I for one would welcome a mobile store from Valve, Epic etc, especially if I could have my purchases work on multiple mobile platforms.
Would they also make Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft open up their platforms?
God I hope so.
They would not be able to recover their costs early enough in the lifecycle. Which means that the time between console releases would be much longer than it already is.
It also would put Nintendo in an untenable situation since they rely on low price hardware as their differentiation.
At this point consoles have very few advantages to PC. If they got "opened up" it would be zero.
Because Acer, Asus etc could simply come along and undercut them on price and still have access to the exact same game catalog. And then they would each decide to add more proprietary features or add more performance.
And so you've just recreated the PC gaming market again.
What's the issue with that?
Developers certainly have no problem making PC games.
Can you say the same about buying any PC? Will that be true for any game you buy for the next five years?
That will be a much better experience for me as a consumer.
There is no need to open up consoles. You don’t have to buy them. The PC is incredibly healthy as a gaming platform.
Please let people like me who want to gaming appliance have it without screwing it up.
Besides, even if someone somehow forced, say, PlayStation to be cross-compatible with other platforms for some reason - it's not like the issues you described are exactly plaguing PCs nowadays. With very rare exceptions (like ancient or heavily modded games), the experience is pretty much "Press 'Play' on your launcher of choice -> Play game".
How is a market with three competitors, four if you count PCs and even more if you count phones “a monopoly”?
Btw, the judge in the Apple case said that Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in game distribution
That would all disappear if you could side-load any content.
It's the fact that Nintendo, Sony etc wouldn't be able to enforce any licensing revenue since users could just install any game directly.
For Nintendo it would decimate the company since it's their primary revenue stream.
I think the benefit of being in the Nintendo store is far higher than that, and they'd do fine. And they have lots of first party games too.
Random sideloaded games are just irrelevant when people are buying the systems for Zelda and Pokemon.
Nintendo charges 30% on the sale of every game sold.
Looking at the current best sellers [1] they would stand to lose a significant amount of money.
Easily in the billions based on current revenue.
[1] https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/games/best-sellers/#sort=d...
Well, that certainly will bode well for the future.
https://www.wired.com/story/jury-will-decide-if-googles-play...
Google, on the other hand, just got pilloried because they are not the phone manufacturer (for the most post), but instead were using their position as the producers of android to pressure phone manufacturers and companies to not compete. Their own internal docs showed the extreme lengths they were willing to go to stop companies from producing third party apps stores. It was this stifling of completion that just got them reamed by the court
It's quite literally impossible for apple to be do the same, because they've banned installing apps at all on their platform. Clearly the right move for Google would have been to do the same 15 years ago and saved themselves the headache.
Apple doesn’t really make these deals, so they weren’t punished for that.
If it was revealed that Sony gave Epic a special marketing deal to prevent Epic from launching a console, then yeah that would be pretty dodgy!
If they left it alone and all OEMs chose to keep Google play store and billing, nothing would’ve happened.
I know for sure that if it were possible to sideload software onto my Switch or PS5, that would definitely benefit me as a consumer. The fact that I have a reasonably powerful computer attached to my TV but can't install software on it without convincing Sony to sell me a janky dev kit for way too much money is just wasteful.
Just about the only objection I can imagine is "piracy", but the locked-down nature of these platforms has surely not stopped piracy from occurring. Nor has piracy caused the failure of Valve's game store or the downfall of their gaming hardware.
You need a new law to say that.
Google got in trouble for saying that you could do something and then secretly undermining it. Whether or not third-party app stores were allowed on devices was not the core issue.
I suspect they'll end up ruling in favor of Epic, in some limited fashion. But let's see!
I saw plenty of people who never installed anything because it was PITA.
There’s a reason the App Store revolutionized things.
My mom searched for a printer driver and ended up installing some third party crap wars on her computer
I've said it before, I'll say it again, as many times as people need to hear it: There is no such thing as, "I'm just not a computer person!" We're over and done with that era of human history. Just like we're over and done with, "I just can't read and write!" Too bad. You live in a world were reading and writing is required just to exist. It's been that way for about 100 years, give or take depending on who you ask.
Now you need to have basic understanding of computers and the Internet. That's the world we're living in now.
Should we ban cars since there are people who cannot drive?
The point is that if you are the owner of the device you get to choose what to do with it, not Google. If the trade off for that freedom is an increased risk of malware then so be it. The people that want to only use the Google Play store as their source of software are free to do so, that's the beauty of your device being /your/ device.
I’ve also known since then that if I wanted an open device, I bought one and not complained about a device that I knew going in that I couldn’t program.
The point is that this isn't 1986 anymore and when everyone's devices are locked down it prevents competition because there's no distribution method for homebrew software. If there was no ability to install custom OSs on IBM and IBM-compatible machines we wouldn't have Linux. And if Microsoft was the gatekeeper of what websites could be displayed on IE in the 90s we wouldn't have the web in the form we know it today. So sure, you personally may be able to buy development boards specifically but when you can't get your software to the average person's device, what does that mean for adding competition to the market?
I'd much rather live in a world where being more open means there might be some malware lurking as opposed to one where everything is so locked down that I am at the mercy of what these large corporations deem acceptable for me to do on hardware that I "own" in the name of safety and security.
There is very much a choice of homebrew applications - buy one of the “few” devices you admitted existed and develop for it.
You could even buy one of the Linux phones.
> So sure, you personally may be able to buy development boards specifically but when you can't get your software to the average person's device, what does that mean for adding competition to the market?
The “average” person decided that they didn’t care about obtaining homebrew applications enough to buy such a device.
> I'd much rather live in a world where being more open means there might be some malware lurking as opposed to one where everything is so locked down that I am at the mercy of what these large corporations deem acceptable for me to do on hardware that I "own" in the name of safety and security.
And you are free to make that trade off and buy such a device.
Your view seems to be that the free market will solve all ills then and that if this was really something so important then the average consumer would care about it and change the situation. However, 100+ years of anti-trust laws would disagree with this position. It should be fairly obvious that building a new mobile ecosystem would require an insane amount of investment to the point that it's essentially impossible now. As such, the conclusion that "everyone who cares can just buy a Linux phone" is not a viable solution as it's not feasible for a competitor trying to do that to survive long enough in the industry before being run into the ground due to the anti-competitive behavior of Apple and Google locking everyone else out of access to their operating system's users outside of their formal, approved channels.
If we relied on the average person to act in the interest of ensuring viable competition can enter a market we'd be living in the world of the early 1900s with completely vertically and horizontally integrated Standard Oil type corporations controlling every industry. Not that we're too far off from that currently unfortunately, but your view of letting the free market control who has adequate access to potential marketshare in a given industry is incredibly naive and illustrates the exact reason why we need anti-trust laws in the first place and enforcement of those laws. That's all I have to say on the matter.
The stores can be the exact same with the fees removed and device prices hiked, afaict
You can also download apps from the "f droid" depository.
You can even turn on developer options and install raw apk files. Those can contain viruses. (Or more probably: are pirated)
Funny to have this discussion hacker news? I thought everyone was using side loaded apks from apkmirror when you needed an old version.
a) Apple, Google etc could just refuse to host any apps that are being sold on other stores. This sort of exclusivity is common place and legal.
b) Larger developers who have their own agendas like Epic and their metaverse will run their own stores.
c) Everyone else will stay with Apple/Google. The costs of running a third party store are significant and ultimately developers or consumers will need to pay for it. So either end users or developers will end up having to pay more for an experience that is far worse than what they have today. And if a) ends up true then developers would lose their biggest distribution channel.
They just want to get to be the middleman instead of Apple/Google.
This seems like an enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of thing… be very careful supporting them. They’re not a paragon of virtue.