that's been stuck on ancient versions for many years.
Though they have (from my rough memory) made some contributions back to FreeBSD where it seemed to make sense.
All that aside, the point is that they didn't build their platform "almost from scratch".
They assembled a lot of pre-existing pieces (many OSS), then built on top of that. It's a common way of doing things.
And sure, some might be freeloading. But they also do contribute quite a bit to open source. https://opensource.apple.com/
I know your response was more to correct the “developed from scratch” but I still think it’s important to note that it’s not unidirectional. Even in the development of their own platforms, you can find old Usenet discussions of how they were feeding things back. I think they could have gone their own route but Unix compatibility was important.
The history of Next, Apple, and the open source community is very intertwined and unfortunately cannot be reduced so easily.
A somewhat unexpected factoid about Apple and OSS, is that Apple doesn't seem to provide hardware to any OSS projects they didn't themselves create.
Not even Homebrew, who (to my thinking) should have been first in line due to the immense benefit they used to provide Apple's users.
> didn't build their platform "almost from scratch".
Well, no, it’s of course relative I meant that compared to Valve/Steam they did. And it’s not like iOS/macOS is just a collection of open source components slapped together with some small proprietary layer on top. At this point it’s mostly proprietary stuff they had to build effectively from scratch over the years with some open source components here and there.
And in that case, no, Valve didn’t provide all of that. They provided some of it, but AMD did the graphics driver, arch did the OS. Valve still offer less for the 30%. I’m not trying to diminish the effort they put in, but just pointing out the totality of what each store offers behind it is very different.
To your last point, that’s not really relevant to my point. I’m just pushing back on the other person about whether Apple or valve offer more for the 30%. You’re interjecting a completely different argument.
They only do it because they are painfully aware their rent-seeking behavior is entirely at whims of ms/apple and they want to have some moat.
https://www.neowin.net/news/valve-co-founder-windows-8-is-a-...
Take a wild guess when they started pushing steam on linux, and which version of windows introduced a store.
I think a lot of folk have a hard time reconciling that there may have been non-altruistic intentions behind something that is enjoyed today.
Similarly, Steam itself was a hedge against physical distribution to cut out the middleman. It wasn’t originally envisioned as a store for anyone but Valve.
But here we are today, and both have positive side effects that actually have outlived the original design.
2. Then what does steam offer for 30% that isn’t just distribution? The majority of steam games do not use Valves tooling for matchmaking or their engine.
3. Can you go without name calling? Or are you that childish that it’s the only way you can feel like you have the upper hand in a conversation?
4. I’m not defending a 30% cut and already mentioned that. I’m saying that saying steam offers more for the 30% is absurd.
:(
> Microsoft also charge for commercial access to their SDKs ...
Is that a new thing, or just for specific products? Asking because I've previously used some of their Azure SDK stuff before and that didn't seem to have a charge for SDK access.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/d/visual-studio-enterprise-s...
Meanwhile Xcode is free and has been since the Project Builder days on Next.
I’m not personally saying one is better value or not. Just that the companies have put different values on different parts of their developer flow for many decades now, and one can’t simply say that the money comes from a single source.
Also you didn’t actually necessarily need it to publish software on Windows.
While if you want to develop for iOS (and even macOS these days) you still need to pay the $100/300 yearly fee (which is there entirely for gatekeeping and not an actual income stream).
You don’t know if Microsoft chose to fund certain parts of their development with the profits from VS enterprise or not. None of us do.
Even, for arguments sake, if we say that they could make it all free and still afford it, it would still affect priorities of what gets developed.
Again, I’m not saying one is right or wrong. I’m just arguing that it’s a lot more nuanced than any of the comments here suggest. Nobody has enough facts outside the companies bookkeeping and leadership to make these hardline claims.
I’m highly certain about that. Regardless also I don’t think most companies work like that. More or less all revenue at least from the in specific divisions like Windows or Azure is going to the same pot.
> Nobody has enough facts outside the companies
Well.. same argument applies to > 90% of all stuff people say on online forums like HN and makes most online discussions entirely meaningless.
Regardless we can still reason about a lot of things with a fairly high degree of confidence without complete certainty.
> we say that they could make it all free and still afford it, it would still affect priorities of what gets developed.
Yet it’s the direction MS has been taking over the last 10-15+ years. They have invested massive amounts of money into products which are either effectively free for most users or don’t really generate enough direct revenue to fund them like GitHub.
Different companies fund things differently and put up different barriers.
Again, for the umpteenth time, I am not making a VALUE judgement. I am just saying they all do things differently and without knowledge of their books, nobody here can say what funds what internally
That’s it.
The Azure SDK's aren't charged for access: https://azure.github.io/azure-sdk/
The SDK's for modern MS products generally seem to be freely available. Maybe it's only their legacy offerings that have some charge to it?
If that's actually the distinction, then my guess is that it's simply "no cost access means higher numbers of developers using them" for the new stuff.
Whereas the legacy stuff probably would cause internal bun-fight's to happen if they changed their licensing model. ;)
What makes Windows not modern? The whole point of my comments is that different business eases have different funding.
Azure is a separate business for Microsoft than windows development.
I’m going to guess based on your range of comments that you’re primarily a devops and web developer and not a native app or game developer?
Which leads back to my first response to you: I don’t think you’re actually familiar with developing things for distribution on either steam or an App Store.
It is. Anything MS or Apple ever charged for SDKs and development tools was just peanuts compared to their other income streams.
At the end of the day open consumer platforms benefit much, much more from maximizing the amount of 3rd party software that’s available on them than from anything else.
> Then what does steam offer for 30% that isn’t just distribution?
Discoverability, consumer protection, relatively very good UX etc. of course that is much more valuable to smaller/medium developers than to companies like Epic/EA/etc.
Even the App Store and the 30% cut was a great deal for developers and consumers when it came out initially compared to all the alternatives available at the time.
The issue is that at this point Valve/Steam has to actually provide real value to consumers/developers and innovate. Apple can just do nothing and collect free money (consequently the App Store itself sucks immensely as an app/platform) since they don’t have to compete with anyone anymore. What are you going to do? Buy an Android? : D
Sure. But this has absolutely nothing to do with fairness.
They charge 30% because they can and because developers have no other options.
Anyway consumers paying for HW/OS are the ones that are funding the development of those tools/apis etc. Apple, MS, etc. provided all of that stuff for free (or a nominal fee) for decades because they always needed software developers more than the other way around. Any platform without third party apps would be mostly worthless.
Apple is in an interesting spot because when they released the app store initially 30% was a very good deal compared to how much it cost to publish apps on other phones.
I’ll also reiterate that the majority of devs pay 15% now on the App Store. Not 30%.
And then this gets into every other market choice as well if we’re saying all the stuff is paid for up front by the consumer.
What does Steam offer for its 30%? The majority of games on steam don’t use any steam services unlike apps on the AppStore. Valve doesn’t do educational sessions for developers or provide support for system issues. So is Steam not a terrible deal at double the cost?
But then we get to consoles, where the consumer not only pays for the device but also pays a subscription for online play. If we say that Sony/Microsoft are funded up front by the consumer and then recurring for online fees, then what the value to developers for the 30% (in addition to devkit costs)?
I’m not defending apples cut here. That’s a subjective argument that goes nowhere, but I am saying: if we say Apple’s cut is unfair, why are we okay with the others that are arguably more? And why do people defend the other marketplaces ?
Probably not relative to total revenue. But it doesn’t really change much. To be fair I don’t have a problem at all with 15% or even 30% but with the fact that Apple is running a lite extortion racket by not allowing any competition.
> how a company pays for its RnD internally, one cannot conclusively say that the consumers are the ones who pay for the HW/OS
I don’t think the exact nuances of internal accounting (even if they do it this way instead of just putting all revenue into a single “pot”) really changes anything.
It’s pretty clear (based on all evidence from the last 30+ years) that platforms can generate significantly higher revenue by maximizing the amount of third party software and by giving away development tools/etc. for free or significantly below cost than by trying to extract as much money as feasible possible from 3rd part developers (and it wasn’t a huge concern anyway since all major desktop platforms have always been mostly open)
> why are we okay with the others that are arguably more? And why do people defend the other marketplaces ?
IMHO mainly because Apple has a very large market share and is effectively a monopoly in certain ways.
If you want to develop a mobile app/game you can’t not make it available on iOS. It’s just not an option. This gives Apple a huge amount of pricing power and effectively allows them to exploit developers and consumers by generating a surplus they don’t have to work for.
It a scale of course but no other company is quite in the same position. Steam can lose most of their customers if they stop providing value. Even Google is in a much weaker position (consequently they don’t have such strict controls on iAPs) since phone makers can (and have) make their own app stores, side loading etc. I think consoles are closers but they are purely an entertainment product with a lot of alternatives and substitutes.
Overall I personally believe consumer surplus should most dwarf everything else to an extent. Therefore I don’t see any reason why can’t we apply “arbitrary” rules/standards to corporations based on their size and influence on the market.
Small/medium developers of course benefit much more from the increased reach/discoverability and PC games have a very different business model than mobile ones of course.
But even for iAP, yes 30% is very step but as a consumer I’m significantly more likely to spend money on an app published by a non-major company if I can use Apple as an intermediary (refunds, subscription management, no cc hassle etc.) I don’t think I’m unique in that way so there is some values we’ll just never know what % it’s actually worth until Apple stop restricting third part stores.
Large companies with a “sticky” user-base of course gain absolutely nothing from it.
Not that I’m trying to defend Apple, on the whole they hardly offer anything useful in return for the 30% to the developers at least because they don’t need to. The App Store as an app/platform is a complete pile of worthless garbage compared to Steam..
Such an odd take.
I begrudgingly use a Macbook for work - that is the laptop my employer issued for me. I pay for IntelliJ, because I think it is an excellent IDE.
Following your logic, Apple should somehow bite 30% of that yearly subscription, when in truth, I am a customer of JetBrains, not of Apple.
Your logic would be fine if, and only if, there was the option to buy the game outside of the AppStore, and you still chose to buy it through the AppStore. That proves you prefer going through Apple's channel and are their customer after all.
In the Steam case, especially for small/medium developers, there are multiple options to buy their games - I generally prefer GoG.
No, that’s not even remotely close to what I said or implied.
> In the Steam case, especially for small/medium developers, there are multiple options to buy their games - I generally prefer GoG.
Yes. The overwhelming majority still use Steam due to various rational reasons.
> Your logic would be fine if, and only if, there was the option to buy the game outside of the AppStore,
I never said that I think that Apple should have a monopoly on app distribution on their platform.
So if within their own industry Visa and Mastercard overcharge like crazy, especially when they can, what makes you so sure that they’re a good counter example for a completely different industry? Especially when competitors seem to be charging a very similar rate for a similar service?
That being said, it is a fair point when you consider that retailers and other similar product middle men tend to charge 1-3%, but it’s important to also consider that Apple position’s itself as a luxury product and brand where 30% markup isn’t actually out of line.
I would bet Apple has put more into R&D for iPhones, iPads and iOS than the entire enterprise value of visa and mastercard put together. If anything, they've worked for it more than visa/mastercard who are merely rails with distribution. Most of the heavy lifting, risk and work in the card ecosystem is done by the issuers (banks et. al.)
Visa and mastercard are logistical masterpieces.
Think of how much legal work needs to be done in order to be compliant in every country in the world.
I suppose that is just another way of describing "legal work" in this context.
And it would be morally wrong to put that costs on the app developers, without their apps the store is useless.
The lack of apps killed Windows Phone.
They built it to sell something else, operating systems and then some ancillary stuff. They became one of the most valuable companies in the world off just that.
Just like the iOS was built to sell phones. They make plenty off phones. They’ve made Apple one of the most valuable companies in the world too. Access to an App Store has become a requirement of a modern phone, so they wouldn’t sell many without it. But it doesn’t mean they should be able to tax the entire economy so heavily. Just like how running a browser is a requirement of modern browsers for an operating system, but that doesn’t mean the operating system should be allowed to tax the entire economy of activity that takes place on said operating system.
And you pay for that when you buy the device. That does not justify paying Apple huge percentage each time when you are paying for an app.
The 27% are seen similar to Sony and Nintendo as fees to be on a platform which has wide reach but also gives tools and does stuff to enable app distribution.
Is that too much? I don‘t know but it‘s what all appear to do. The platform politics didn‘t evolve as fast as the tech though. So what about apps like Patreon, Netflix, Spotify, that was never on the table in 2008.
They do, which is why credit cards take that much, cost of chargebacks is a part of the transaction fee.
Microsoft and Sony take similar cuts for access to their game consoles. In return they provide: - High quality, robust developer APIs. - High quality debuggers, graphics debuggers and CPU+GPU profiling tools with in-depth access to hardware counters - Networking libraries for matchmaking, and a network backend for tunneling network traffic via their online services - True development kit hardware with expanded resources for debugging tools - High quality documentation and direct support - GPU drivers that actually work - Payment processing - All for a hardware platform that is typically sold at or below BOM cost for the initial launch of the device
Google provides distribution via the Play Store, and only for about ~4GB of app before they force you to use your own CDN because they have a limit on the size of the app bundle they'll distribute. There's likely things I'm not aware of that Google provides for app developers rather than game developers, but if we're comparing to game consoles then I'm going to compare tool for tool.
Apple's tooling is better, largely because they have way more control over the target hardware and software environment, but they take an additional cost via their highly restrictive app guidelines.
Much of this comes second hand as I wasn't on this particular team when they were working on Stadia bring-up for proprietary AAA engine (I joined about 2 weeks before Stadia was officially canned).
But the quality of support from Stadia for developers was leagues above what you get from Android. Every few weeks I'll hear from other team members how good it was working with Google for Stadia. The tooling was great. We got developer kit hardware. We had documentation and direct support channels and Google was actively managing outreach and development on tooling to ease transitioning into their systems (Google was one of the biggest driving forces behind DXC's SPIR-V target).
Compare this against the same people commenting on the Android experience and it's the complete opposite. We're left out to dry with poor support while trying to target devices that barely work.
What's the difference? Google actually had to fight to get us to come to their store. They had competition and weren't acting as a toll collector to a captive market. Game developers had the choice to tell Google to kick rocks, Xbox and PlayStation aren't going anywhere. Google had no choice but to play ball with good support and fair pricing. No such pressure exists on Mobile, and they crank the toll as a result.
However with mobile storefronts at the start everybody gets treated equally since they all have access to the same limited number of features and get the same level of (some would say neglectful) automated support. For the most part Epic Games goes through the same process of uploading a game or program and waiting for approval that Jimbob does. It's only afterwards that the level of access changes. It's this way by design. Not only because early on there were no big names in the mobile space and so no real tier system was necessary, but also because quantity is valued over quality. There are about a thousand uploads to Google Play a week (I haven't found strict data on how many are only games, but the process is the same for games and apps so it doesn't really matter), versus between twenty to thirty on PlayStation and Xbox. Creating unique avenues and methods would bottleneck things horrifically for mobile. As a developer you get an informal discount for the relative lack of quality control and increased competition you'll be facing.
This cost is very evident in the prices of the games. You won't ever see games that aren't asset flips or shovelware below a non-sale price of $1.99 on Xbox Games Store, but you'll see plenty of $0.79 games on Google Play and Steam.
It's very different on the mobile side: Apple sells iOS devices at full cost. With Android, it gets even more mucky as Samsung, the hardware vendor, gets 0% of the sales on their handset (unless the user, for some reason, uses the Samsung store), and Google gets the full 30% for only their software work. So the fact that Google gets 30% is wild.
Not that I trust Google (my personal phones are Apple) but how do you think a phone with all software made by Samsung will work? Every time I lay my hands on one of their phones (and I have one on my desk for Android development) something annoys me. They somehow think they know how to do UI/UX but they still haven't learned after all these years of "customizing" Android.
So yes, Google deserves some money. Not 30% but some.
And your Samsung comment doesn’t make sense. Samsung gets the operating system for free and then sells hardware for whatever profit they can get for it. Plus all of the post-sale platform services profit they can manage, just like Google and Apple. What is wild?
The intention is to point out that simple arguments of 'Xbox is charging 30%, so it is fine that the mobile platforms do the same thing' failed to take into account of the nuances of the situation. Isn't it weird that these platforms are all charging 30% even through all these platforms have different business models, with different cost structure and provide different values? I hadn't even talked about how Microsoft has been getting no money off sales on Steam when it is their platform, because they hadn't (yet?) lock down the platform.
Finally, Nintendo did sell the Wii U at a loss. [0]
[0]: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/nintendo-still-selling-wii-u-a...
[1]: https://x.com/tomwarren/status/1671981463040819200?s=46
[2]: https://x.com/twthereddragon/status/1672270407179665409?s=46
Also, from memory, Xbox/Sony consoles are loss leaders to recoup profits from store sales. I'm not sure if that holds for Google and Apple phones, but I'd be more okay with app store fees if it did.
Sure. It's all just revenue growth. Sans some anti-competition regulation, it's the prerogative of a business to charge as much as the market will bear, as much as it can be sustained, by whatever legal means necessary.
That's why MS bought game studios to get more games and therefore users to the Xbox.
They don't attract people, they gatekeep solutions/entertainment. It is the exact other way around, the products on their store attract people into their environment.
After all they play a massive part in making those purchases possible.
I know, the big ones are always "evil", but...
How about being real?
Yeah it's great.
At this point it’s safe to assume Roblox is as popular as Apple so they don’t have the problem of discovery. Distribution yes for which they can pay the listing price.
The DOJ needs to crack down on Apple and Google.
I had to web search for what this thing was, apparently a game for small kids? Why should "everyone" know about video-games addressed to children?