Poor Tim! Hey anyone know if I'm allowed to put my own skin store inside the Fortnite store? It's only fair.
But these are likely irrelevant comparisons.
For one thing, the degree of monopolization simply doesn’t exist. Gaming is a market. There are many gaming platforms that are extremely popular. Xbox, PS, Nintendo, Steam, and then just open distribution on PCs which essentially means there is no lock in in this industry. And unlike the “web app” comparison folks try to make, open distribution can easily leverage the same capabilities as the store distributed games can (and in fact, they are more capable than games from some stores, like the Windows store).
But more importantly, gaming isn’t an essential part of life, which is basically what smartphones, dominated entirely by iOS/Android, have become at this point.
People depend on these platforms. There are businesses you cannot interact with if not through your phone. There are public transportation systems that are almost unusable.
And finally, maybe this is just me, but I think the idea that general purpose computing is the same as playing video games just strikes me as wrong. General purpose computing, which is what phones are, are basic infrastructure for modern life. They should be treated differently and we shoudoht allow 2 companies to monopolize and/or embargo them like Apple/Google are trying.
if everything is running on the same couple engines, the cosmetics are all compatible with each other
Asking Fortnite to accept other stores selling Fortnite-compatible cosmetics doesn't work either because Fortnite has not monopolized a trillion-dollar industry, meanwhile spending billions on lobbying to make daily life for the average citizen impossible without them, which the Google-Apple cartel has. Fortnite has also never gained market share by pursuing claims about being an open source platform or not being evil, again unlike Google. These differences.. make all the difference. Call me when my kids are forced to agree to Fortnite EULAs to participate in schooling all around the world.
Unless all around the world is the usual "world === USA".
Not at all. US isn't even the leader on this. For example in many countries it's already much harder to do any kind of digital banking without a Google/Apple-approved phone than in the US.
In Europe as well, more and more places where it's completely the norm for schools and teachers to do all their communication through Facebook or Whatsapp. Sure those have web, but are arguably the worst of the three. Portugal nor most European countries are above this at all. If only they were. Look at all the national IDs rolled out, those too more and more mandatory Apple/Android 2FA.
Will Portuguese teachers never downgrade any students who do all their homework on e.g. OpenOffice and it doesn't look nice on the teacher's MS Office? Doubt it.
We have had national IDs since forever, with fingerprints, we don't go crazy about it like in some other countries, even though we suffered a dictorship with lots of human losses, colonial wars, and even though PIDE/DGS wasn't KGB or Stasi level, it also managed to impact our society.
I should know, I am part of the first generation to grow up in freedom, while hearing the grown up stories of how everything came to be.
By the way, some schools still understand emails, telephone calls, reporting books, and meetings in person.
Here is an high school example, using a non-Meta platform, just because, https://espn.edu.pt/
Also, given the frequency of families having issues with the Cuco MDM used to lock out the Windows computers they handed to kids during COVID, and what kids do which such computers, I'm doubly unsure it was a smart idea to offer shitty Windows laptops vs. shitty Chromebooks.
Schools around the world give kids Chromebooks (or iPads) because they're harder to fuck and easier to unfuck. Windows still sucks at this, and no one came up with a coherent — locked down — Linux platform to achieve the same.
That kind of stuff is mostly US school system, schools in countries that go with USA into G7 meetings, or wealthy enough for that kind of stuff maybe.
Not every country has the pleasure to enjoy a school system swimming in money to offer computers to kids, in every single school.
Not even during COVID was every Portuguese family granted the pleasure to have a device offered to them, some lucky ones did, a large majority only saw them on the news, and as usual the burden was on the family to come up with a solution to all their kids attending the various school levels.
And lets not even go to such great stuff like Magalhães, e-escola, and who got to profit from it.
It's possible other school districts with a less diligent, but similarly overworked, IT guy just give up and don't even hand out the computers anymore, especially if they don't have enough of them, after being on their second or third kid.
None of them has hardly an IT guy, or girl on site, and as usual "em casa de ferreiro espeto de pau", acquaitances have been invited to have a look at their computers.
And yes, it includes kids from at least 2nd grade. My COVID kids got their laptop on 1st grade, but that's no longer the case.
Nobody gave a shit about the mobile web until Apple launched the iPhone, where one of its main selling points was a “desktop-class web browser”, where Steve Jobs told announced that if they wanted to run apps on the iPhone, they should be web apps.
Then suddenly everybody started demanding “iPhone-compatible websites” overnight. Nobody was asking for “mobile websites”, which until that point were shitty WAP/WML things, or – in the best case – cut back m.example.com microsites. People wanted “iPhone-compatible websites”.
And then all the other phone vendors used Apple’s open-source WebKit code (open-source thanks to KDE, useful on mobile thanks to Apple) to release their own browsers, and the mobile web took off like a rocket because suddenly it was useful because people could use real websites.
And let’s not forget Steve Jobs telling people to avoid Flash and use open web standards instead.
There is a very clear before/after with the mobile web, and it’s the launch of the iPhone and all the work Apple put into making WebKit work well on mobile that provided that watershed moment.
Apple were championing the web in the time period you claim they were “intentionally undermining and artificially crippling it”.
Now, you may be underwhelmed by their performance in more recent years, but it’s simply factually untrue that they have had a 20 year campaign to undermine the web.
Cry me a river for the Epics of the world selling loot boxes and other pay to win crap. It came out in the trial that 90% of App Store revenue is coming from games.
Neither Epic, Google or Apple are on the side of the angels
Yes, it does. Your only options are like Fornite, Roblox, or Minecraft.
Saying make your own game, is like saying make your own phone. There is tremendous value in the gigantic userbases these platforms have. This value is why platform holders can charge for access to them.
Wow. I guess Steam must be bankrupt and surviving off just four games. And I guess Epic and Steam just don't compete. And itch and GoG are just irrelevant with no market impact.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but gaming is not "choose between these two" level of monopilisation. And indies just won game of the year awards! Things are just not monopolised.
What?? Unlike phones nothing locks people into only playing a specific game. And there are so many other games out there to choose from.
>are so many other games out there to choose from.
But how many can you make a business on top of that can pay competitively? It's like how there are a ton of operating systems to choose from, yet only a few that are viable to build upon.
One example?
Stardew Valley. Runs on everything, not just "viable" OSs, made by a single person, and easily competes with an entire genre of gaming to pay the author.
A $400/mo Patreon does not exactly outweigh somewhere between 18-35 million sales on a single one of the platforms it supports. I would not call that the "upper bound".
Taking Fortnite as an example the relevant figure would be that creators on Fortnite can make over $10 million per year. Bringing up that Epic made a few billion dollars is irrelevant to what this conversation is about, which is games where it is financially viable to build content for them.
If that was your interpretation, then it would have been better to have mentioned it anywhere upthread. What we have, so far, is people talking about the gaming industry, and you calling it a monopoly. Nowhere before do we have a mention of third-party developers.
f you want to start a business making games then you really should consider using a game engine rather than something like Roblox because Roblox takes a massive cut (way more than 30%) when looking at what users pay vs. what you cash out. I don't
Yes, it's possible to make your own game, but it's also possible to make your own app store. There is value in being able to build on top of successful platforms. These existing app stores can demand a bigger cut than doing things yourself because they bring a lot of value and paying customers to the table.
Because games are not platforms. Roblox is a platform - games ("experiences") are all UGC. Fortnite is a game that Epic is turning into a platform. Not sure what Minecraft is doing but it doesn't seem anywhere near as financially viable for creators pas Roblox.
It's an interesting thing to think about because Roblox does not exactly follow the App Store review guidelines. Code and assets are downloaded onto your device to run the games. If you could add them to your home screen then it wouldn't be so far off from a game-specific app store.
Except there isn’t multiple stores on Xbox or PlayStation or Switch. Which is directly comparable to the iOS lock ins that Epic was fighting against.
> But more importantly, gaming isn’t an essential part of life, which is basically what smartphones, dominated entirely by iOS/Android, have become at this point.
True but also irrelevant. Monopoly laws don’t make those distinctions.
> And finally, maybe this is just me, but I think the idea that general purpose computing is the same as playing video games just strikes me as wrong.
Again, monopoly laws don’t make any distinction here. However to answer your direct point, some consoles are marketed as more general purpose devices for taxation reasons. All consoles support YouTube, most have other streaming services from Netflix to Spotify. They all come with a fully capable web browser. Even their hardware has been generic for the last few generations of consoles. So they are general purpose devices in all metrics aside from the variety of apps available. And you could argue the reason for this is literally because of their “App Store” lock ins. So your argument here is evidence against the point you’re trying to make.
> General purpose computing, which is what phones are, are basic infrastructure for modern life.
That’s not the definition of a “general purpose computing device” and I reject the idea that iOS and Android are equivalent to water, roads and electricity.
I do agree that smartphones are a MASSIVELY useful asset, but you don’t actually need a smartphone for modern life. Plenty of older people still manage just fine without iOS nor Android. They’ll use a laptop or PC to access the same services via a web browser.
Furthermore, the companies who are fighting iOS lock ins are not critical services. Epic, for example, is a gaming company. They don’t provide health or banking services. You can’t do your taxes in Fortnight. You don’t book your car in for a service via an app built in Unreal Engine. Epic build games not essential infrastructure.
I assume by hardware margins you are thinking of component and manufacturing cost. However, the largest cost that has to be amortized over the life of a hardware product is R&D cost, which is huge.
Even by the component and manufacturing cost metric, the Switch has always been profitable, though DRAM and flash storage costs are putting pressure on hardware margins at the moment. Still R&D is the largest cost that each company faces.
Morality is irrelevant and criminality is for the legal system to decide, not you.
> Nintendo and Sony do not make 10% of the hardware margins that Apple does.
Which, again, is completely irrelevant.
> They are not analogous businesses.
Only because you’ve decided they’re not. And your arguments have zero citations to any legal precedence. Yet we do have legal precedence of lock ins on other platforms and their related app stores.
So the problem we have is the legal precedence actually works against Nintendo et al and now it’s up to the courts to decide if those prior judgements are relevant to Nintendo and its ilk too.
Thus far all you and your likeminded peers have proven is that you have a personal opinion. But you’ve provided precisely zero legal evidence to back up your opinions. So why should we trust your opinion any more than the highly public legal precedence that was reached between Epic and Apple?
“but they’re different” isn’t a compelling legal argument for why they’re different. Regardless of how much you might wish it were.
The killer app for jailbreaking game systems is and has always been running unlicensed games, a scenario which Apple, Xbox, and Nintendo vigorously object to. It's also why Sony killed Linux on PS3. On the other hand, you can run unlicensed games on Android and it hasn't killed Google Play.