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Comment by belltaco | Hacker News Reader

It was the same when Apple banned Fortnite for daring to accept payments outside of their walled garden and the forced 30% cut. People falling over themselves to hate on Epic and defend Apple's forced cut and the total removal of developer freedom. If it was Microsoft the entire tone would be completely different.

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You wonder why the company with 95% market share is treated differently than the company with 40% market share.

Does Epic Games give developers "total freedom" with Unreal Engine or will they insist upon their royalty when applicable? You can read their FAQ and there's literally a section titled "Why does Epic think it’s fair to ask for a percentage of a developer’s product revenue?"

What's good for the goose, etc.

5% Royalty past $1m for using the most high tech game engine in the world is a totally reasonable price. Just like 3% for using payment services is totally reasonable. But 30% for using a distribution service is just absurd. The only reason the app stores can charge that much is because of their iron grip on the platforms.

By agreeing that some amount is acceptable, you've conceded the principle. As the famous saying goes, we’re just haggling over the price.

As for whether 3% is reasonable, again we can look to Epic for evidence. Epic's own Steam competitor takes a 12% cut — and they admitted in court that it was a money-losing venture. That should stop and make you think. The Epic Games Store isn't even a complex ecosystem, it's just a glorified Windows app downloader and even then they couldn't make a profit at 12%.

Apple argues that their 15% fee for most (30% for the ultra-successful) pays for a lot more than just payment services. It pays for absorbing the cost of fraud. It pays for dealing with refunds. It pays for developing the APIs. It pays for employing an enormous team to perform some imperfect-but-useful oversight over the 1,800,000 apps in their store. It pays for a lot of things.

If you think Apple makes too much money, fine. That's a perfectly fine argument to make. That's a very different one to claiming that they're not entitled to make money. Or that the government should dictate prices at them.

But we are not haggling over the price. apple has control over an enormous portion of the market. I can't haggle because the big guy controls everything.

And saying apples cut pays for more services is just hilarious. we are forced to use those services and forced to pay for them. Stripe does refunds and fraud detection. There are other app development platforms for API's like kotlin and flutter.

And you and I both know that apple's margins on the app store is a joke. Thats why they dont report it seperatly in their financials. Whether epic couldnt make it is their problem.

> But we are not haggling over the price.

You argue that a 5% cut is reasonable and a 15% cut is not reasonable. You are haggling over the price.

EGS only loses money because they have to buy their customers by giving away free games, to try to dislodge Steam's position. The infrastructure costs of EGS cannot be that high.

Apple spends billions of dollars to get customers too.

> But 30% for using a distribution service is just absurd.

It’s the market rate. Almost all retail stores online and offline charge 30%.

Boxed software at physical retail stores was more like 70–90% of revenues, split between the retailer, distributor, publisher, and manufacturing.

I doubt manufacturing gets a percentage cut - doubt they want such a cut. Manufacturing likely charges by how much you ask them to produce. They will quote you a price for your order and maybe include a discount for large volumes.

Manufacturers gets paid, and they'll expect to make a profit. No, they don't take a percentage, but that's a rather academic distinction when the unit cost for manufacturing is $5 and your product isn't marketable with a price exceeding $50.

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