Epic games CEO Tim Sweeney thinks ‘every politician should fear’ Apple’s power
theverge.com
theverge.com
Ubisoft could just create an app to avoid Steam.
It's not possible to do that in the mobile space.
And yet here Valve is with SteamOS and the Steam Deck.
It doesn’t actually have to capture the market, it just has to exist as a threat. It’s worked for ages threatening to move to Linux to get steep discounts from MS.
Steam failed to get any traction with SteamOS as a desktop systems before Steam Deck, so I think it reinforces my point.
To his credit that’s a substantially large club, he’s not alone.
(Edit)
To elaborate, he’s balking at a company having control over a platform that they built and charge for to help maintain the platform.
Every company wants to own and drive the platform, and that’s been the desire since at least the 80’s.
Tim would like to build a metaverse and own that platform, and doesn’t like that today he’d have to build it on top of other platforms and pay a price to do so.
This is simply not true. First because Fortnite was a desktop first game.
But philosophically, I really struggle with the idea that just because something sits on the app store then Apple deserves the credit for any success.
It's like saying that Fortnite owes MS windows and Intel for their success. Sure at some level, but not in any real or practical way.
Can you imagine if Windows took 30% of all desktop software sales since the dawn of Win 3.1, and what a worse place computing would be in?
Nobody has to hawk their goods on iOS and if there wasn’t money in it nobody would. If Epic didn’t stand to make assloads of money they wouldn’t saber-rattle every few months or fight these legal battles. If anything the fact that everyone complains about their pricing but still publishes on iOS means they have the pricing exactly right.
But this ignores their market position on mobile phones and the barriers to creating an open competing mobile phone.
It's like if there were two car companies and you could buy tires from them, but if you wanted to buy tires from a third party you had to pay Ford or Chevy 30% tax because you were putting them on their cars.
And you want to tell the tire companies too bad, you don't have to sell tires.
Tolls and taxes bother me but I don’t pretend to not understand them.
Pricing power comes from market power.
Apple has market power because they were first in the new generation of touchscreen phones.
Some app developers have hugely benefited.
Some app developers already have an audience and just want their software to be available on all platforms and Apple is using it's market position to extract a toll. I think it's abusive given it's market power.
Epic doesn't care about metal or xcode and if there was an open phone that had market position (like Windows PC) Epic would be fine to port it's software to that system.
Apple's toll comes from it's market position, not it's investment. The investment created the position -- but For how long does the consumer need to pay Apple's toll for being first 15 years ago? Forever? Apple recouped it's investment many many many times over.
To your point about financial apps, most can and do offer their services on websites as well. Those websites aren’t relying on infrastructure and SDKs paid for by Apple.
If the current percentage isn’t fair, what is?
Honest question.
Isn't that true for fortnite too? I bet 90% of the code and infra involved in an in-game Fortnite purchase belongs to Epic and is common to all the different platforms they support.
Whatever Apple can negotiate with Epic after Apple is forced to allow Fortnite to bypass the app store and the 30% cut.
I don't know what number that is, but it's not 30% for Epic. I'm sure plenty would pay it, but plenty would not.
Massively profitable isn't enough when you could be ... supermassively profitable!
> Most companies are balking at a 30% surcharge on everything purchased for essentially app reviewing and listing in a store
That's probably why Fortnite is not available on Google Play or in the Nintendo eShop. Few companies are willing to pay Google's or Nintendo's platform fees.
Users can end up losing anytime there are dominant players, but I don’t think Tim is arguing for anything to help users, he’s arguing to help himself and that’s my point. This isn’t some kind of altruistic mission he’s on.
If someone does something that helps a situation we should support it.
If Google/Apple doesn't want a law to pass, all they have to do is push a notification to every one of their users.
The platform power of Apple's walled garden will destroy startup culture. Any great idea can vertically integrated directly into the platform, OR taxed 30% until the only real winner is Apple, OR nullified by kicking it off the app store without comment.
Not even Google is safe. Search is something Apple could do "good enough" at this point...and all they really have to do is threaten Google with being booted as the preferred search engine and Sundar Pichai will bid more and more and more until he is paying Apple $25 bln a year for the privilege.
Android will be relegated to Samsung making phones for poor people. Windows will die because other than gamers, no one under 30 uses it.
Who is safe? Amazon. Apple doesn't want to be in the warehouse business. Also Tesla. Apple will never catch them. Everyone else will lose and suffer the Apple monopoly.