Tim Sweeney praises public domain and GPL software; hints at GPL Epic
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Like Apple built the iOS ecosystem, the App Store, and all the tooling around those that allow you to market a game to millions of new customers?
The same Apple you’re suing because you don’t like having to pay them for their effort? When Epic literally requires a fee for developers who want to host their games on their store?
For fuck sake, I’m sorry but this guy nauseates me.
What effort? One of Epic's main arguments is that they want to distribute their iOS app without using Apple's services, but they can't because of artificial restrictions that Apple has implemented inside a product that, once sold to the customer who is Epic's target for the app, no longer belongs to them.
I think the 30% cut is ridiculous but it's a give and take for both companies.
But it's not like Epic is selling that, or asking Apple to allow them to have their own manufacturing plant for iPhones, is it?
The iPhone is an instruction-executing machine. That's what people buy. Epic wants to offer a specific set of instructions that people who already use the iPhone can execute. Why should Epic have to go through Apple to do it, if there's nothing in that machine that would prevent Epic from doing it on their own, besides artificial limitations which only have that specific purpose?
That's not what people buy; that's the hardware they receive as part of their purchase.
The effort to build into iOS the APIs needed for Epic's games. The effort to document those APIs and host developer conferences where actual iOS devs give instruction on how to use them. Do you see any first-party iOS games that look anything like what Epic sells? I sure don't.
If it is seriously costing them serious money to maintain the current state of their documentation then something is seriously wrong.
I'd say no, not like that. He seems to be praising FOSS and similar. Even ignoring the antitrust stuff, what Apple offers is paid proprietary software/services/hardware.
> When Epic literally requires a fee for developers who want to host their games on their store?
If Epic manufactured the majority of, say, desktop computers in the US and used that position to force an operating system which forces a package manager which forces a payment processor which takes an uncompetitively large cut, and actively suppressed any attempts at creating alternate package managers, and forbade telling the user about the existence of this cut (such that they could make informed choices about it), then I'd agree with the implication of hypocrisy.
That's not currently the case though. It's nonsense to pretend that just charging for hosting is the issue.
If alternatives were available without artificial hurdles and users/developers were allowed to make an informed choice, then I think that Apple's hardware and iOS would still do fine and be considered worth their price by many. Likely even that many developers would continue to pay the developer license fee to be able to build and distribute apps with Apple's tooling. I don't think the same can be said of the App Store though - I imagine we'd quickly figure out how much people actually consider that to be worth.
"Tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem" - Steve Jobs in a 2011 strategy email