They have to my knowledge never produced a game, or a "real" console, yet they rake in more gaming money than any other? That's a hostage situation by any measure.
Am I looking at this wrong?
For example, it is a weak argument to point out they have not produced a game or a gaming-first console, ie marketed to gamers primarily with the additional capabilities of doing other things. Gaming has been "the other thing".
The reason being that antitrust and anti-monopoly actions from the government are to highlight antimcompetitive practices towards other competitors. Simply winning the lion share of the market has no regulation against it, becoming more vertically integrated or it being pure happenstance that consumers choose to generate revenue for you on the platform is not something we regulate.
Now, by "hostage situation" you must be referring to the developers? You might have an angle here but not in a way that would really change anything. Antitrust regulation here would simply make Apple provide the ability for developers to have alternative payment methods.
So, not clear exactly what you are referring to or want to happen. But I think there are stronger arguments to support what you want to happen. As long as Apple doesn't ever do anything to Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo etc in the gaming space, they'll be fine.
Appstore is doing it by being the only allowed storefront on a general computing device.
So yeah, your comparison is great if you mean to say that Appstore and Steam should compete under the same conditions.
Get Steam onto iOS and we'll see if the store cuts stay the same, for either party.
IMO, yes. Their cut is the same as the big gaming companies (30%), they're just in more hands - they have a bigger market than the consoles.
EDIT: TFA is comparing Apple to Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo here, all of which have walled garden stores on their consoles, which all charge ~30%. This is rather important context.
Which, as a side note, you are forced to use on those devices.
How is this a qualitatively different situation from Apple then?
The standard being asked for and the outrage only being applied to Apple seems... fake.
Consoles still play games as a core competency, but they can also also run a broad array of apps. I can, for example, watch YouTube and Hulu, and browse the web, on my Switch.
This made me think about why I'm more and more OK with hardware being limited to "blessed" activities.
The older I get, the more time I like to spend doing activities, as opposed to spending time configuring software and hardware to do activities. I don't value getting things working as its own endeavor anymore.
As such, and after spending several decades fighting Microsoft, Apple, and Linux to play videogames on my PC, I value a console's focus on playing games as their core competency.
I like that I can turn on my playstation, pick a game, and not have to figure out the optimal settings for my graphics card, installation options, or wonder if my drivers are properly updated for this game.
Sure, it's not perfect, but it's also no longer my job to perfect.
I still use a computer to do general computing tasks, but it's only doing the tasks I can't do elsewhere. And those tasks are few in number, though great in importance to my hobbies.
By this logic they have never produced a ‘real’ phone.
Apple has invested hugely at every level in making iOS into a games platform.
Now, Apple knows this. There are technologies (MoltenVK) that are actively being developed to fill this gap. A lot of this tooling is in it's infancy though, and requires an insane amount of overhead to run (doubly so on ARM). The current consensus is that Apple's graphics APIs are too unstable for most cross-platform titles to target, and most game studios would rather not divide their dev teams into "the Mac people" and "the every-other-platform people".
Apple is clearly doing extremely well for themselves and I'm not claiming it's a mistake on their part. But as a user who enjoys playing games, MacOS is by far the worst system for it. Linux is leagues ahead now due to proton and Vulkan.
The hardware is powerful enough for some gaming on macos but nothing supports it. I can get CSGO and RuneScape running reasonably well but those are almost certainly on OpenGL and not Molten.
I think the only significant Molten support has been in the pro video / 3D space.
In short, getting games to run in any capacity on MacOS right now is just not worth the effort. Linux was barely able to do it with the full cooperation of the kernel developers. It's a suicide mission on a system like MacOS.
My hope is that if the macbooks start to take up more of the market, either Apple will cave on Vulkan or Valve will find some way to make proton work.
If games programming was about economics, we wouldn't be hiring developers in the first place.
There are no other platforms on the devices. Saying I can buy another house if I could only choose one electricity provider or ISP isn't a good defense (in those cases either).
Just look at how big ATVI's mobile gaming revenue is: it rivals (and sometimes beats) the revenue from their "core" products (a'la Call of Duty).
I was more talking about the size of the current install base of the platforms (iOS, Xbox etc) though.
And if that second install base is 8B, and even if only 10% of them play a game, that's still an 800M user market - which is bloody huge.
The actual percentage of game players is significantly higher - some online queries put it at of 50% of smartphone users. That's a potential market of over 4B if we use your assumptions.
Additionally, if you own a phone, you have the potential to buy a game at any time. You just need to be converted (and Apple puts a lot of effort into that in their app store). It's also much lower friction to get a game on a phone than a standard computer (which is, admittedly, pretty low to begin with).
It's what allows Apple have more game-related revenue than Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo combined.
Music, check. Videos (including streaming platforms), check. Games, triple-check. Browser, check. Apps to make games, check. Exploitative apps, check.
No Kindle/Kobe readers though. Unfortunate, that.
It's forced Internet Explorer on Windows, except 100 times worse because it permeates through the entire platform.
You can't get any other storefronts because that wouldn't funnel money to them. You can't get any game streaming apps, because see first point.
They're general purpose devices in anything that makes them money, and nothing else. It's not because they won't spend money to introduce that functionality, but that they specifically spend money on denying that functionality.
AOL won a suit against Microsoft for integrating IE in Windows. How on Earth is Apple any better? Just to make an add-on point they even force every other browser on iOS to use webkit.
Love it, hate it, they have their value.
Do you think the ruling in AOL v Microsoft was wrong?
You completely dodged that aspect by linking to a comment about games consoles.
So much freedom! I get to market my stuff to poor people and picky, principled tech users.
We haven't seen the last antitrust case against them. I'm certainly looking forward to them getting knocked down a few pegs. Only a stool pigeon would defend their behavior.