Hacker News Reader

Comment by gridlockd | Hacker News Reader

This headline makes it sound like there has been a change of heart, but Tim Sweeney has been a vocal critic of walled gardens like the App Store and the Microsoft Store, well before Fortnite was a success.

The "special deal" here wouldn't have been some sort of fee waiver, it would've been to let Epic open their own store on iOS. In other words, having Apple give up its monopoly on iOS app publishing, just what the current lawsuit intends to achieve. Obviously, they weren't going to get that, but it's worth asking for it before starting a billion dollar lawsuit.

View on HN

Apparently he doesn't have any issues with the walled gardens from game consoles.

Do consoles take a cut for subscriptions made from consoles?

For new game purchases anyways, consoles collect platform royalties.

$7 out of $60 game purchase (12%), according to 10-year old https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/...

What about IAPs and requirement to subscribe for services only from consoles?

It doesn't matter. Obviously, Epic would like to pay 0% royalties on everything and be able to publish unlicensed games on consoles.

The problem is that Atari already failed in court against Nintendo back in the eighties, so the chances of winning that suit appear slim.

Or walled gardens that his parent company maintains.

Which would those be?

Epic's own game store. They aren't doing this out of the goodness of their heart

Epic has been very consistent about wanting the % cut lowered industry wide. It's silly to try and depict the Epic Games Store as malicious: Like it or not, developers keep more of their revenue on that store due to the 12% cut, and if other storefront operators don't like that they can lower their cut. When you choose a storefront as a developer you're choosing who to pay off in exchange for access to their platform and customers, it's that simple.

"out of the goodness of their heart" is also a silly way to characterize this positively or negatively: They want a chance to compete with Apple by offering lower costs in exchange for not offering the same feature set as Apple, just like how the EGS on Windows does not offer the same feature set as Steam. They believe developers will pick them due to the lower cut, but that's something the market would decide. Right now the market can't decide, because Apple has decided to prohibit competition.

Incidentally Epic made a public promise that if Apple lowered the cut, Apple Pay users would get the same Fortnite discount that people paying directly get.

How is their game store a walled garden? It can be installed alongside others on the same hardware. Even their exclusivity agreements are time limited.

Epic dictates what goes on there.

But they cannot dictate what's on your device.

Like they cannot dictate on consoles, nor on Symbian, J2ME, Brew, Windows CE/Pocket PC, Blackberry, BluRay, TV set top boxes,...

They are just PC spoiled.

Not sure what your point is. None of these platforms have ever been relevant enough for anyone to bother with a lawsuit even if it was winnable.

Epic is not a subsidiary of Tencent, Tim Sweeney owns a majority stake in the company.

People keep on saying this, but exclusives are not the same thing as a walled garden.

You can install games on your PC from any source, and there are over a half-dozen good games distributors you can choose to shop from or sell on. And if none of them work, you can also just buy directly from the developer themselves.

If Apple allowed multiple app stores and sideloading on iOS, but pulled in a few exclusives (ie, Apple Arcade) and banned Fortnite from its official store, that would be equivalent to what Epic is doing on the PC with the Epic Store.

And that is exactly what Epic wants Apple to do -- it's a completely consistent position for them to take.

So how to do that on a PS4? Yet no lawsuit rather happy marketing demos on how well Unreal will do on PS5.

The absence of previous legal action is not an indication that a practice is legal.

Exactly how many people does Epic have to sue before you'd be satisfied?

It is perfectly fine for Epic to focus on suing the companies that are causing them the most trouble right now. Given their relative size compared to these companies, it would be stupid for them to take on everyone at once. They don't have the resources to sue every major player in the entire games industry.

If they are trying to set a precedent in the courts, it makes sense to go after the most winnable case, and then try to use that ruling to win others. So it would not be Android, where alternative app stores and side loading are permitted, and not the consoles, where the manufacturers will argue they are not providing a general-purpose device. iPhone and even more so iPads are the ideal targets for lawsuits that aim to set precedents.

But didn't Epic also pull a similar move on the Google Play store simultaneously?

Yes. I guess they may be trying to show that Apple and Google have a duopoly in the mobile app market. If they win the Apple case, I am sure they will sue Google next, and that would be a much easier lawsuit to win.

They already did sue Google: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/13/21368363/epic-google-fort...

Side note: alternative stores are a pain: installing the F-droid privileged extension for automatic updates requires root access, for instance. Why couldn't that be a setting, like device administrators?

I feel Google is doing the bare minimum to avoid antitrust rulings, which they probably do.

Google views sideloading as their inconvenient but necessary antitrust escape valve, in my view. They don't want people using it, they want it as something to point at and say "not guilty".

Interesting however is the wording of an old version of the Android Market (old name before Play Store came about) developer agreement - the title of 4.5 is labelled "Non-Competition".

I think that title (which has unsurprisingly disappeared from more recent versions) says it all. Sideloading was Google's attempt to avoid an antitrust battle in the early days of Android, as they could say "we are new, anyone can make a store". The trouble is the licensing agreements with OEMs contain all sorts of restrictions, some of which have probably become public over time. Perhaps more will emerge through the epic games lawsuit, as it seems they're going after the restrictions on OEMs. There's many of those they can request through disclosure if they don't have them already!

Ref: https://web.archive.org/web/20150107232223/https://play.goog...

Yet he sued Google....

I don't know about that, Epic is historically a PC-centric developer.

However, the legal question of having a monopoly on publishing for a game console has been settled ages ago, and the platform owners won.

> However, the legal question of having a monopoly on publishing for a game console has been settled ages ago, and the platform owners won.

I don't believe it has, and I don't believe they do.

The only lawsuit of this nature that I'm aware of is Atari v. Nintendo [1]. All that lawsuit established was that

- It isn't fair use to violate copyright law in the process of bypassing mechanisms used to maintain the monopoly

- While it might be copyright misuse to create those mechanisms establishing a monopoly in the first place (undecided), the court isn't going to grant you a win when you got in the position you did by lying to the government to steal code.

Notably (as far as I can tell) it established nothing whatsoever about antitrust law, which is what is at issue in this case and presumably what would be at issue in a similar case related to consoles.

Is there another case you are thinking of?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Games_Corp._v._Nintendo_....

Sega v Accolade also seems relevant here, and held that reverse engineering to create unlicensed Sega Genesis games was fair use and thus permissible (though in a later settlement, Accolade did become a licensed developer).

Antitrust violations were part of the suit brought against Nintendo, but the court basically ignored those in the ruling.

Here's a legal analysis that predates the ruling:

https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar/489/

It outlines the requirements for a successful antitrust case, particularly that simply having a monopoly is not enough.

Didn't epic get a sweet deal to open cross platform play for fortnite? That platform isn't walled if you have enough money.

He explained his view on this back in 2018:

"There’s a rationale for this on console where there's enormous investment in hardware, often sold below cost, and marketing campaigns in broad partnership with publishers. But on open platforms, 30 per cent is disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform, such as payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service."[1]

Low margins on hardware definitely does not apply to Apple (they famously have much higher margins on their devices than their competition), and the (paid) App Store exposure doesn't really match "marketing campaigns in broad partnership with publishers" either.

Not saying he's completely right, but I can see his reasoning and I don't think he's a hypocrite in this case.

[1]: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-07-31-30-percent...

Tim apparently lacks experience with margins on J2ME, Symbian, Brew, Blackberry, Windows CE/Pocket PC.

Perhaps that's because he's concerned about mobile platforms where one can actually make money.

Can I go into any retailer and open my own store?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com