Tim Sweeney: " Now Apple is demanding a 30% cut of all Patreon DONATIONS
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If you derive satisfaction from a product, expect someone to produce it, and support that process, then it is a purchase regardless of what someone calls it.
I mean pretty much every part of this is incorrect.
Lets say they are single in the USA and made $150k on Patreon:
(12% * 47150)+(22% * (100525-47151)) + (24% * (150000-100526)) = $29,3000 -> 20%
<https://support.patreon.com/hc/article_attachments/288492020...>
WEB
* $10.00 sale -> $0.80 Patreon + 0.59 Fee, $0.00 to Apple, $6.89 to creator, $1.72 to gov't [FED]
* $10.00 sale -> $0.80 Patreon + 0.59 Fee, $0.00 to Apple, $6.02 to creator, $2.58 to gov't [FED+10% State]
IAP + default price bump
* $14.50 sale -> $1.15 Patreon + 0.00 Fee, $4.35 to Apple, $7.19 to creator, $1.80 to gov't [FED]
* $14.50 sale -> $1.16 Patreon + 0.00 Fee, $4.35 to Apple, $6.29 to creator, $2.70 to gov't [FED+10% State]
Users who care about the cost increase will go to the website. The others will pay in app and be stoked that they can just go to one place to cancel any iOS subscription. If they use their Apple Card, they can literally click any transaction in the Wallet app to see exactly what sub they were charged for.
So much of these anti-console anti-appliance threads boil down to:
Value-adding experiences consumers want enough to pay for (such as peace of mind that anything bought here can be cancelled no questions asked) should be prohibited, because I don't want to offer that experience.
It's basically a social club that gets a pass on taxes because they believe in magic.
We don't gate anything behind the payments, and it's extremely unlikely we'd ever even consider doing so.
A quick search doesn't suggest that the apache foundation uses patreon...
Conceptually, why should a "donation" be any different than a "payment" in regards to the Apple tax? Regardless of their current legal agreement attempts to disambiguate these, they are conceptually quite the same. In one case you receive a good, in another you receive good-will.
Should Apple be entitled to 30% of these voluntary payments? Some of you will say "yes", but I'd bet pretty strongly the vast majority of the public would say "no".
And legislation will follow eventually, in my opinion, despite the US government/courts moving very slowly here.
Continued acts like these will only move up the timeline and increase the number of lawsuits which will eventually tip against Apple.
Apple believes so, because Apple is so arrogant as to think that the payment wouldn't have occurred had it not been for their hard work on the platform.
It's false, of course. It'd be like Bell Telephone asking for a cut of your profits because you negotiated a business deal over the phone. Or the cell phone carriers forcing you to pay them $7 for a 20-second ringtone.
We traded one villain for another.
If you want to send $10 to someone using Venmo, it would be absurd for Apple to charge $3 of the $10 you are trying to send.
On the other hand, if Venmo charges a $1.50 fee for this service, it would make sense for Apple to charge 30% of that.
Not trolling - and I think Apple is greedy here. Still I need pointing out how your arguments is not logical.
This is like saying you can only sell your product for a % of someone else profit.
Apple should be allowed to charge whatever they want - as long as they don't have monopoly on the process. That is the crux of the problem here. Monopoly is the problem not the percentages.
It should absolutely illegal for a company to tax your revenues like this.
It seems it only becomes a problem when there is external pressure that where accepting the giving of giving 30% to Apple is seen as the best of a bad situation. But that's what anti-monopolistic efforts are supposed to avoid.
Well, no, society is much better off with these things blocked off. There are immensely perverse incentives created.
The main one here is just straight up collusion because there’s not many distributors by nature. It’s dumb as hell that steam takes as much as it does. It’s not helped by clauses about not charging less elsewhere even if the fees are lower which should also be illegal
Sure. Why not? Typically society would only be concerned with the servitude becoming involuntary. Thus the right to be enslaved would be expected to also come the right to end enslavement at will. That said, in most jurisdictions marriage dissolution is happy to uphold involuntary servitude so we're not entirely consistent here.
> Suppose a guy wants to sell his organs?
Likewise, society might take issue with it because of its once and done nature. Decide that selling your organs was a bad idea and don't want to do it anymore? Too bad. You are already dead. However, relatedly, things like the sale of blood often is legally accepted as you can stop providing blood at any time if you find the association is no longer working for you.
Aside from the monopolistic considerations, the 30% offer to Apple would normally be acceptable to society because, like blood, one can stop offering it in the future should they no longer find it to be desirable. If it were a contract that states that you will pay 30% and on all future transactions for the rest of your life, even if you stop liking the idea, then society would undoubtedly take issue with it. But that in no way has any relationship to what is being talked about here.
Now, the monopolistic considerations are not typically accepted by society, but, indeed, we have gotten pretty lazy in doing anything about it.
Minimum wage.
Sure, which it can do because of the monopolistic position it has entrenched itself with. If that were cleaned up, it would no longer be in a position to do that. But the other commenter doesn't agree with you. He says that is an entirely different problem.
Is suspect you will soon find a monopoly, though, and that you’re merely confusing some external interpretations with what is defined within the context of this particular.
That is clearly not the same thing. Why don't you do the exact same thing? I mean, other than the monopolistic efforts holding you back.
(I recognize that you are trying to bring your own monopolistic definition to the table, and while I'm sure it has merit as a better definition, I fail to understand what value you think there is in trying to change the subject? Why not just stick to the topic in progress like everyone else, even if you don't love everything about it? The rest of us probably don't love it either, but that's not a good reason to toss the ball to the side in an effort to disrupt play because it isn't the brand of ball you have a preference for.)
The point I'm making isn't that Apple is doing good here - I absolutely hate it, actually. The point I'm making is that the issue isn't that there's a monopoly, strictly speaking, but that Apple engages in anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices which are harmful even without a monopoly.
I made the same mistake at one point, so I feel for you[1], but what was actually said was "monopolistic". That is not the same as a monopoly. One can act in a monopolistic manner without actually having a monopoly.
[1] But I don't feel for, and frankly find it incredibly strange, that you are now doubling down on your mistake after it was brought to your attention that you were speaking outside of the context of discussion.
I'm taking monopolistic position to mean a grossly dominant market position short of a monopoly. If you meant it as engaging in "monopolistic competition", that's another concept entirely that's irrelevant here. I also took monopolistic behaviour to mean behaviour seeking to monopolize.
literally all you have to do is `brew install altserver` and then be on wifi with your laptop once a week.
I don't think the word DONATION is irrelevant at all.
Tim Sweeney is using the word "DONATION" deliberately to make Apple look like someone that steals even the "donations".
You know like someone stealing from the church lockbox.
I am not supporting Apple here at all, I am just pointing out the attempt to manipulate public opinion.
"If you derive satisfaction from an series of artistic works, and you know the person who creates those artistic works, and you decide to send money to support that person..."
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edit: and this is closer to the reality, because plenty of people subscribe to someone's patreon (or donate to them in other ways) for "products" that they have already consumed, or because they want other people to consume those products.
For an example of the latter: when financing journalists with mostly or completely open newsletters on substack. People generally aren't paying journalists because they want to read exciting stories. They're paying journalists because they want certain stories and types of stories to be investigated and written. They're not people who are paying to consume.
It depends. Is the author giving away content for free or is it paywalled? There are both types of authors using patreon.
> then it is a purchase regardless of what someone calls it.
I'm comfortable saying that the authors who give it away for free and ask for donations are, in fact, receiving donations.
to me that is the main distinction, who is benefiting from making that monetary contribution
otherwise, it is just an issue of timing, did I pay up front or later after a tried and liked the product
If you donate to a church, you often also enjoy the perks that that church offers, paid for by donations.
If you donate to a public radio station, you probably also enjoy listening to that radio station.
> If you derive satisfaction
Semantically, would The Church also qualify, (if it weren't already legally exempted)? You take yourself to the church, talk to the church people, they tell you things, you think and behave in Their mental framework, you feel better in your life, deriving satisfaction.
Officient salaries / (number of services * average participation) = FMV0. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/churches-integrate...
Until one day, when tipping was "replaced" by a 15% "service fee" that was tacked onto the bill. This was sold to members as a convenience: rather than need to carry cash to tip the waiter, you can sign for it and take care of it with your monthly bill. This was misleading because the "service fee" did not go to the waiters (or the bussers), but instead was simply kept by the business office.
To make this all legal, we did all get a raise to the actual minimum wage (rather than the "tipped" minimum wage). This was still a big wage cut, and they lost most of their long-time staff, leading to huge churn. I left shortly after this happened for a better job, but the club closed down completely a couple years later (after 80+ years in operation). I suspect but can't prove that these things are related -- most likely they drank the waiters' milkshakes out of desperation, knowing they were eating their seed corn (to mix a metaphor).
So people making the decisions tend to incentivize the things that will maximize the return for their time.
There were other reasons to think that the club was in trouble (elderly membership literally dying off, dilapidated facilities, laying off beloved long-time staff, rust-belt economy not minting a ton of new rich people) so my best guess is that it was as simple as that: they needed short-term cashflow to stay in business, so they took it from the waiters and bussers. Either this wasn't enough and they had to close up anyway, or it actually brought the ultimate failure point forward.
A second later he was the embodiment of the surprised pikachu face meme when I told him that it won't be happening. Of course he went crying to my boss an hour later.
Even in a country where you can get a sick leave for burn out for weeks, paid 100% of your salary, by speaking 5 minutes to a doctor, the management is treating employees like slaves. This is a really fascinating mindset.
You're still on the project for another 3 weeks, so they'll be paying you for that time. Why are you refusing to work on it? Are you going on PTO during that time?
Somehow they expected that knowing this I would finish my current ticket and just happily work on that pile of technical debt called a project with a smile. Instead a 5 minute call with a doctor got me a work break, which is compensated like work days (but doesn't consume vacation days, is effective immediately and can't be opposed to).
Why not working on that three more weeks? Because I hate that project that got me in a burn out state since a few months. Their decision was sudden and brutal, with no formal warning and no effort to try getting my point of view and improving things. Since management decided to play asshole game it's fair game.
Now you might ask what if I get fired? Well I could enjoy my 1 year half vacation with unemployment benefits north of 2K€/month working on interesting projects like research papers and my video game. Very scary indeed. I hope the boss can see the light of economic rationality again.
This might make a great story for fake internet points, but seriously, don't do this in real life.
Just do the bare minimum required.
I think that was implied well enough by the last paragraph, or rather the PO has no recourse to the threat of taking PTO.
The comment is more about how managers don't think about the obvious consequences of their actions when it's their job to do so.
Aside from that, saying "do your best" right after you removed someone from a project is hilariously tone-deaf. So is the work valuable and I need to give it 110%, or is it not and I have 3 weeks notice?
https://doctorow.medium.com/the-long-bloody-lineage-of-priva...
That reminds me of an oft-cited study regarding parents being late to pick up their kids from daycare [0]. Once a monetary fine was imposed, late-pickups actually got worse, presumably because parents felt their lateness wasn't shameful anymore since they were justly paying for extra staff-time. That switch in customer viewpoints to proved difficult to undo.
While I do not think that case was an MBA-tier mistake, there's a similar theme: Something looks fine for sociopathic homo economicus but fails in the real-world of social relationships, implicit expectations, and long-term repercussions.
> actions that are negative to the point of verging on antagonistic towards their employees and customers
Besides raw greed, some of that may be from a quantitative/"McNamara" fallacy [1], where too much emphasis is put on easy numerical metrics when making decisions, and quarterly revenue is easier to have than measuring "customers resent us and our brand is recognizable but only in a bad way."
I saw this firsthand with a pizza shop that went to computerized ordering from paper tickets. The drivers could no longer "lose" tickets and pocket the cash payment (resulting in a wage loss of ~$10/hour or more).
I've anecdotally heard similar from lots of folks that used to work fast food and service jobs.
And they say software isn't a force of good! /s
Perhaps you are thinking of strip clubs?
So, while a fun distraction, we're right back to you thinking that money in someone else's hand is better than money in your own. What is your rational? Conventional wisdom says that there is leverage in increased cashflow. Why is the conventional wisdom wrong?
However with Apple (and Microsoft), we're all serfs on their feudal fiefs, so they can do this and get away with it.
Even within the legal context of one country, you may for example be "a resident" by immigration law while "not a resident" by tax law, or vice-versa.
If you give to a single individual on the street, it would typically be considered a gift. If you gave to a collective on the street, then it would typical be considered a donation.
Of course, humans are at their best when not normal. If you want to call giving to an individual a donation, go nuts. Hell, if you want to call it the moon, even better.
But saying "donation" brings up feels for people. That's exactly why you see people in here adamant that they've been "donating" to their fave indie artists! It makes them feel philanthropic.
Those same feels are why Tim Sweeney used the word "donation". It makes you think a 30% cut is being taken from non-profit pediatric hospitals for the poor - Sheriff of Nottingham style. It's hyperbole.
Patreon doesn't say the word "donate" anywhere on their website. The closest they come is saying how to "pledge support" for your favorite creators by subscribing for a month and canceling.
Patreon does not use the word donate, but they do consider contributions to by “donations” even under recommended tax policy if the artist happens to be a non profit, not that we need to consider taxes to be relevant to feels.
https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/207099326-Is-m....
I'm not interested in whether this is good or bad, I just want to know -- why now?
I thought all of these app store policies had been established for many years now.
And they did change their posture now in that they started demanding the payment.
What prompted the change on the term was a decision on one of those monopoly investigations. But I can't remember if it was the US or the EU one.
Discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41224853
Patreon takes 8% fee + 2.5% currency conversion fee + 2.9%-5% and 0.1-0.3 USD transaction fee. That, and everything you create on any platform will need to live up to their requirements to not get kicked off.
Crooks, all of them.
The issue is not in how the fee is calculated, it is jusy that both Patreon and Apple have far too high fees. Having the EU shake this up at least the Apple side is great.
How is that not unreasonable for such a simple service, especially as there are alternatives without such fees like Ko-Fi and LiberaPay?
Dude’s still sour that Apple didn’t let him get away with breaking App Store rules and that judges sided with Apple too.
Note that “donations” are taxable income, so Apple is not out of their element for doing this.
[1]: https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1818258637413835199How... ridiculous? And totally relevant to the subject at hand?