Tim Sweeney on why Epic did better against Google than Apple in court

I've never considered switching to Android.

And despite the fact that I want a wide variety of options, I prefer MacBooks, I prefer many Apple services, including software.

Otherwise, you can put non-Unreal games on EGS, and you can put Unreal games on other stores. EGS does not give you benefits if you choose to publish an Unreal game on EGS, and I'd be surprised if all the games EGS buys exclusivity for are Unreal games.

Epic does sell their own games on Epic Game Store, but they also sell most of their games on Steam too (with the huge exception of Fortnite, though it's free to play)

I know you’re probably trying to focus specifically on cost to provide the software and not the cost before that (which I’d argue is flawed) but you’re also then missing out on the support cost etc… from there on out.

Nintendo has never sold a console at a loss, Sony hasn't done it since the PS3 in 2006 and Microsoft since the 360. So it's not the norm since more than a decade.

In one case you still have a monopoly, but operated by the state. This generally goes poorly. A state agency is only weakly accountable to voters and not really accountable to customers at all. This is only marginally better than a private monopoly, if at all.

In the other case you break a private monopoly and move to a competitive market. The competitors are directly accountable to customers, who can choose someone else if anyone tries to charge high fees or the customers otherwise don't like you.

Suppose there were two cellphone platforms and they were both equally terrible, or equally good. But each one locked the customers out of their own property -- you have to use their app store, their cloud services, you can't install their operating system on anyone else's hardware or vice versa. Mandatory lock-in to all of their other services, competition impaired.

This is not okay just because there are two of them instead of one, because it's what causes there to be two of them instead of dozens. You can't enter the market without replicating the entire vertically integrated conglomerate because someone who makes only hardware, or an operating system, or an app store, can't use it with the existing ones.

It removes consumer choice, and each of the conglomerates could continue extending the stack in either direction until you have to buy your house and car and all of your groceries, appliances and media from the same company as you get your phone.

This is not the same thing as vertical integration. The same company could make a CPU and an app store without having them bound together so that you can't choose one without the other. You could choose to get everything from the same company, but you shouldn't be required to just because that's what the company wants.

If the market were three or four companies all behaving exactly like Apple, there still is a clear & present need for government intervention, a clear "consumer harm" by creating technological intermediary overlords with total control over information technology.

Apple defenders love pointing out that there is choice, that folks can go to Android. But what if Android were just as lawful-evil malevolent a force?

You're in one conversation. Many other people are in a completely different conversation, something like:

Isn't Android more open than tons of closed systems, who will never be punished... and isn't that evidence that the law itself is written poorly?

For example, RRPs are generally considered illegal, you can't force your customers to sale at specified minimum price, and more crucially, you can't do it selectively.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collusion

Edit: since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38623158 was posted, maybe we can try that one and see if the thread turns out any better.