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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

If only those games weren't infested with micro/macro transactions to manipulate players out of their money in the first place. Mobile gaming is a cesspool of ads, gambling, greed, data collection, and bullshit all of which has been slowly spreading like a cancer to gaming on every other platform for decades. I'm not happy about Apple and Google demanding a cut of the action either, screw them too, but making these tactics even more profitable for shitty mobile game devs isn't going to benefit players.

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Apple did this to itself. Reportedly it was Jobs' opinion turned policy that Apple don't do games or pornography.

Exactly this policy and their interference to app developers created a selection pressure and a cutout hole in shape of "only slightly gamelike && technically not pornographic && in high demand", and the category of apps more accurately represented as "strip clubs with casinos with no cash-out" filled the vacuum like a Ghibli film blob monster.

Early iOS games were more game-like. Apps like SNES remakes, flappy birds and music games, were more common, but they all converged down and down into porn territory.

It doesn't happen naturally; not even pornographic game markets, let alone Steam or Itch, aren't as badly infested with gambling as App Store. It only happened artificially by how Apple ran it over the past ~15 years.

Microtransaction infested games were inevitable even if mobile gaming didn’t exist. Like, of the top 10 highest lifetime grossing games, 3 are arcade pay-per-play (the original microtransaction), 6 are f2p that got their start on PC, and only one is mobile-first / only.

Last year, 58% of PC gaming revenue was from microtransactions, and that percentage is only growing.

> Early iOS games were more game-like. Apps like SNES remakes, flappy birds and music games, were more common, but they all converged down and down into porn territory.

Game devs discovered pretty quickly that, Apple having set the initial expectation that an iOS game should cost $0.99, the only viable way to run a business on a mobile platform was a f2p/exploitation/casino model.

Assuming your ongoing costs are low (or zero, because Apple's hosting the downloads), and your development costs are just a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of man-hours of labor, well, 70% take on a market of 1.5 billion people is enough to keep my family and I fed and housed for quite a few years!

Even back in pre-iPhone days, actually getting a mobile game required one to subscribe to a text message subscription service that may or may not be hard to unsubscribe.

At least they give the user the option to pay or not pay, unlike Apple that forces developers to not have any other option.

Is there anything wrong with walled gardens hypothetically taxing the shady microtransaction-infested unregulated-gambling games and data-mining apps 5x and using that to correspondingly reduce fees for honest indie developers?

(Setting aside the issue of defining who are the goodies and who are the baddies in a way that does not enable the baddies to purely technically comply with the goodie guidelines while remaining baddies.)

The walled gardens don't give a shit about the "honest indies", they make 30% off of the micro transactions while doing nothing. Billions in effortless money.

> The walled gardens don't give a shit about the "honest indies", they make 30% off of the micro transactions while doing nothing. Billions in effortless money.

Do you give a shit about honest indie devs? Putting them in quotes says you probably don’t.

If you did, perhaps you’d find that this is an obvious path to a better state of affairs that to walled garden operators is zero cost (or even profitable), financially and reputationally, while making it more economically viable to make good games that don’t use dark patterns to keep your kid glued to the screen and regularly asking for money to exchange for some in-game coins and lootboxes.

Ah yes, putting words inbetween quotes to, uh, quote someone is a very novel usage of quotes. As an aside, being indie isn't a guarantee for honestly: I have seen come incredibly scummy behavior from indies.

> zero cost (or even profitable)

Having to handle _more_ developers isn't zero cost, but let's assume they actually sell games and indeed, make profit. That would be great! I would love a mobile ecosystem where there is a variety of things, where my phone is an actual viable platform for more than just browsing online and shitposting on HN.

>financially

You fundamentally misunderstand just how much money gachas generate every year. You could release a dozen Hollow Knights, a dozen Balatros, a dozen Stardew Valleys every year, and you'd still make less money than taking 30% off of a _single_ gacha. Genshin Impact grossed $10 billion last year. WuWa, ZZZ, HSR all gross close to half a billion each, each year. Pokemon TCG is on track for 1.5bil. And that's just gachas: games like Call of Duty Mobile and other just print out money.

There are no universes, neither in Apple or Google's imagination (which is very locked in on how much money they're making right now, as opposed to how much they could) or in anyone reasonable's thoughts where indie games take off so much they overtake any amount of profit they're currently making. There's no catching up to the amount of content a team like Genshin's puts out every three months.

> reputationally

If you think Apple gives a single shit about reputation when they're the only dealer in town, I have news for you. If you think Google gives a single shit about reputation when 90% of traffic goes through their store anyways, I have news for you.

> putting words inbetween quotes to, uh, quote someone is a very novel usage of quotes

Where exactly have I written “honest indies”?

> You fundamentally misunderstand

Sorry no, you fundamentally misunderstand the point. Try to do the math. Those microtransactions generate loads of revenue; taxing them higher will generate more revenue for the walled garden. The revenue that can then be used to subsidise a drastic reduction of the tax for the rest.

> If you think Apple gives a single shit about reputation when they're the only dealer in town

You are casually sneaking in falsehoods, so I’m not sure reading the rest was even worhtwhile. Not only is Apple not the only dealer in town, it is not even the largest one.

>while doing nothing

Designing entire hardware, software, and backend platforms and investing billions of dollars into them every year is not nothing. If what these companies built took no work, try making your own platform to release games on and see how little work it truly needs.

Indeed—try to make a platform where a solo developer can create an app that is then distributed to almost the entire planet, where anyone can find, buy and install it (with a nearly 100% guarantee that it will work) with a click, and get paid for it without having to open branches in every jurisdiction and deliver paperwork for N different, constantly changing tax regimes.

Are you describing the web? PayPal or Stripe can comfortably handle payments

If you revisit my comment, you may find what I am describing is certainly not a payment system.

> Designing entire hardware

Designing the hardware does not entitle you to extracting more money from anything. If you don't want to lose money on your hardware, don't sell it at a loss. (Which Apple isn't doing, nor are any of the Android device manufacturers.) I haven't seen Dyson try to extract 30% off of every hairdressing salon that uses their dryers.

> software, and backend platforms

Are made to attract users on the platform. With the intention of making money from it after. Cool. Quick question, do you pay for Chrome, or Firefox ? They invest hundreds of millions of dollars every year into it, how dare you not pay them 30% of every purchase you make online ?

> investing billions of dollars into them every year is not nothing

The billions have been invested initially. The ongoing costs of running the App Store / Play Store are not even close to a billion, especially not for Google that already owns all the network infrastructure necessary to run it.

>If what these companies built took no work, try making your own platform to release games on and see how little work it truly needs.

Sure, that's very simple: take any open publishing store on Android, and ask yourself why noone uses them for games delivery. I'll even add a hint: it's not because they don't offer diff based assets upgrades.

Do you have proof that hardware is sold at a loss? Do you keep in mind that the software that comes with that hardware—the OS and all the batteries it comes with—comes free of charge, including years upon years of not just security patches and bugfixes but major updates with absolutely new functionality? The ongoing costs of maintaining and developing the platform and keeping the OS secure quite can not possibly be trivial.

> With the intention of making money from it after.

What else do you expect—the goodness of their heart alone? That would be the shortest lived business ever.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to base a business off creating positive value for people; but it’ll create vanishingly little value unless you also make sure this business is profitable—that allows to create more positive value for people over time and incentivises the ongoing improvement.

> Quick question, do you pay for Chrome, or Firefox ? They invest hundreds of millions of dollars every year into it, how dare you not pay them 30% of every purchase you make online ?

No, but I hope both of us know how both of them are financed—by Google’s ad revenue, primarily. I would prefer the software I use in general, and operating system in particular, to not be financed primarily through ad revenue.

>Designing the hardware does not entitle you to extracting more money from anything.

But they can work together with 3p to expand the capabilities of the device and incentivize it with revenue sharing agreements.

>how dare you not pay them 30% of every purchase you make online ?

It's somewhat strange but payments have been taken up by other vendors like stripe. If payments were built into the browser it would make commerce easier and would allow them to take a percentage.

>and ask yourself why noone uses them for games delivery

Because being able to distribute to a store billions of people already visit is valuable.

What exactly are these gardens walling against if they have microtransaction-infested unregulated-gambling games and data-mining apps?

Malware, for one.

This sounds more like a government thing.

Why does it warrant government intervention? Considering it will be profitable, it should be a result of market forces. The question is why it hasn’t been so yet.

You forgot the fanatical parasocial relationships that are formed with East Asian mobile games in general. They are comparable to idol culture.

When games went "free to play", platform commissions for in-app purchases (sometimes misleadingly called "payment processing charges") were the only way that walled-garden game stores could make money from them.

The irony is that Japanese game platforms have been using the walled-garden licensing and platform fee business model for more than 40 years[1], and it continues today in the Nintendo eShop and PSN store. I doubt Nintendo and Sony are going to reduce their platform fees just because developers don't like them.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)

[2] https://www.1d3.com/blog/platform-fees

Interestingly enough the Wikipedia article claims that Nintendo introduced DRM and licensing to combat shovelware. But shovelware on Nintendo platforms has continued to be a problem from the Wii to the current Switch eShop.

You are 100% right! The difference is that a phone is necessity that tends to a monopoly, unlike say a PlayStation or a handheld game platform. But no question in the game space where you can choose platforms, a walled garden is great. That's why Steam is really good, and if it wasn't you could get your games from the Windows app store, or the Epic Store..

The phone/necessity part of smartphones seems largely independent from the game store part, since you can usually choose from multiple wireless providers, sms/mms (and now rcs) all work, email works, and web browsers also work.

How dare they charge for that slot machine!

More seriously: There have always been mobile games that have a purchase price or ask for a single payment. You could find one right now. The vast majority of popular apps have in game transactions. Game developers just want to get paid for the work they do.

Interestingly, in the Apple App Store, there is no option to filter by "paid". Only free. I want an option to filter by "paid, no IAP". Actually, I don't mind IAp for things like new levels and such. It's just so badly abused by mobile games.

Apple made one concession to consumer protection law and the FTC by changing the "free" button to "get", but I'm sure they know how those slot machines work, and where the money comes from.

At one point in-app purchases were listed clearly and prominently so they were easy to inspect (and hopefully embarrassing for nonsense like $99 wheelbarrows of smurfberries[1].) Now it seems like IAP rates are hidden below the fold, unfortunately.

[1] https://www.pipelinecomics.com/smurfberries-apple-app-store-...

I'm not saying the Apple store isn't responsible for the problems of free to play. They really are. Apple has a memory of when their hardware was beholden to software like Adobe or Microsoft and they designed the store to avoid that problem. It really favors cheap apps, and they used to really discourage offering a sample and then unlocking the full app for a purchase. This was supposed to be so you didn't have "bait and switch" but really it just trained people to think no app was worth paying for. Even though they did pay so much for loot boxes..

So now there's an alternative way to pay. Let's be happy about that.

Every so often Apple will themselves feature a selection of popular pay-once-and-get-it-all games in the store as an ad capsule.

... actually, I just checked, and if you scroll down enough in the Games tab on your iPhone's App Store app, they seem to be running it now under "Pay Once & Play". Might be worth a look.

It's a shame they hide these things below the fold.

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