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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

More like an admission of defeat ;) After all 15% is still higher than the highest EGS tax which is 12%. Good news nonetheless.

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I think that the real prize Epic is after is introduction of independent app stores. 30% tax is just a convenient vehicle they're using for that (not mentioning that they pay that tax on consoles without a word).

Why would you think it's an admission of defeat when Epic Games won't qualify for the 15%? To those that haven't read the article:

> The new App Store Small Business Program, as it’s called, will allow any developer who earns less than $1 million in annual sales per year from all of their apps to qualify for a reduced App Store cut of 15 percent, half of Apple’s standard 30 percent fee, on all paid app revenue and in-app purchases.

But this whole fight was never about Apple's cut, but rather about Tencent (and other Chinese apps) risking getting kicked off the App Store and thus needing to put pressure on Apple to allow third-party app installations. But since Trump lost the re-election then they probably don't have to worry anymore.

That's a bit too far into the tinfoil-hat territory. Apple had to do something to counter the mostly bad publicity for them around the whole App Store topic. But they can't simply reduce the store tax for everyone, because this would cut their App Store revenue in half overnight. The vast majority of apps on the app store most likely make a lot less than 1 million/year, while the vast majority of profits is made through a "handful" (well ok, probably a few more then that) massively big apps, so this announcement probably won't make a big dent in Apple's App Store revenue (but will make a lot of indie devs happy).

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