Thought it was just going to be one of those nothing burger cases where they only lost the license because someone forgot to renew something and was surprised that it actually isn’t that.
Lmao. I’ve no love for Apple, and even less for Epic. It’s like two grotesquely unlovable toddlers are throwing a hissy fit in their little sandbox and I’m here for it.
Yes, it’s kind of funny with Epic complaining about fairness, when they arrange exclusivity agreements for their own game store. 🤪 And they actively sabotage it working on Linux.🤔
Regardless of the irony, someone needed to start this fight with Apple, so it might as well be them.
Between the two of them, I’m not willing to “support” either, but I’m slightly more inclined to hope Epic comes out on top because they’re not also in a hardware dominance position. Epic can be as shitty as it likes about certain platforms, but they at least can only affect their games. They aren’t gatekeepers to a massive audience of users, and by far one of the largest gates at that. The Epic store actually has competition.
Between an abusive developer and an abusive gatekeeper, the gatekeeper is the bigger issue.
Ok, I really don’t get Epic hate. Sure, they’re using shitty practices to attempt to compete with the megolith Valve is, and it sucks. However, how are they sabotaging it working on Linux. They made Easy Anti-cheat work on Linux, which is huge, and also UE5 seems to run better on Linux than Windows by most accounts I’ve heard, including my own experience.
Make reasonable complaints all day, but sabotaging Linux compatability is not something they’re doing.
Tim Sweeney is pretty openly against any Linux support for some reason so I think that soured Linux gamers against them.
I have been gaming on Linux for 15 years and it is so much better these days, but we are still not a 1st party target. I get why, but it sucks to be ignored and told to just deal with it forever. I spend as much or more on hardware and software than windows gamers (except for a Windows license I suppose) and I guess I have to vote with my wallet.
Epic (the game engine and middleware developer) and Epic Store (the one that sells games) seems to have different priorities. Customers of Epic game engines and middlewares want linux supports, so they provide it. Meanwhile, Epic Store don’t want the burden of maintaining linux ports for their games, so they remove supports for linux in games they acquired.
It’s got a platinum rating on ProtonDB. It looks like the native versions aren’t being supported anymore, but they still work. I don’t blame them. The game has gotten a lot smaller over the years and I’m certain there’s very few Linux players on it. Regardless, the Windows application seems to work perfectly fine for Linux users. Yeah, native is ideal but it costs extra money to maintain two (or three) versions.
Anyway, you can’t say they’re sabotaging Linux support when they also purchased EAC and had them add Linux support. They may not be perfect with Linux, but they aren’t sabotaging it.
Edit: Why is this being downvoted? If you want to downvote you should be able to articulate why. What is the expectation for them to do? The game has clearly been on the decline for a while, and I’m sure they’ve got the numbers for their player counts by system. They have limited money and need to support the game still. Why would they waste it on supporting a native Linux version if it isn’t being played and the windows version works perfectly on Linux? If they didn’t want Linux to exist, why would they make EAC work on Linux? Explain how you think they’re actively trying to harm Linux (sabotage) instead of merely maybe hurting it as a side effect passively.
Ok, I really don’t get Epic hate. Sure, they’re using shitty practices to attempt to compete with the megolith Valve is, and it sucks.
Meanwhile GOG attempts to compete by offering features that other platforms don’t offer, like DRM-free installers and a multi-platform game launcher.
If Epic got to #1 place, what guarantees there are that they would stop using exclusivity deals to hinder their own competitors? It might just be that we end up with a more anti-competititve market leader, and then what would be the benefit of having overtaken Steam?
I can agree that GoG doesn’t have a large share of the market, but I’m still unconvinced of the benefit of this call for competition for competition’s sake when it’s introducing anti-competitive practices. Usually we want competition to push back against anti-competitive practices.
They both have anti-competitive practices. They’re just different practices. Epic tends to favor helping developers and Valve tends to favor appealing to users. Valve doesn’t need to force exclusivity because games have to take a loss to not use them, because they’re already the market leader. There’s no knowing what Valve would be doing if they were the underdog, but people need to stop assuming Valve is good. No company is ever good.
No company is good but that doesn’t mean they are all equally, identically bad.
We have seen what Valve did when it was not the market leader because it didn’t spawn in such a place. What they did is lock their own games to their own platform, which is something most other PC storefronts do or did at some point.
We did not yet see what Epic would do if it would got to the top. Is it even guaranteed that they would continue to take less revenue?
And really, if all companies are bad, what’s the point of rooting for Epic to overtake Steam?
I’m not rooting for epic to overtake steam. I’m just against the people who hate Epic just for the sake of hating Epic. It’s cool to hate them I guess, but it doesn’t usually make sense. The biggest real issue is their store client sucks, but Steam wasn’t always as good as it is now either.
They don’t owe Epic any respect or reasons to dislike them either. For all this “all companies are bad”, you are being a bit picky over when they can or can’t be judged.
I gave you my reasons why I don’t like them. They are not jumping into the game client market in the early 2000s, they are did it 2018. They have had the blueprint ready, with many examples, but they didn’t care to match the other alternatives in the market. Which in itself wouldn’t be such an issue, but it does leave a bad taste when they make themselves the only option where to buy certain games. I don’t hate them because it’s cool, I hate them because they inconvenience me.
It’s pretty silly to love a company: they’re not human and behave as a sociopath would.
To love a company (which is really just to love their brand) is just to be easilly influenced by marketing and having a tendency to simplify one’s view of the world down to labels to make it easier to mentally understand it - in consumer terms it means that when you’re making a purchase decision you can just take the mental shortcut in your decision of directly choosing the “loved” brand, rather than needing to evaluate products and their suitability for you to make an informed buying choice, which is cognitivelly more costly.
While “brand love” is understandable and not abnormal, it’s not a quality but rather it’s just a pretty flawed cognitive shortcut that goes against making informed choices, so expecting it from others is like expecting that everybody has a specific mild character flaw.
You do your thing - it’s your life and your money - just don’t think that others must share that same reductive way of making purchasing decisions.
I mean yeah it’s mostly used by meatheads who get excited that somebody got punched, regardless of context…but I’m not exactly clutching my pearls at the use of a gasp bad word.
Dunno why that got down voted even though it agrees with and elaborates on the comment I replied to.
It is just a statement. I didn’t even urge, encourage or request anybody to stop using that, so not even pressing on the toes of anybody except really insecure people like the other commenter on your level.
Hell, it is used by those insecure people who can’t handle a criticism about their beliefs, usually in context where the subject is women, minorities, people living difficult lives, people enjoying crazy shit harming no one (else), rebellious populations that are directly or indirectly fucked by the colonialism.and fight back with whatever they have, even if it looks primitive in the face of their adversaries firepower.
And here I am making just one criticism about the use of a word that has almost become the Reddit’s “this” in Lemmy political environments, and I’m the one clutching pearls or being insecure.
Apple said one of the reasons they terminated our developer account only a few weeks after approving it was because we publicly criticized their proposed DMA compliance plan. Apple cited this X post from this thread written by Tim Sweeney. Apple is retaliating against Epic for speaking out against Apple’s unfair and illegal practices, just as they’ve done to other developers time and time again.
Epic breached the terms of its agreements with Apple and Google to kick off its lawsuits against them in 2020, and now that Sweeney is openly complaining about Apple’s terms for third-party app stores Apple doesn’t trust Epic not to breach those too. Seems reasonable.
Please clarify it to me because I read this debacle as Apple blackmailing developers HARD into not talking bad things about the company. I get they’re evil and petty but I’m having a hard time to believe they’re this childish and stupid, specially with the DMA knocking at their doors.
This isn’t some random developer, it’s a developer that has already breached a contract with Apple. It’s reasonable for Apple to be wary of entering into another contract with them when the CEO is publicly complaining about the terms.
There’s definitely a case to be made that Epic shouldn’t need an Apple developer account to make their own app store, but Apple is well within its rights to deny them an account based on their history.
I can just see them responding to the EU like, “Yeah, we’ll allow other people to build app stores for iOS. They just need a dev account that we won’t approve. That’s not us specifically blocking alternate app stores though.”
Epic changed the mobile versions of Fortnite to add an option to pay for V-Bucks through their own system, which is against the terms of both Apple’s app store and Google’s. That got them kicked off of both app stores and then they sued Apple and Google.
Ahh, I didn’t quite understand from goggling what exactly the problem was. What else would Epic do, though? I don’t think they could have just sued for damages.
Careful. There are quite a few terms of service that you’ve agreed to over the years that if certain aspects of them were enforced, you wouldn’t think they were very reasonable.
I honestly don’t know why there are so many people around here willing to back apple on this kind of shit. Who cares if they had the right to do it? The inherent problem here is that they had that right, when they really shouldn’t.
Careful. There are quite a few terms of service that you’ve agreed to over the years that if certain aspects of them were enforced, you wouldn’t think they were very reasonable.
Epic has an entire legal department to read over agreements like that, and yet they deliberately breached the terms. That’s hugely different from someone unknowingly breaching a TOS that they didn’t read.
I took an app development course in college. Everything was android and I tested on my own device, except one project had to be on apple. I managed to snag an ancient iPhone off a friend to test, but no, turns out you need a dev account to even be able to load your own code on your phone. Fuck apple forever.
Did this change? It was about a decade ago. I could develop and test on an emulated device, but testing on hardware was 100% locked behind a $100 paywall.
It mentions the apple developer program which is what I assume the 100 dollar subscription is. I keep seeing people say dev accounts are free but any tools beyond the dev environment are paywalled.
I wasn’t even talking about app stores; I never published anything to Google play, just loaded through usb from android studio. The apple program didn’t allow even that.
You mean when you want to make it available to download in the only way Apple makes possible? It’s not like you can just send the apk to someone to run on their iPhone, if you want to share the app with others on an iPhone, you have to use the Apple App Store, you have to pay them $100 + the cost of an Apple computer. Just to share your FOSS app with your friends.
You’re not even good at whataboutism, lol. Changing one setting is not even comparable to Apple’s perfection. The message that you need to allow it first even takes you straight to the setting.
And before that you need to register and validate your contact data. Even the act of that one login is more work than changing one setting to allow sideloading. Your point is just completely wrong.
How is the $100 a obstacle to any legitimate developer? The only one it hurts is those who would otherwise flood the app store with crap submitted from throw away developer accounts.
Who said anything about legitimacy? I said small, synonyms hobby, FOSS. It is an obstacle to be forced to pay money to Apple for the ‘privelidge’ of being able to install it on their devices. And they are Apple’s devices, you do not own anything you buy from Apple.
I said small, synonyms hobby, FOSS. It is an obstacle to be forced to pay money to Apple for the ‘privelidge’ of being able to install it on their devices.
When I was a student or freshly qualified, $100/year would’ve been a lot.
But it’s more than just the money.
I’ve coded hobby / small android apps. I was charged a one off fee of $25, and I can use my nice gaming PC with my lovely high end mouse and keyboard, and over the years I’ve used Windows and Linux to write the apps, both from a shared hdd.
My apps aren’t useful to the general public, but I’ve got a couple of decades experience in my field, and those apps are genuinely helpful to the people that use them.
For apple, the last time I looked into it, I’d have needed a specific type of apple computer (one with an intel chip, couldn’t compile on the cheaper non-intel chips).
That automatically makes it a pain in the ass, I couldn’t just use my normal PC for coding. I’d need to transfer assets to a network share or use a convoluted way of keeping the same assets updated on two computers, and look into ways I could use the same mouse/keyboard on both machines. Would using a splitter or KVM cause problems? Input lag when gaming? Would it need a power brick? Just finding the desk space for another PC case would mess up my speaker layout.
It just adds unnecessary complexity, and to slap a $100 yearly fee on top is just insulting.
Absolutely not worth my time for apps that would never make $100/year in sales (which after apples 30% cut, would need to be $142/year. Plus extra for taxes and occasional iMac upgrades).
Maybe things have changed since then, but every time I use a small, niche app or find a wonderful free app, I wonder if it’ll exist on apple.
Good for you you have so much disposable income. Many hobby devs such as myself aren’t so lucky
Go talk to some random people and ask them how much they spend on their hobbies, I bet you won’t find many people who have a hobby that costs less than $100/year. It’s a damn cheap hobby.
which is one reason why I don’t make Apple apps.
That’s probably a good thing. I don’t think we need more apps made by amateurs in the app store.
What the hell is this condescending, elitist, gatekeeping nonsense? $100 is a lot of money for some people. Hell, in some countries, that’s a sizeable chunk of someone’s monthly salary. We should be encouraging and supporting developers from all backgrounds, not just ones that are middle/upper class from developed countries.
Signed, a disabled and unable to work guy who enjoys IT and programing
You don’t need to pay to develop an app, you only need to pay to put it in the store.
So develop your app. If it’s any good, pay the $100, sell it in the store and it’ll pay for itself. It may even make you a little profit. If it’s not good enough for that, why does it need to be in the store?
Some capabilities actually need a paid developer account even if you don’t plan to put the app on the store.
The Capability library shows only the capabilities available to the target type and your program membership. If you are not a member of the Apple Developer Program, the capabilities you can add are limited.
Say you you’re maintaining a FOSS app on your own time. How interested would you be to pay Apple $100 annually for the privilege of giving their users free stuff?
Say you you’re maintaining a FOSS app on your own time. How interested would you be to pay Apple $100 annually for the privilege of giving their users free stuff?
Depends on the reason you’re maintaining that app to begin with. If it’s a hobby, then $100/year is a pretty cheap hobby.
When I was in college, I was pulling in just enough money from work to pay for rent, food, essentials, and over drafts from the previous week, that $100 was more than I had available for a good 3-5 years of my life. A college student looking to develop and publish apps is the very type of person most hurt by this.
The 30% cut is an obscene relic - and on some platforms, it is the primary reason you can’t run your own software on your own hardware. For a fucking smartphone, a 24/7 wireless communications device on your person, that restriction is obviously intolerable.
Does it? Steam does not monopolize a platform, or demand exclusivity. With Steam you are 100% free to sell through other channels, and even be able to still use Steam. Also there are actual services on Steam, and there are possibilities for lower rates.
Well not really, AFAIK they sell only about 20-50% of games sold for PC, depending on source. Not at all comparable to Apple that has maintained 100% for iPhone.
Also Steam is an independent alternative to Microsoft store on Windows now. So again quite the opposite of the Apple monopoly control of their platform.
I just checked up on it, because it’s a number I remember reading earlier. What I have noticed is that when the 75% market share is mentioned, it’s downloads, that’s a pretty meaningless number. The only number I could find was 18% SALES from 2013. No doubt that has increased in 11 years. I corrected the number to 20-50% since there is no way it can be 75% with several of the biggest game developers like Microsoft, EA, Epyc and others almost completely avoiding Steam. Together with independent sales, and Epic and Microsoft store, and smaller outlets like GOG and Humble Bundle.
Yeah, percent downloads is particularly difficult to extrapolate for steam: they host a number of extremely popular “free” games, and are notorious for their sale pricing. In addition, they have (IMO) very generous policy for providing devs keys for use on their platform.
Every other store charges 30% including Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Google Play, etc. Epic doesn’t and they aren’t profitable, so I don’t know why people pile on Apple.
Wow, they do this just 2 days after being fined $2 billion by EU!
Unless you don’t know this “Tim Apple”, those fines have a tendency to increase with repeated violations.
I’m an American but even I know your in the minority with that opinion. You tell everyone in the EU to throw away their iPhone and delete their Facebook, I’m sure it’s gonna be really easy to convince your EU friends. I have a little respect for Apple, not a lot of companies will psudo stand up to the US government after the Boston Bomber on privacy grounds, even if it was just for show.
You would be surprised on how Europeans can adapt to that very quickly. If you take Apple out of the European market sure it will cause some fuss, with time we adapt.
That’s a false comparison. Salary after tax is not comparable to profit. Profit is after ALL expenses. So if I did something really really stupid, after being warned about it and repeatedly, and was fined 2% after ALL expenses, I’d say I got off easy.
Really, it’s just an asshole tax. Most restaurants these days have extra fees that exceed 2% just because. Hell, once upon a time, a 15% tip was given for great service. Now it seems like 20-22% is often the lowest in the recommended tip section. 2% of extra money is nothing, especially when the fine is less than what was earned from the infraction. It’s a lot easier to stomach a 2 billion dollar fine, when you earned 4 billion because of it.
Think of some small family owned business, like a ma and pa shop. What they have after all expenses, the profit, is what they live off. That’s their “salary”.
What you have left after all expenses is your savings. In a business, savings would be an investment, which does not count as profit.
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