Epic Sues Apple and Google due to Fortnite getting pulled [2020-08-13, 2021-05-03]

cheapchips said:
The feel of Unreal weapons was always sloppy compared to the Quake games. This is objective fact. As such, Sweeney can never be forgiven for the part he played in this.
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Personally I always thought the quake engine source code was better than unreals

even now UE is a bit of a mess, not to mention its very broken, even simple stuff (rename file, compiling actually working 100% of the time, intellisense, editor crashing for no reason, code still based on a FPS etc etc, how did this become the biggest engine, oh right the tools)

Apple is not immune for my wrath, they unleashed Xcode & objective C (at least now they had the sense to remove obj-c, and xcode is a lot better than it was, still not a top rank IDE but certainly a lot better)
 
zed said:
:LOL: you think unknown person X putting a game on the IOS store has a chance in hell of negotiating a less rate than 30%
They can negotiate all they want, its not gonna happen, mate

The only possible way was if they were forced to in court like whats happening now, and there is a possibility that apple is gonna lose, which will cost them a lot.
And as an apple shareholder that makes me sad
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Unknown person X is filed under the "Joe nobody" category mentioned earlier.They have little optio s beside just following the tide.

Them aside, even middle sized devs/pubs could excert more presure if they had the balls to. You can start by finding alternatives to the easy choice of the current oligopolies. Launch in stores with lower %s first. Have a pixed dev price and have the store % be placed on top, so it costs more in stores that take more. These are all forms of negotiation in my book.

Oh, but steam has a contract that demands price parity. Simple, create different versions of the game with minor content differences, like 2 exclusive Steam edition hats for your avatar. "Its a different price because its a different product".

Oh but steam could still see through this and remove your game from their store. Well, that is where the balls come in. Say: FINE, your loss. Tell your fans that despite Steam being a great store, the cut their take is more than option XYZ, so it makes no sense to charge the same there, so if you wanna play the game and support the dev, as much as you like steam, buy our title in this other store and maybe when gabe takes that crowbar out of his butt we can be back there either with an apropriately higher price, or a lower cut for them.

Oh but you may lose sales that way. Of corse you may. I never said those things are easy, but I think they are not impossible, and in fact, even necessary. Again: balls.
 
milk said:
Oh, but steam has a contract that demands price parity. Simple, create different versions of the game with minor content differences, like 2 exclusive Steam edition hats for your avatar. "Its a different price because its a different product".
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I have seen games that are cheaper on Epic Game Store than on Steam.
 
??!! all well and good milk, but Im not getting how what you saiz applies to apple and the app store.
Yeah from what I read the epic store has already gotten to 17% marketshare in a year, other stores have been around for years and site at 1-2%
On the downside its taken them millions of dollars to get there, then again MS have prolly spent more on their store and what marketshare is that?
Personally I find the epic store app, terrible (its fullscreen, it consumes way too much resources etc, steam is far superior)
 
zed said:
??!! all well and good milk, but Im not getting how what you saiz applies to apple and the app store.
Yeah from what I read the epic store has already gotten to 17% marketshare in a year, other stores have been around for years and site at 1-2%
On the downside its taken them millions of dollars to get there, then again MS have prolly spent more on their store and what marketshare is that?
Personally I find the epic store app, terrible (its fullscreen, it consumes way too much resources etc, steam is far superior)
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I was giving an example. Switch Steam for Apple store in my post and all of it still aplies. Of course, foregoing apple's store means foregoing the entire iPhone platform, but not the entire Smart-Phone platform.
 
Well the EU may break up the iOS walled-garden paradigm.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/draft-eu-data-rules-target-apple-google-facebook-amazon/

It may require Apple to not preinstall any apps, allow side loading, share data with smaller competitors, among other things.


No doubt these provisions would help companies like Spotify, by coincidence happens to be an EU company which was complaining about having to compete vs. Apple Music.

Would the EU be even contemplating these kinds of laws if it were EU companies which controlled mobile platforms like Apple and Google?


The EU has been pushing a Digital Single Market initiative for years. So for instance, they've phased out mobile data roaming charges, in an effort to craft a big EU market with the scale to compete against the American tech giants. Unfortunately for the EU, they've not yet been able to incubate home-grown companies which can create a platform which attracts consumers from all over the world.

So now they're trying to tinker and limit how platform innovators build these platforms.

Presumably, some startups could develop killer apps. only if they don't have to compete with Apple and Google themselves or are able to sideload on their platforms. Here's a prediction, if they go through with this, there still won't be any EU company which develop some apps or services which dominate mobile platforms.

Say for instance an EU counterpart to WeChat or something like that.

There's nothing barring an EU startup from creating something like WeChat now. In fact, aren't a lot of messaging apps from Europe, like Telegram? Would be a way for them to kill iOS Messages. So one way to create an app which would be used by virtually everyone on a given platform is to make the platform owner kill their popular apps.

I guess it would extend to things like Siri, Hey Google and Alexa as well.

A lot of these first-party apps are tentpole features added over the years to attract people to the latest versions of the OS and the latest devices. Siri was originally a third-party app and certainly there have been a number of messaging apps over the years. But in Apple's case, they made Messages good enough that most iOS users skip using third-party messaging apps as much.

But the EU can't have that. Doesn't matter how much user satisfaction there might be with first-party apps and services, they have to try to prop up some mythical innovators who can't catch a break because their brilliance is crushed by these platform giants.
 
Yeah I was about to post that, looks good for epic

Theres no need to get all conspiratorial about it wco81, the EU has shown many multiple times that they care more about the people/environment than the US does, in the US it always seems to be companies interests first, I can give countless examples if you need but I think you agree.
Of course apple can threaten to leave the EU, like facebook recently threatened to,
 
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I don't think they care about Epic.

They may care more about Spotify though.

And the fact that it's just another chance for them to whittle an American giant down.
 
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/6/...iciary-committee-apple-google-amazon-facebook


If there is antitrust action, it would be enforced by the DOJ, not Congress. At least that's how previous antitrust actions vs. the tech industry have been conducted. I don't recall any legislation passed when the DOJ was going after Microsoft, for example.

A lot of these members of Congress will be gone even if the DOJ started taking enforcement action right now. The companies will litigate against the actions and it will be in the courts for years.


It's interesting, tech company workers are pouring political donations to Democrats in this election cycle, while the Republicans get their money from Wall Street. So Democratic members of Congress are joining with Republicans to list grievances against tech companies? If they broke up the big tech companies or barred them from entering certain businesses, there would probably be job losses. But the idea is that with greater competition, smaller companies would grow and employ the workers of the giants who lost jobs, is that the logic?

Or break up the companies and employment decreases, takes years to regain the same trajectory. Microsoft wasn't broken up yet all these huge companies rose and dominated in new markets in which MS failed to compete -- not for lack of trying either.


Meanwhile, Congress wouldn't dare move against "too big to fail" financial institutions, threaten to break them up or even take a modest action, like regulate ATM fees.
 
Saw clips of Steve Ballmer interview. He said the cases against each of the tech companies are different, so Congress isn't going to pass specific legislation for each company.


Also heard that FTC is investigating FB for something. An analyst said worst case, if FB has to divest Instagram and WhatsApp, they may be worth more once separated out. Though FB has been doing more to integrate the different services on the backend.


In any event, it would be dubious for regulators, whether in Europe or in the US, to try to increase competition by knocking down the biggest market players.

MS with all its resources could never get traction in search or online advertising. Or for that matter, become a player in mobile.

However, it has become prominent in cloud services, after Amazon had established a huge presence.

If MS had been broken up as many proposed about 20 years ago, between their Office and Windows divisions, would we have seen greater competition in office productivity or desktop OS markets? Not really, the market kind of corrected itself and mobile diminished the dominance of desktop computers. MS is still dominant with Office, but that seems more about inertia in corporate markets than innovation or growth in the category -- no growth but it spits out huge cash flow.

Or think about all the big acquisitions MS has made over the years. Imagine if they had been barred from acquiring Skype, Linked In and some of the other big deals they've made. Did those deals prevent WhatsApp and others from pretty much displacing Skype? Or prevent not just FB but IG, Twitter, Tiktok and others from building up huge number of users?


FB buying WA and IG probably kept it dominant but as Tiktok and Twitter shows, they couldn't monopolize social networking.


Now imagine Apple being barred from acquiring PA Semi or a number of other acquisitions, most of them very small compared to other tech mergers. Maybe the Apple SOCs are nothing special, though it's not clear people are buying iOS devices because of the SOCs so much as the features they enable. But could those features have been enabled if they were buying Qualcomm SOCs all this time?


There is often unanimity that governments shouldn't pick winners and losers in business. But the proposed remedies in that Congressional report includes taking big winners and handicapping them in order to try to prop up losers or rather companies which aren't as big winners. For example, Spotify complains about Apple Music and now the EU is looking at creating competition -- though I'm guessing Spotify does pretty well, probably leads in many markets over Apple Music.
 
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...e-google-have-monopoly-power-should-be-split/

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. The subcommittee wanted to answer one key question: did Big Tech get big playing by the rules, or does it cheat to stay at the top? After 16 months of hearings, research, and analysis, the panel's findings are out... and the results look really bad for every company involved.

The tech sector does indeed suffer from abuses of "monopoly power," the subcommittee concluded in the mammoth 450-page report (PDF) published late yesterday afternoon.
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Those bloody europeans wanting to break up good old USA companies

wait a sec

(scans article again)

Its not the europeans!

However, the report concludes, Apple does have a monopolistic hold over what you can do with an iPhone. You can only put apps on your phone through the Apple App Store, and Apple has total gatekeeper control over that App Store—that's what Epic is suing the company over.
That monopoly control allows Apple to "generate supra-normal profits" from the App Store, the report finds, and those profits have become a dramatically higher percentage of Apple's revenue over time, now generating billions more than the company spends annually to run the App Store.
Apple also ties its in-app payment system (IAP) to the app store in an anticompetitive way, the committee found. Citing internal Apple communications as well as testimony from the founders of ProtonMail and Hey, among others, the report finds that "Apple has leveraged its power over the App Store to require developers to implement IAP or risk being thrown out of the App Store."
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very very damming
 
No it's members of Congress from hotbeds of technology and markets like NY and RI.

From that Ars article:

It is correct that, in the smartphone handset market, Apple is not a monopoly. Instead, iOS and Android hold an effective duopoly in mobile operating systems.

However, the report concludes, Apple does have a monopolistic hold over what you can do with an iPhone. You can only put apps on your phone through the Apple App Store, and Apple has total gatekeeper control over that App Store—that's what Epic is suing the company over.

That monopoly control allows Apple to "generate supra-normal profits" from the App Store, the report finds, and those profits have become a dramatically higher percentage of Apple's revenue over time, now generating billions more than the company spends annually to run the App Store.
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OK, so Apple isn't allowed to make billions from the App Store? We have a cap on corporate profits now?

Fine, since we have huge deficits and national debt, lets go after "supra-normal profits" and really impose higher tax rates on banks and oil companies.

Oh, that's not happening?

Then what the fuck does it matter how much money Apple makes and whether third-party developers are making enough money?


Because if they want to go over corporations for making too much money, time to go after individuals too. You don't have to be some Ayn-Rand-loving ur-capitalist to ask if we're really going to say entities, whether corporations or people ("corporations are people!"), can have too much money.


It's not a coincidence that this animus against these FAANG companies is peaking around the time they're hitting all-time highs in market capitalization. But that's great, we want to tackle inequality by restricting the income capabilities of the .01%, lets have at it.

But be honest about it.
 
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