Honestly, they should sue Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. The fact that we allow such restricted computers that can land you in prison for manipulating them is just absurd.
More realisticly Epic is just choosing their battles where they can see that they can make progress but they can’t say that.
They only need one big win. If they manage that, the rest would be much easier. As arguments will have been made and ruled. They can refer to the case against Google as precedent, making the subsequent court cases short, cheaper and/or not be necessary. If Google loses apple, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will all examine changing policy or settling any disagreements earlier.
Precisely, it would be a stupid waste of money to launch simultaneous lawsuits against everyone. Get one victory, then use that precedence to get settlements from the rest.
I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s absurd how locked down their stuff is, but I’m not aware of prison time for opening up consoles yet. You can get sued, like Sony vs Hotz, and get ordered to pay some outrageous restitution, but that road ends in bankruptcy, not prison. Still complete bullshit that they can bankrupt a person, but there’s no prison…yet.
That’s not necessarily a good example. He probably would’ve gotten arrested just for the modchip part, which does seem kinda ridiculous, but they were also (according to Bowser’s admission) more directly aiding piracy:
Bowser also admits he and TeamXecuter “created and supported ROM libraries” for its customers to use through websites like MaxConsole.com and rom-bank.com.
And I am saying that even though I have zero love for the mobile gaming market, while I do own and like consoles. There is just no reason to consider they’re doing things any differently on this matter.
30% seems quite a lot, no matter the platform, especially for small indie studios. I’d care more about these than whatever the Fortnite machine has to pay.
Honest question: how is it possibly “complete” bullshit, when we know for a fact that console makers are taking like a hundred dollar wash on every console sold whereas Apple and Google make substantial profit on every device sold?
I mean I would love to see consoles forced to allow sideloading and alternate app stores too, but I can’t fathom how you cant see the difference in business models…
I’ve been developing mobile apps since before the iPhone was a thing. I remember when the App Store was announced, including the 30% cut for Apple. There was a lot of excitement around the fact that developers could keep 70%.
Before app stores, this is how you distributed and charged for a mobile app: customers would send a text message with a keyword to a so called shortcode, depending on country this was a 4 or 5 digit phone number. For example, you would send ‘NAMEOFGAME’ to 12345. The user would then get a text message back with a link to download the game. The message they got back was a so called reverse-billing SMS (also known as premium SMS). This message would be billed to the customer, at a certain rate that you as the sender of the SMS could configure. This basically meant customers paid for games through their phone bill.
How this worked from the developer’s side:
You generally didn’t own the short code, it was shared with many users, you had to pay a monthly fee for the use of that keyword. Companies who owned a ‘nice’ shortcode (like e.g. 12345) would charge more for it than those who owned a more difficult to remember one. This would cost you at least €100 a month per keyword (the same as you pay for an app store account per year, for an unlimited number of apps)
For this amount all the operator did was forward the message to you, you had to have your own server to process the messages. Your server then had to call an API at the telco to send an premium SMS back with the link. (a so called WAP push message). The telco would usually keep 50% of the total cost to the customer. Send a €3.00 SMS , you get €1.50, the telco gets €1.50. For sending 140 bytes to a phone.
The link you sent pointed to your own server, where you had to host the files for the game for the user to download.
Note that there was no store, no way for users to discover your game, so you had to advertise it as well. The telco’s took 50% for billing the customer, while you had to everything else. Of course the development tools for mobile apps were absolute shit as well.
So when Apple announced that they would let you keep 70%, would take care of hosting, payments, would provide a nice user friendly app store where people could actually find your app and provide decent development tools for you to build apps in, that was a fucking huge win.
Were all phones this way? I was thinking on Windows CE phones (like the iPAQ) you could just get paid via Paypal or similar and then send the customer an installer file / unlock key.
Was there a rule that you had to bill through the Telco?
There was no rule, but it was basically the only convenient way. Receiving e-mail on a phone was not at all common, typing a long URL on phone was a PITA and paying for stuff online was not something a lot of people were familiar with.
WIndows CE phones and the like were so niche there was no point in even developing apps specifically for them.
Also note that the above would usually only work in one country, if you wanted to sell internationally you’d have to make arrangements for a shortcode and RB-SMS for each country you wanted to sell in. Never mind the advertising campaigns. Apple taking care of that, with basically global reach and different kinds of payment methods without you having to worry about any of it was quite revolutionary.
Ahh, you must be talking about dumb / feature phones, I guess? I remember a lot of people who had smartphones early on getting / sending emails on their Symbian devices or Windows Mobile devices. In around 2003 (years prior to the iPhone launch), Windows Mobile actually had something like a quarter of the smartphone market. So, in terms of smartphones, it was sizable. But, a lot of people didn’t have smartphones at the time, so that whole market was niche in a way. Most of the smartphone market at that time was Symbian, but Windows was big, and then there was also PalmOS.
I still kinda wish smartphones now had the option to work more like those old ones. They were much less locked down. It’s fine for the vendor to offer a store, but the early phones would just let me install apps any way I wanted. Hell, you could buy some PalmOS apps at physical retailers!
30% fees are insane. Those cost are passed down to us the consumer. We get shittier game because a third of the profit goes to these marketplaces.
I get the epic hate bandwagon but what the fuck is up with the constant bootlicking? Google sucks for doing this and all the other platforms as well. They ALL employ monopolistic tactics to keep their moats, stop defending them because the circle jerk tells you too.
The 30% covers storage, distribution, discovery, and probably more. If you had to implement that yourself you’d wind up with a shittier version for probably more money.
This is horseshit. Apple is making billions of dollars a year on the app store.
Setting a CDN and a document search service take like 5min on Azure / AWS / GCP, and get you 90% of the way there, and your annual bill for them might push into the hundreds of thousands, but nothing close to approaching the amount of money that Google and apple are taking in through the app store.
People really need to stop defending this horseshit behaviour. If it’s so hard to run an App store then why won’t Google or Apple fairly compete against any?
30% fees are insane. Those cost are passed down to us the consumer. We get shittier game because a third of the profit goes to these marketplaces.
Whilst that may be the case, every single day one launch on EGS and other stores (GOG, Microsoft, Steam) launch at exactly the same price on Epic despite the lesser cut. Not one single title I’ve seen launch at a lower price on EGS.
I feel it’s naive to think that is, the consumer would ever benefit from a lesser cut, the fat shits at the top would just keep more.
The publishers could already set the prices lower on EGS by default with the 18% difference being put in consumers pockets making EGS a more enticing place to buy games for now, instead, they want to sell games the same price on EGS vs all other stores they offer titles on pocketing the difference.
EGS Exclusives even launch at the standard pricing despite the money they used to receive up front from Epic and the lesser cut. None of this grandstanding is a benefit to me as a consumer and I won't give a fuck in supporting Epic/Tim until it is.
Man, just imagine the shitstorm if a game launched at $50 on Epic, then a year later increased prices to $62 everywhere due to Steam's terms and conditions so that the dev could maintain the same profit from steam.
Of course that will never happen because there's zero consumer benefit and instead they just launch at $60 on Epic. If that did happen and the savings were benefiting the consumer then Epic might have a point.
The consumer would benefit from a higher quality of games, since they would become more lucrative to make and the available budget after a successful title would be higher.
There’s also the indie scene that would benefit from every dollar. A 30% middleman tax can affect a lot more than just the price.
Cutting ceo pay is a good idea too but one problem doesn’t forgive another and regulating soft monopolies would be a first step in that direction anyways.
The price is the same because of a Most Favored Nations clause in Steam’s ToS. Publishers have to sell it at the same or higher price on other platforms to keep their product on Steam, which is the lion’s share of the market. This is part of the accusation in the lawsuit: programming.dev/comment/5159579
Now you could argue that even if it were removed, publishers would still sell at the same price and keep the extra profit, but that’s just hypothetical at this point.
How do you compare it with other platforms if it’s exclusive to EGS? For timed exclusives, it would mean the price would have to go UP on EGS when the Steam version launches, which seems like pretty dumb marketing honestly.
I know I’m playing devil’s advocate defending Epic and publishers, but I don’t see how defending rent extracting monopolies is any better.
I don't even think Sony's MFN is an issue as Alan Wake 2 is $10 cheaper than on consoles, a boon for the consumer and something I could get behind, but no.
Vbucks aren't even lower cost on pc where 100% of the sale goes to Epic. No 30% cut there but prices are the same.
I'm all for supporting the message that Tim is trying to portray but they're so inconsistent with the way they manage the business I can't for the life of my accept that they're being honest.
They briefly cut the price of vbucks on mobile when they pulled the stunt and could easily do the same on pc permanently. PC Vbucks aren't transferable to Playstation wallets so they should be able to do something.
I’ll happily pay these 30% if it means I get quality services for them:
high speed download servers
reliable cloud saves
automatic, non intrusive updates
discussion forums
easy mod management
friend networking, multiplayer services
responsive and uncomplicated support
(using Steam as an example here)
People always act like those are to be taken as granted, but if you have ever worked in dev/devops, you would know that there’s a lot of work maintaining each one of them.
Also, you can use these services for as long as you want, despite paying for them with a single one-time purchase.
Of course, if the platform doesn’t provide any services or benefits, your point stands. In that case just avoid it.
Apart from the forums, Epic offer all those things and take only 12%. Microsoft offer most of those things and also take 12%.
Hosting a forums platform costs almost nothing. Moderating them like Valve, expecting the game creators to do the work and doing an extremely poor job, with each big game hub filled with toxicity and people earning points for racism and other forms of bigotry, is certainly not worth 18%.
Yeah, I still remember that I completely lost access to my Steam account in the early days. I forgot the password, and the password reset feature didn’t work. I contacted support and they never responded. I eventually just gave up and lost the games in the account. I guess if I had waited long enough they probably would’ve fixed it, but, holy fuck, Steam was really shit in the early days.
To Valve’s credit, my understanding is that the support situation has improved marginally over the 20 years since my incident.
Nintendo does not sell hardware at a loss and, IIRC, has done so since the Wii. It was a huge deal back when they said they were going to make a profit off the hardware. Given how abysmally the Wii U did, I’m struggling to find coverage of that from 15yr ago that I only vaguely remember. However, that’s been a major point from Nintendo since the Wii, so it’s ridiculous that Epic wouldn’t know that and is clearly just an attack on Google (please don’t read that as me supporting Google or Epic).
They usually start out selling for a loss, but Sony reduces costs and scales production so they’re usually profitable (or at least even) after a couple of years. As far as I can tell the PS3 took the longest, releasing in 2006 and not breaking even until 2010, still 3 years before the PS4 launched.
Personally, I don’t think that selling hardware at a loss is a good excuse to be anticompetitive with the software. I don’t understand how it (and any other kind of loss leading sales tactics) doesn’t trigger anti-trust laws.
So if Google sold its phones at a loss then Epic would have no problem paying the fee? Sure.
The more interesting part of the argument is saying that people will contact Microsoft/Nintendo/Sony for technical support with a game and expect them to help while Apple or Google would send you to the developer.
google isn’t the only company selling android phones.
Other Android OEMs are allowed to ship whatever store they want in addition to Google Play. The Epic Games Store is on the Samsung Galaxy Store: galaxystore.samsung.com/…/com.epicgames.portal
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