Microsoft calls for a closer look at app stores
theverge.com
theverge.com
That said, it sucks that I cannot tell people they can also download Krita from krita.org. There's always the fear that some day, the Windows Store will be closed, or Krita will be kicked out or whatever.
Publishing in an app store means you're a sharecropper, with all that entails.
As in, you've signed an NDA literally forbidding you from mentioning as such? Or you're simply not allowed to put the URL anywhere in the Windows Store description?
If the app developer can't advertise that one of their store options is cheaper, a 3rd party isn't limited by the same contractual obligation.
The former means Windows helped the user find the app, whereas the latter means the author did and Microsoft is just providing a way for the user to download the app.
In my app most downloads are from direct links, so I am happy about that policy.
How do they stand on subscriptions though? That’s one of the areas that Apple has been terrible with.
Paying customers may be product too.
That was implied ever since Microsoft decided to make Windows 10 free or at a very low cost to a majority of users. And, why not, as long as their fee is not outrageous for application developers and they don't restrict the users' ability to install software from other sources.
So paying yet product. And varying price is something I would expect from airlines, not from respectable business.
I question wisdom of the original term. What if "shut up and take money" is not enough? If so was it on purpose or by accident? First time in my life I think of conspiracy theories.
My take on catchy phrases:
- You are a product for for-profit
- You are a product if don't fight for your freedoms
Most people either upgraded for free to a new version (the same operation was paid before), or get Windows through a subsidized OEM version. Subsidized is pretty clear: you pay less, in exchange for something else.
> varying price is something I would expect from airlines, not from respectable business.
Why should we expect a software company to be more ethical, for varying definitions of ethical, than an airline company?
But what if the user literally just enters the apps name in the search. In this case the app store only played the negligible role of an trivial looking indeed. Is it really reasonable to then thanks a larger cut?
Edit: but then the cut for extremely driven aquisation is 5% which compared to some other stores is really low. So I really shouldn't complain ;)
BTW big fan of this app and I have to admit that I'm relieved that it has some sort of a steady revenue stream. That sum next to the Donate button doesn't look like it could sustain any large scale development.
If they were so confident in the convenience they offered they would allow you to mention other options. This reeks of anti-competitiveness.
It's that I, a user, cannot choose to sideload an app I want to use on my device or choose to use a different store.
That's only half the equation. I run android, but have no google account. I have always used a combination of aptoide, f-droid and manually downloaded apk's for my apps.
When all the covid apps were released and governments were encouraging people to download them, do you think they put the APK on a government website for people to download?
Nope, just links to the app store. Of course, most of those apps relied on google play services API's for a bunch of stuff, so it's not like they would have worked anyway.
It's not enough to merely allow sideloading. If the expectation isn't that mobile devices are a diverse ecosystem and that it's not good enough for developers to pick one store and bugger the rest, you've achieved very little. Most people could not be bothered going through what I do to keep my phone clean.
I generally find that all you need to do is tell people their solution is not acceptable. All the banks in Iceland are trying really hard to convince people that phone based 2FA is the only option. However, I went to my bank and informed them that I don't take my phone with me when I travel overseas and I require another option. They tried a few other variations of "but you could use your phone this way", but once they realized I wasn't joking when I said "I often just don't have a phone with me, find me something else" it turns out that the physical 2FA tokens totally still work, they just don't like telling people.
Generally speaking, the people providing these things have a boss who expects them to make sure things run smoothly. They'll try to force you to use the app if that's the easiest path, but as soon as they realise that trying to force you to use the app will be much more painful for them than just giving you another option, they'll find another option.
I just want to know that my license to use an app purchased in 1 store means that the license follows me (or my account or my estate, etc), not limited to that one app store. If I buy a game on Steam, and later move to a PS and later move to XBox, I don't want the loss of value associated with losing all copies of my legally purchased/licensed content (or worse, if my account is closed/banned on one platform).
This is also what is destroying any potential value to electronic health records (although doctors seem to hate transcribing their notes, so the value may be limited anyway).
It is not a lock-in at all, and it also not strictly enforced or enforceable even , plenty of times I have given cash when a vendor offered me a 2 % discount on a large purchase where the extra hassle was worth it .
Your assertion seems to be that just because you got away with it that it's "not enforceable". I would argue that just because it's a clause in a merchant contract (a very important contract for a small business), it's a significant threat.
The comparison is not the same at all, No merchant gateway is blocking cash transactions just forbid different pricing.
This is miles away from what Apple can do. A payment g/w can only at best stop payment processing as it happened wikileaks or more recently with SciHub.
Apple can kick you off the market effectively by blocking access to app store . Either the app store should be treated like a utility given its monopolistic nature or not be allowed to push their second service (payment g/w, lots of competition) because they have control over first one App store (no competition), in another era this would be classic anti-trust .
The Windows app store gives a 95/5 cut to developers, as long as the download happened from an external link to the page. If the discovery happened via an app store search or marketing within the app store, that cut changes to 85/15 [1]
I would also like to find some revenue split data for the Xbox store, though I imagine that's far more nuanced, with many different contracts for different third parties. If I'm an indie developer with no negotiating power, is that a 70/30?
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2019/03/06/microsoft-store-revenue-share...
Recall when Microsoft was lagging far behind the other cool instant messenger kids, and was loudly crying for open interoperability and cooperation. Once MSN Messenger had a foothold, it slammed shut and their noble goals dissolved. Microsoft is certainly not alone in this self-serving morality -- it is a logical position -- but they do have a lot of examples in their corporate history.
Apparently the Microsoft employees are out in force today. It's also interesting how making an observation like this -- that the Windows app store is a failure -- leads people to pigeonhole. As I sit here on my Lenova 720 in Windows 10 Pro cross compiling an app between Windows and Linux in the WSL...hurrrRRRRrrr)
Enterprises? Forget it.
It's probably still too early to tell, but App Management for Microsoft Teams, updates to MSIX, and better Windows 7 compatibility for companies over-paying EOL extended security support agreements, at least for Microsoft/Office 365 companies, has opened the door to enterprises re-evaluating the Microsoft Store for Business. It might actually replace System Center like it was intended to, just years late.
Of course the difficulty and headaches involved with windows package management are pretty asinine, they at least are an accessible and non-gated platform for both the developer and user, which can't be said for Android and iOS/MacOS.
The .NET bit is an irrelevant strawman. We aren't talking about that, and it has zero relevance.
The Windows App Store is a sad disaster.
The most popular app is Roblox. It has 164 reviews. The second most popular app is Spotify. It has 57 reviews. On Android, it has 19 million reviews. Their Android TV app even has 200. The item with the most reviews is Minecraft, with 1000 reviews. On Android it has 3.5 million.
The author of krita mentioned in this thread that their revenue is 50/50 steam and windows store, so it can't be that bad.
And of course Microsoft dropped RTF like a hot potato when they managed to use their new Microsoft Windows platform to leverage into a huge market advantage for Microsoft Word. Other vendors were obviously initially reluctant to spend enormous resources to port their software to Windows, a competitor’s platform, but Microsoft could spend hugely on developent of Microsoft Word for Windows, making it very impressive graphically, and when the Windows platform was successful, all other word processing software vendors were left behind, forced to play catch-up. I also remember hearing that Microsoft were using secret Windows APIs to get nice things like toolbar icons in color, not available to non-Microsoft companies.
[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/rich...
[2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/em-s...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rich_Text_Format&...
I believe it is a lot more complicated than that. Non-game Apps on the Xbox see the same splits as on Windows (the 85/15 and 95/5 based on "marketing"). The 70/30 is offered to game developers that want to do only the bare minimum Xbox integration possible to get on the platform, almost every other scale and publisher agreement is presumably covered under NDA of one sort or another. Some rumors are that the sliding scale is today competitive to Steam's (and better than Sony's, maybe? Sony's seems even more NDA encumbered), with a lot of complicated other factors such as Xbox Play Anywhere titles and allowing Xbox Game Pass rotations are rumored to get substantial cut discounts based on the shifting whims of Microsoft's marketing teams.
That rate is under nda. What I can say is I've never heard of big studios getting a better rate in the first place.
As in real estate you can get upfront money, marketing commitments, or guarantees, but landlords/platforms are loath to give out better rates.
Microsoft has deployed all sorts of carrots and sticks to try to drive more adoption. In the early Windows 10 days, you could secure $500k-$2.5M in services investment even for internal apps at a not so huge scale.
Console is a loss leader, or sold at cost. No one on planet Earth could make an exact replica of Playstation 5 or Xbox 5 for discount. And that is excluding all the IP, R&D and Software / OS Development involved. The 30% is where they make the money. And personally that is a fair share.
Microsoft also make their profits via selling OS to OEM and Business. The current App Store model are there to help distribution of Software. And the 5% are essentially zero considering you will have to paid ~3% for credit processing any way. i.e Linking to the App Store frees you the burden and duty of hosting yourself for free.
Edit: And if you dont mind share why you downvote.
Also, a smartphone is an essential hardware for modern living. A gaming console... Not really.
Prices are all ephemeral anyway. How many of those "normal products" are only able to be sold for more than they are made for because we value the labor of the person making it less than we would the same labor from the person buying it?
To loop back around to the iPhone, pretty much every indie developer I know thinks that mobile phone games are priced too low, but nobody can change it because the expectation has been set that a mobile game can't be $30-60. It's just the way the market has evolved.
So markets are complicated. Sometimes they move in smart directions, sometimes multiple factors conflate together and they move in unsustainable directions. The fact that developers still write games for consoles doesn't necessarily mean that developers like the system they're a part of, or that they don't want it to be any better. It just means the expected value of signing those NDAs, using expensive locked down hardware, and paying revenue portions to the console maker still currently work out to be positive.
Games sell like hot-cakes on the Switch right now. Nintendo would honestly need to do some pretty horrible stuff to make a Switch release of almost any semi-popular game not worthwhile economically. But that doesn't mean developers love everything Nintendo does.
So be careful of reading too much into what developers do. We're Capitalists just like everyone else. If the market demands F2P micro-transactions, NDAs, DRM, or region-specific pricing, ultimately most of us will do what the market demands. Revenue splits are no exception.
That being said, I would argue the market for games publishing hasn't settled, and that it's really not shifting towards increasing revenue splits or developer costs. The original process for getting games on the XBox was way harder and way more expensive than it is today. The reason consoles have generally started to shift towards more open terms is because developers eventually got fed up with paying money to release bugfixes, and started shifting focus to consoles that made releasing software easier.
We're seeing the same trends with Steam and the Epic store. 30% was reasonable, until Epic started offering much better terms. Now Valve is starting to move towards 20%. Devs will work with any system that makes them money, but obviously they would prefer to take bigger cuts of each sale. People don't really appreciate that -- if Steam didn't have such a massive market share right now, no developer would rationally choose to release on Steam instead of Epic Store. We all want lower revenue splits.
I'm not advocating for any model over any other, just acknowledgment that there exists a complex co-dependent relationship between the console owners and the developers.
There is also a history of consoles not selling well when the price becomes too steep from the Neo Geo for $699 to the XBox that was bundled with the Kinect.
If people are bad at gathering enough money at once then there are options like pay 999 now or pay 1099 over 2 years period. This is not in the interest of the consumer so it will not happen without regulation.
Why should video game consoles have an exception?
No, this is wrong. Dumping is selling at a loss unsustainably in the short term to drive out competitors. If you do it sustainably, it basically can't be dumping.
Thousands of business have loss leaders, from supermarkets to rasers. Video game consoles are not an exception.
It's not clear to me why loss-leading consoles are a good thing for consumers. It just means that:
A) games will be more expensive, because Microsoft needs to make more money on them, and
B) a smaller number of games will be made, because the barrier of entry to profitability on any single game will be increased by forcing developers to subsidize Microsoft's costs.
Microsoft is still going to make the same amount of money regardless. They'll either charge upfront, or that cost will be passed on to consumers in the form of more expensive, less experimental games.
So, I dunno. People who make the comparison between Apple and XBox should maybe be careful what they wish for, because I'm more than happy to go after XBox, Playstation, and Switch with the exact same criticisms. I am skeptical that there are many indie game developers who are happy that they need to jump through hoops to get development consoles, or sign NDAs just to target a platform.
The game development communities are exactly the opposite of HN culture, there no one cares about FOSS ideals and stuff, it is all about IP and getting their ideas into the gamer's hands no matter how.
In fact, nowadays I see as a mistake having spent so much time around FOSS during the university back in the 90's, which caused a bit of schizophrenic considerations when going across communities.
I think both game devs and console makers prefer the big-TAM world.
Not loss leaders. Maybe close to "cost" but not loss leaders.
The reason is the length of the lifecycle. Say you spend $100M developing a video game console. That seems outrageous. You ship 100 000 units to stores for the early adopters, and some goof says $100M/ 100 000 = $1000 per console just for the R&D costs. These must be a loss leader!
But by the end of the cycle you've sold over 100 million units, so the R&D cost was under $1 per unit. You also get to do relentless cost engineering. When you spot a way to reduce the BOM by 4¢ on a product you're going to sell another hundred million of, that is Four million dollars you just added to the company's profits. Moore's law is on your side over that period of time too.
In other words it is a "sell the razors at a loss and make it up on razor blades" strategy.
> In 2006, at the time of PS3’s launch, each console was sold at a loss of around US $240 per console
That would be a loss leader if the plan was you sell those launch consoles and then exit or move on to a new product having lost $240 per console.
But that was never the plan, the plan was you sell millions more consoles over many years and so overall they're profitable.
It's not razors and razor blades, Gillette sent me a free razor when I was a teenager because that's a razors and razor blades model. Sony doesn't give away consoles because they make money selling the console. They didn't make money on the first few million, which doesn't matter because they sold over a hundred million after that.
The reason they don't do razors and razor blades is because the attachment rate is much lower than most owners imagine unlike for razor blades. It's typically going to be 5-6 games per console. PS4 actually hit 8 games per console but that's a fantastically successful machine nearing the end of its life.
So, if you're losing $240 per console but you hope you can shift six games per console that is $40 per game you need to recoup to break even.
If you go out to a third party developer and you say "We want $40 per sale" they are going to laugh in your face. This isn't Apple strong-arming independent developers, the big games publishers (most obviously Take Two and Activision) absolutely are powerful enough to walk away from such a deal knowing that their competitors will do the same and then the console is dead.
Thank you for saying "app store" instead of "App Store". If you dictate this sentence on an iPhone it comes out as "The windows App Store".
In other words, the people that work for Apple are so petty that they won't capitalize the word "windows" even if it was preceded by the word "Microsoft" but they always capitalize the words "App Store" because they insist that they have a trademark on this very generic term even though they really don't [0].
According to them, the generic phrase for app store is "online store" [1], which is hilarious because nobody ever says that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_store#%22App_Store%22_trad...
[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...
Typing Microsoft Windows from my iPhone. It does capitalize it properly...
My main complaint is that they insist that they own "app store" when the courts already told them that they don't.
Hyperbole. It's much more likely no one at Apple cares about this like you do, and it's just a simple bug; nothing malicious.
It’s nothing less than pure spiteful pettiness.
Was it Steam? Which first launched in 2003?
Did Apple debut objectively novel behavior that made the App Store a thing? Perhaps the install flow, or maybe the developer submission flow? (Which was admittedly awful for a number of years)
That said, the idea of iOS and App Store that you don’t ever sideload, browse from PC or web browser, or handle .ipa directly, as an integrated whole, do feel novel to me.
Valve Steam - announced on March 22, 2002, released for beta testing the same day. [1]
Windows Marketplace - announced on July 12, 2004, launched on October 12, 2004 [2].
Nokia Ovi - announced on 29 August 2007, public beta on 28 August 2008 [3].
iPhone App Store - opened on July 10, 2008 [4].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(service)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Marketplace
Sept 2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Runtime_Environment_for...
"an application development platform created by Qualcomm, originally for code division multiple access (CDMA) mobile phones, featuring third-party applications such as mobile games. It is offered in some feature phones (mostly with the similar specifications of a mid to high-end mobile phones) but not in smartphones. Developed in 1999, as a platform for wireless applications on CDMA-based mobile phones, it debuted in September 2001."
> Downloads:
> Since Mar.31, 2004: 4,189,079
> Last week: 209,952
Possible trace:
> On-Device Portal technology emerged in 2000 [2]
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20050429230232/http://www.getjar....
If you drop the money a BBS is an old-man's appstore.
Microsoft windows app store
on my Google.
Now the wolf is an advocate for the sheep :-)
Replies like yours and another sibling ( hoorayimhelping) do put that hope into my heart.
Although, I am questioning the utility of WhatsApp as they seem to be particularly fond of forwarding absolute garbage on WhatsApp.
Unfortunately, I don't know if a non lock down system is possible. The incentives for bad actors and the attack surface is so huge, I wonder what can be done.
It is hard to beat advertisement machine by powerful organization with unlimited resources which utilize small window opportunity gain monopoly. There is nothing magical about Steve Jobs and iPhone, it was obvious so much that design was tried again and again through decade.
Today - PinePhone, Librem.
I don’t want to troubleshoot my older relatives tech issues, I just point them to the apple store. Time is worth a lot.
As far as I can tell, only Apple wanted to invest in this route. Nokia, Google, Microsoft all have tons of cash, but no one wants to invest it into low ROI high liability physical retail options.
Nokia was perfectly okay letting the mobile carriers and their uneducated minimum wage staff deal with customer service. Apple decided to invest in customer service.
Also, all of this migration to smartphones happened in 2010 to 2014. If other companies had invested as much as Apple into the user experience (including what you do when you have a problem), maybe they would be in their position.
Corporations do no not care about people. People form communities to help themself, open small shops. LineageOS, postmarketOS - that is magical.
Debian can't open brick and mortar stores.
Android while perfectly able resolve your first request (video calls and web browser) become more and more closed over the years. Because user freedoms is not valuable differentiator for most of the customers. Google and manufacturers are corporations too. They seek profit.
Users value experience, true. And Apple understands that support is part of the experience, they invest to build their brand. That's good, but they do it to exploit customers as much as possible, 30% cut is part of it.
It does not matter who is on top of the mountain. It is underdog who is trying to differentiate. Maybe if nonprofit, but it could not produce newest and shiniest, without support it does not work. Support either from government (like do not sell poisonous products) or customers (conscious choice). History shown again and again that government does not care and for customers it take a long time to figure out [1].
[1] Arsenic wallpaper never officially banned in Britain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fru5Q-6p9lk
Android did not have a FaceTime equivalent back in 2010 to 2014. I know, because I tried it. A simple app where you pressed the contact name and it called the person, reliably and consistently was all that was needed.
There might have been Viber but I didn’t trust that company at all. But when I’m dealing with non tech literate people, I want a consistent, unchanging experience, and that’s what FaceTime was and what all the Android video calling apps lacked.
I see, no compromises - no non locked down system for you.
My point is that Apple offered the buyers something they wanted, and no one else did, hence they were rewarded.
But even during those times, you were still free to install/mod whatever you wanted on your computer, and even now it is (just barely) possible with Windows. Apple has always been far more controlling than Microsoft, although the latter is slowly moving in that direction too. Maybe this is finally a welcome change in direction, but I doubt it...
When it comes to permission dialogs Windows has always been worse IMO
A few days ago I downloaded a non-notarized app. The dialog that I saw baffled me and it took me a while to recall how to run a non-notarized app.
You have to right-click on it and clock on "open", something that should be equivalent to double-clicking, but isn't. That's harder than clicking a security box. Someone with no knowledge might never find out how to run these apps.
> Apple has always been far more controlling than Microsoft
Notarization came out with Catalina.
How so? Both MacOS and Windows for years had a completely unhindered app installation process. Though it was much simpler on MacOS because you didn't need a custom installer, and you could easily move apps from one computer to another.
It’s completely reasonable to argue that this is no longer true, but it’s denial to say that it has always been this way.
True. For the users, app installation wasn't a problem, until Internet Explorer came for Netscape.
The problem was mainly Microsoft having the majority of manufacturers like, Dell, IBM, HP, Compaq, Packard Bell, Hitachi, Toshiba having Windows pre-installed and threatening a rise in prices of their Windows license or even revoking their licenses if they sell PCs pre-installed with desktop OS competitors like Be Inc's BeOS. [0]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20131109045719/http://www.intern...
Don't be a fool and think Microsoft has changed because they give away VSCode and have added features to Github. This isn't a goodwill measure, it's a lock in measure. They're quietly trying to lock in engineers into their platform, just like they're trying to keep gamers locked in to their platform.
They're trying to look like the scrappy little guy competing against Apple, but this only after their Windows App store has failed to do anything. They wait until their hand busts before tattling - if the Windows store succeeds, they happily go along with it. If it fails, they talk about how great a tragedy it is for the American consumer.
Epic just gave away amazing games for a month or two. I got GTA5 and Civ6 for free amongst other treasures.
The packaging story, the driver stories, the market share...
The stores don't lose anything when a developer supports Linux, Epic's own engine supports Linux as a target
The problem is the support costs don't seem to add up at all, and I fail to see why the store fronts would be to blame...
Steam has been providing support for the Linux community for years, through native ports of their games, explicitly selling Linux ports on their store, and just making sure their client works on Linux as well. This isn't to mention their actual innovations such as the Steam Controller, Steam In-home Streaming, Steam Remote Play, and even Proton.
In contrast, we have Epic Games who, besides adding nothing to the market besides a bunch of free games (which is likely going to end when/if they feel like they have a good enough share), actively killed the Linux version of Rocket League when they purchased the game.
I appreciate Epic Games for the Unreal engine, but if this is how they want to get a share of the PC game store market, they're not getting a dime from me.
Yes, really. This just sounds like the standard Linux Desktop evangelist "Works for me! (TM)". Take this case [0], where in it is claimed that support requests for Linux were vastly disproportionate to the number of Linux users.
Linux has huge problems as a platform due to its fragmentary and ever-changing nature combined with its near-total disregard (in userland) for backwards compatibility. People have been screaming this at the community for the better part of a decade and a half (including Linus himself!) and mostly falling on deaf ears.
Which is not to say that one should support Epic if you do happen to care about gaming on Linux. Quite the opposite, as Valve has done more than anyone[1] to try and make it work.
[0] https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760
[1] With the exception of the entire WINE project in general
"Linux definitely has a long way before it's usable for the majority of the public for gaming", is the crux of my comment.
Linux users on here just get very defensive when you bring up very obvious shortcomings and immediately go into "it's not that bad"-mode
You shouldn't talk about things you don't know about...
- Millions in grants for developers
- Unlimited free backend services for game developers, the same the power one of the most successful games in recent history (and the first serious offer for this caliber of service outside of Steam despite AAA publishers having stores for years)
- Millions invested in arguably one of the most technologically advanced game engines freely available
- Thousands of dollars in free content to help developers kickstart their projects
- Finally moving the needle for developer revenue splits after years of stagnation
- No built-in DRM (Games can still optionally include their own DRM, but there's no Steamworks-style DRM options)
- Built a publishing house with a blanket deal for studios which is very competitive, (50/50 split of all profit)
- _Retroactively_ waived fees for any game that made under 1 million dollars running on Unreal.
Say you didn't care about anything Epic did besides release a few free games, they did plenty more than that
Can't reply to your comment directly but for a reply...
How is massively supporting the game industry and providing a real competitor in a the market not doing anything for the end-user?
You realize the games the end-user plays benefit from literally every single thing I mentioned right?
I'm speaking explicitly as an end user here, and from my point of view the Epic Store is a straight downgrade from Steam in almost every aspect.
No one is betting their business in such tiny communities, while having exponential costs in development and dealing with very vocal and entitled gamers.
So naturally a couple of studios test waters, and then they just target Android instead.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/3409
https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1223457395419930627...
Most of the rest of the arguments seem to revolve around Epic doing paid (timed) exclusive deals with an interesting cross-section of developers. (Using the weight of their Unreal engine licensing fees to sweeten the pot of what they could offer in some cases.) It's something common to console games, but some PC gamers seemed disturbed to see it on the PC. It also seems to betray a short-term memory with respect to Steam, as Steam also bootstrapped on exclusives such as Half-Life 2. (Half-Life 2 wasn't even a timed exclusive as most of Epic's have been, HL2 still requires Steam in 2020, whether or not you bought it or The Orange Box on a physical disc from a retail store back in the early oughts. Which leaves prevarication room for some Steam fans because Valve did allow multiple stores to sell the game even if it was a platform exclusive to play the game; but it still ignores the historic controversy when Steam did that in the first place and many gamers at the time called it a mistake and the death of PC gaming.)
(ETA: Also, Epic did do one sleazy/evil thing early in the EGS: it scraped private Steam files for friends lists, rather than using documented APIs, to try to bootstrap its social network.)
Sounds like a PC to me.
That developers pay millions to license and use. This isn't charity work.
> build out the first "full house" competitor to Steam
So they can control the market as a replacement for Steam, a superior platform that has (a) an instant return policy [1], (b) the ability to emulate input for any game for the disabled[2], and (c) the ability to share your entire game library with family without having to share accounts and save files.
[1]: Obviously hasn't always been the case. [2]: Via Big Picture Mode, which allows you to use any controller for any game and remap inputs for games that have no such settings. A total blessing for anyone disabled or with a preference for different controls.
They retroactively waived licensing fees for any game that made under 1 million dollars in revenue going back years!
But, ah yes, you got them! They're a company in a capitalist society trying to make money, what crooks!
>So they can control the market as a replacement for Steam
I don't know how you can say this with a straight face. By that logic anyone who makes any store that isn't Steam is just trying to control the market.
Anyone who makes anything that isn't the current incumbent in a monopolized industry is just trying to become the new monopoly!
And the rest of your points are in the worst faith.
Epic games is how old? You're complaining that a new player hasn't matched every feature of a decades old incumbent?
Not to mention, Epic games has instant-refunds on some games (developers can disable this, also yeah, bringing up Steam in a conversation about refunds is a joke, you knew that enough that you had to pre-emptively footnote it)
And Steam was an accessibility NIGHTMARE until very recently, to the point that I had seen petitions come out against it! Not to mention accessibility in games is largely on a game-by-game basis, acting like Big Picture was made to improve accessibility is laughable when it launched without the ability to even change text sizes for years.
On that note, Epic actually supports screen readers as a first class citizen in their engine: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/UMG/UserGuide/Scr...
Steam however sells me Civ6 which works, which costs about £3,000 (£15 for the game, £3,000 for the lost time I know it will cost me if I install it)
https://itch.io/b/520/bundle-for-racial-justice-and-equality
$8 million isn't much next to Steam, but it's a lot in a world where Steam is the default when people think of PC game stores.
Note: I do wish all of these people's official clients supported Linux.
[0] If one accepts that label
Were you expecting them to just get rid of the old browser and leave users in a lurch? You'd be on here blowing them up for "taking away a browser without any instructions so my grandma is calling me now" instead of whining that they made you actually acknowledge the change.
I'm with you, launch a guide on how to use edge as soon as they click on the Internet Explorer icon. Please do not unset my preference of default browser, please do not make me crash your program to avoid your ad... in general why does my start bar get worse every time it changes as it lurches towards an ad display vector.
Funny enough, I guess they would get less criticism if Edge just came preinstalled like Mac does with safari.
There's still a full screen unskippable ad post-update, and an Edge setup process, and then additional reminders that you might want to make Edge your default browser.
The prevalence of popups and other notifications in Windows designed to drive user engagement with a specific product / feature / team has been increasingly noticeable lately, while actual productivity features like searching your local files and applications have been gummed up by web results instead.
I still use Windows on a daily basis since Visual Studio is the best tool for the work I do and Windows is the best platform for PC games, but they do plenty to exercise their leverage as the platform owner.
And none of these lock-in measures mean shit. If Microsoft is providing a service that people want/need then why is that bad? They can't lock anybody in if nobody switches. People switch since they provide value.
I want a source on that, because even Gates in this absolutely self-serving report(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/14/bill-gates-phi...) did explicitly not claim he or his foundation is responsible for the 123 million estimated reduction in infant mortality since the year 2000 . As important as vaccination is, child mortality has decreased by many many reasons, including rising standard of economic conditions,decreased world fertility, an accelerated movement to urban life and widely distributed medical care. To attribute this complex and global set of conditions to just one individual is beyond sycophantic.
> One has to be exceptionally callous to consider businesses going out of business greater than human lives.
Spare me this sanctimonious take. So Gates used some part of the money he extracted in monopolistic and quasi-criminal practices to buy children vaccines and now he cannot be criticized because "can somebody please think of children?
By the way many of those countries who receive vaccines from the Gates foundations had to pay exorbitant license fees to use monopolistic MS products.
Apparently there is this revisionism where Microsoft was doing Mafia style visits to everyone, giving advices at gun point that accidents happen.
It is incredible how there is this culture that only the man is to blame, while those taking the money couldn't be helped to do otherwise, those pour souls.
Don’t forget “developing countries” too: a brasilian friend was running a copy of windows “licensed” for poor people. Wtf.
The glorification of Gates nowadays still worries me.
(To not talk about their server and enterprise monopoly)
https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Against-Windows-10-Microsoft-...
I think a really low percentage wave is going to disrupt these markets as new competitors that are bootstrapped, slimmed down and not VC money hungry enter the scene. All it takes is for people to start demanding they get paid for the real work and not the sale.
You could argue that their chosen X% is too high relative to their value add, but any competitor will definitely need to charge more than your proposed X=0.
I'd personally welcome similar regulation caps on app stores (higher than 0.3%, but also certainly lower than 30%) in the EU.
In other words, consumers get offered fewer options, which results in a far worse deal, overall, but in exchange they can avoid the hassle of evaluating all the better options they'd have if they hadn't been legislated away.
My understanding: everybody pays the same price, independently of payment method. If the standard credit card interchange fee is 2%, then the vendor has to raise their prices by around 2% to make the same amount of money on the product. As a consumer, I would have to pay the 2% of the inflated price if I pay by cash (or debit card or something).
So I'm forced to pay by credit card with a cash back option or some other rewards to make back part of the 2% that were added on top of the original price.
I lose, if I don't play the game, and I'm back around a zero-sum-game if I do play along. In any case, the credit card company wins.
If the fees are capped, the vendor doesn't have to raise the price, and the consumer wins no matter the payment method.
1) The 2% fee might mostly be captured by the credit company and thus represent a net benefit to most consumers (at the expense of retailers) because retailers tend to want prices like 1.99 and would be reluctant to raise that to 2.01 because of the reduced sales. Over time there might be other options like slightly reduced portion sizes to help the store, but profiting a little bit extra on most products is hard, and profiting a lot extra on a few products is near impossible because consumers will buy from competitors.
2) The 2% fee isn't reimbursed equally to all consumers, so individuals with higher credit scores might have a preference for the current system even if it's a zero-sum game overall. (this point also easily allows arguments the other way in favor of regulating fees because we probably shouldn't be extracting an additional percent here and there from young people and those with financial hardships)
How does it benefit the consumer if the credit company takes 2%? I cannot see why it would make a difference to the consumer (at least in the short term) whether the retailer or the credit company takes the 2%.
Having my app on a large store front such as Steam or Play Store can and often does bring a lot of organic views. I don't know any business getting organic views from credit companies, except the sponsored once, which I'm sure are probably paying a good chunk for that. App stores also handle feature development, hosting, and many other services. What do credit card companies give to business?
Now the question is, how much is the storefront traffic worth to you in terms of cut. If you get 30% or more sales being on Steam vs selling on your own website, then isn't it technically worth it being on that store front?
So what's the deal? It's hard to beleive Google cares more about open web platform than their Playstore revenue or it's just they want to ditch android/ART completely in future.
P.S. As a consumer I'm glad PWA exists and can't wait to see the end of duopoly in the smartphone ecosystem.
As a whole I think Google wants to chase ubiquity. A PWA will work on laptops, phones, Windows, Mac, Android... an Android app won’t. So they’ll push PWAs.
Perhaps, I'm thinking other way round; May be PWA was supposed to kill traditional web apps and was intended to bring web apps to Playstore/Appstore but it didn't happen(yet).
>Android’s Instant Apps, announced a few years ago (seemingly to go nowhere?) seemed like a direct attack on the use case for web sites, but the company tolerated it.
I think android instant apps are meant for Google Assistant ecosystem, Google Smart Display have it and Fuchsia would have GA; so instant apps might come handy.
PWAs play into the idea of ChromeOS as a bigger platform. I'd guess that Google politics have more to do with it not being more prominent than anything.
Apps often are single purpose information silos. You need an app to do every little things.
My guess is that eventually, we'll have an OS with a different user experience where you tell the system what to do (order pizza) and it will create a UI with all the nearest pizza places. You then choose where you want to order (let's say Dominos), and the system pulls all the informations from Dominos database. You make your selection, you pay, done.
In that way, Dominos doesn't have to spend money on making an app and users don't have to download one either. Win-win.
Should governments take a closer look into app stores? Absolutely yes, those games are rigged, monopolistic, and broken.
It's decently likely a ruling around app stores will have impact not just on mobile and desktop, but the console world as well.
But I do agree that there will be a console war if this is continued. I would hope that it leads down the "I own this device" route and level the playing field in general - I've paid Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony the money for the device, therefore I should have the right to run whatever I want on it. Gatekeeping what can be run on a device is a significant problem that needs to be resolved, along with the right to repair (Apple's a good example of the problems) and the second hand market (Tesla is a good example of the problems).
As a developer I pay Apple $99 a year and i can release my app to the store as long as it meets some pretty lose guidelines. To get on a console you have to basically audition your game and met some arbitrary guidelines that aren't published anywhere. Either a company can build a curated system or they can't. XBox, PS4, and the switch aren't monopolies for gaming and iOS or Android aren't monopolies for mobile.
And Nintendo.
I don't follow consoles these days, but the gatekeeping by region that console makers used to do (even if I understand the reasons behind them) was incredibly annoying as well.
I think the perception of game consoles is different from PCs and mobile devices. Even though the game console is a computer, they're still not seen by the public or governments as a general computing platform no matter how blurred the lines have become.
Physical vs Digital is a whole nother holy war though.
"Allow from this source? [ ] Installing apps from this source may put your phone and data at risk."
And it's not like this is hidden the way developer mode is. It pops up when you try to install an APK file.
Agreed, it's not as bad as it used to be. Android needed developer mode, iOS needed the device to be registered as a test device.
Agreed, it's not a perfect system, but it's not exactly the same as the Apple app store - the only way to get software on to iOS for the longest time (recently, side loading has become easier and less gatekept, but still not the same as the desktop experience).
Possibly not for much longer. Sony is releasing the two versions of the PS5, the "digital edition" of which has no BD drive and can't use physical game media. It'll be interesting to see whether it has much uptake.
It will. Physical media is a practical annoyance for most consumers.
I guess the sales numbers will tell the bigger story.
Look at every retro console - their games still work on their platforms, and there's a second hand market for games. It's a shame they're no longer made, but at least there's a physical copy that can be traded instead of a digital copy DRM'd to an account on a store that's no longer operational.
If we (developers) go for a "website first" approach, there is not much the device manufacturers can do against people using our products.
From a business perspective, is there a strong incentive to develop apps at all, when you already have a website?
Any stories of startups that had a running website already and then boosted their usage by an order of magnitude by adding apps for the various appstores?
Pretty much no, with a few exceptions:
1. Any kind of hardcore gaming
2. Any kind of CPU/memory/disk intensive media production software (though this is becoming less so)
3. Any kind of infrastructure application; you wouldn't run a web server or database in the browser (yet)
5. Any kind of application that needs to feel fast. I have a pretty fast phone & computer, but I really feel the difference between a web app and a native app. A bit of data viewing is alright on the internet, but real productivity for prolonged periods of time? I'd rather have a native app.
6. Anything at all that needs to interface with your device. Web apps are extremely locked down, and for good reason, but this does mean that you can't use them as a file manager for instance.
Applications that only need to display, search and edit some data are absolutely fine as a webapp. Anything else gets a lot harder. Although I do feel like we are slowly shifting to more and more web based apps. For better or for worse.
I'm not sure why an order of magnitude should be the effect we're chasing. Doubling would be phenomenal, even a 10% lift could be massive depending on your current size. The only threshold you need to hit is that the value gained from building the apps exceeds the cost to build them. Certainly that can happen at much less than 10x growth.
With that said, the problem is that this is an infeasible proposition for businesses. Ignoring any specific tasks that are actually just better when run native, many users of high-touch apps (used at least once per week, for example) get real value from having a native experience. If your competitors have it and you don't, you'll likely lose users because of it. Asking Facebook to drop the Instagram app because we want to stick it to Apple is only going to help Snap.
In theory, there is potentially some future hope for WebAssembly and PWAs, but if/when they get to the point where they can truly replicate a native experience, I see no reason why Apple wouldn't restrict them the same way that they do native apps. That is, unless a court rules against it or legislation changes.
Tax for independent purchasers can change the way one will pay -- like if you're a UK charity I can donate and get you Gift Aid (if you use the scheme; a government increase in the money you get), or purchase and show it as a deduction in my taxes.
Obviously you know your users better than I, but I wonder if you've surveyed/canvassed to understand their motivations?
I hope you mean "are there many application these days which cannot be replaced with web app". The majority of desktop applications are not available as web apps.
I'd say the majority of several dozen applications I use on a daily basis could not be replaced with a web app, at least today.
Of course with web browsers becoming their own operating systems, most of the applications could in theory become web apps...
Maybe this is fair in a small company but in a large company that controls 70% of the US market? Thats borderline like setting up a tax on an entire industry as if your company was a state in the US.
The right to repair - fix app store owner decisions.
And that's not the worst. Apple sells devices with limited support. Perfectly functioning devices with no way to change OS once it become unsupported. Devices with expiration date.
Amazon, AppStore, PlayStore, etc.
The pattern is the same:
- Bend/ignore/disregard rules for their own products;
- Leverage data from competition for their advantage within the market place;
- Ban/exclude/penalize products from one day to the other;
- Boost/give privilege their own apps;
- Limited support/response, most of the times automated, disregarding the investment and commitment people took on their market place;
There is also a very valid counterargument. Apple maintain the quality of apps on their app story by being a censor.
There are a lot of ways to scam people or bug their devices, and by and large Apple also create a sufficiently safe environment for iOS users.
There do seem to be two aspects in conflict, but good for DHH for kicking this off. 30% is obcene.
“As one of the largest retailers in the world, making billions each year in profit, it’s unconscionable if we sat by not calling out others for doing the same.”
Walmart continued, “It’s imperative that we sully our competitions brand to make gains in the financial markets. Without state backed protectionism for large enterprises, us Barons are really just being hung out to dry.”
Walmart has continued to profit mightily, but it says the complaint is predicated on the fact they could be profiting MORE if someone forced Target to behave more like the rest of the majority.
When asked if Walmart had considered rebuilding its own image to gain business, there was a pause, before the conversation returned to targeting Target.
Walmart blew of criticism it’s used the market to wipe out competition in the past. When asked why they simply don’t do that to Target they replied, “Target is too big financially. So we need a bigger bully they can’t damage in return to stand up for us gritty, ruggedly individual elites. It’s the story of humanity to build government that’s coddles and pampers a privileged minority. It should be no different now.”
When it was suggested the public should advocate for dissolution of middlemen landlords in general, rather than drag the public courts through a pissing contest between blowhards, and stop wasting its precious time resource arbitrating the concerns of petty rich guys, the room laughed.
Why does Microsoft care about this? They have the market power to negotiate better terms. The answer is simple -- they want to reassert control over email. The Outlook app no longer uses ActiveSync, and Microsoft architects usually imply or state outright that ActiveSync is a legacy product.
The MS client stack has a weaker technology advantage than it ever had. AD was the great anchor of enterprises, and it is eroding slowly as things shift to cloud. (Remember, enteprises are a decade behind startups) The whole point of moving away from open email protocols is that things like access control that enterprises need must use Azure AD. That drives deeper entrenchment in MS SKUs and drives products like ATP, Dynamics, the MS Voice stack, etc. Better PR/branding aside, Microsoft is more like 1995 Microsoft than ever.
You can see over the years, Microsoft has bolted all sorts of mobile user experiences over traditional Exchange/SharePoint/etc. Teams was the first one that has had staying power. They can't add functionality to the mail/messaging/video/collaboration stack unless they break legacy.
It would be really awful if Apple caved, and 80% of the commercial email market became a walled garden of a historically hostile platform owner, all so that Basecamp can make a few bucks selling an email client.