Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

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Let's look at games consoles. The way the console manufacturer makes money is by operating a store and providing access to the platform to games publishers, they generally make a loss on the device. It would break the industry to demand that they must allow alternative app stores on their consoles, as those third party app stores would be parasitizing the work the console developer did designing, manufacturing, developing the OS and services, etc and subsidising the devices.

Nintendo is unique in that they actually make some small amount of money on their devices. Does that mean they should be required to allow alternative stores on the Switch?

Apple make a lot of money on their devices, but they still did all the work developing the product, maintaining the OS, supporting the ongoing costs of device services like iMessage and location services that they don't charge for. The App Store arguably provides recurring revenue to offset those costs, which alternate stores would not help support.

Is it really fair to require manufacturers to allow third party app stores to free ride on all the work they've done?Maybe there is an argument that if a manufacturer makes enough money on the device they should allow third party app stores, but how much is it? At what point does it become ok to bar the device manufacturer from maintaining an exclusive app store?

The problem is that you are comparing a device sold to play games to a general purpose device (music, videos, games, banking, productivity, healthcare, phone, modem...).

While consumers generally don't have too many expectations from being able to do much more on a game console (though that is changing on the XBox), people expect a LOT more from their minicomputer in a phone shape. Hampering control on that device is detrimental to the consumer who paid already a LOT for that device.

What, you don’t watch movies on your game device? You don’t surf the web? You don’t connect to social media?

Because all the game devices I’ve seen lately have been much more capable as universal devices than most desktop computers from previous decades.

I don’t see why being able to run different types of software should change the legal situation.

> It would break the industry to demand that they must allow alternative app stores on their consoles, as those third party app stores would be parasitizing the work the console developer did designing, manufacturing, developing the OS and services, etc and subsidising the devices.

This is a weird objection. It's like saying that if you ban robocalls, it will break the robocalling industry. Well, yeah, that's the point. That business model is abusive.

It doesn't cause game consoles to not exist, they would just work differently. You would pay the actual cost for the hardware and less for games.

The overall cost would plausibly be less because there is no need for any of this lock-in business anymore. Instead of buying a "PlayStation" for $300 you buy a copy of PlayStationOS for $50 and install it as a secondary OS on your Xbox or PC. Then a console costs more but you need a third as many of them, meanwhile all the games are cheaper because they're not paying a huge cut to a gatekeeper.

> It doesn't cause game consoles to not exist, they would just work differently. You would pay the actual cost for the hardware and less for games.

That’s simply not an option for a lot of people. $800 for a console is just beyond many people’s reach. The economics of consoles work for several reasons. One is the person buying the console often isn’t the person buying the games. An uncle might get the console for a kid and a parent might mainly buy the games, or several adults might buy games for them. This efficiently distributes the cost over people and over time.

Yours is typical wealthy person thinking, but people on more modest incomes find it hard to make up front capital purchases. They may not be able to plan their finances long term if they have highly variable income. Pushing more of the cost into the games means they can easily scale their spending to match their current circumstances. Up front costs or even regular monthly payments on a financed purchase don’t let them do that. The net result would be a crash in console sales that benefits nobody.

> Yours is typical wealthy person thinking, but people on more modest incomes find it hard to make up front capital purchases.

Making the overall cost lower causes things to be more affordable. Up front cost is solved by installment plans.

> The economics of consoles work for several reasons. One is the person buying the console often isn’t the person buying the games.

All of these people are generally on good terms with each other. So now the parents and the uncle go in together on the console with the parents using some of the money they're saving because the games now cost less. Or the uncle buys the generation N console on an installment plan and the parents, having saved money on games all through generation N, use it to buy the generation N+1 console instead of the uncle.

> Pushing more of the cost into the games means they can easily scale their spending to match their current circumstances.

This is possible regardless. If you have less money, you have either a PlayStation or an Xbox instead of both. If you have less money than that, you have the previous generation for longer. And then the games cost less so you get more of them.

Having half as many consoles with twice as many games is a good deal.

> The net result would be a crash in console sales that benefits nobody.

When the total cost goes down, people generally buy more of a thing.

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