Playstation 5 [PS5] [Release November 12 2020]

I have apps for my checking and savings accounts but I rarely use them. I use the websites of the institutions.

In American, credit card use is far more common so I have apps for credit cards on my iPhone and I will check them occasionally to see if a transaction I just made shows up as pending.

But when I'm actually paying the balance, I again use web sites.

I agree that transport apps are far more essential on phones, since it will plot out your journey based on GPS. Though public transportation isn't that heavily used by Americans.

My most used apps are for podcasts, fitness tracking, blood pressure readings, health tracking. Can I work around using these apps? Yes but they provide greater convenience so I want them. These were all free so I don't think Apple got 30%.

In act a lot of the apps which people most often pay for are games. I paid for Trivia Crack, didn't pay for DuoLingo.
 
DSoup said:
I think what you mean is, Steam's standard T&C do not offer this, and it is specifically not available to you. Again, it's absolutely normal for codes to be mass distributed with hardware and even other software as an incentive. Ergo, it absolute is possible.
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Nope. As a developer with a Steam account, I have access to Steam's T&Cs, Steamworks. The section there tells me as a dev how I can get keys to distribute. There is no option to buy keys. You can get keys from Valve, but you cannot buy keys.
DSoup said:
They need explicit permission to represent individuals and if they don't have that, they really stand to gain very little ...
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I don't understand the CPO assigning authority. As an opt-out mass-action, I would assume the court considers them the plaintiff with the authority to speak on the part of the affected individuals. I don't know how damages are decided. I'm not even sure there have been that many mass-action CPOs to reference. Do you know of any where we can see who was involved and how the compensations were paid?
 
DSoup said:
I'm keeping an open mind on this whole thing, but when many games cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to create and market, and represent a massive investment risk, how does it make any sense that Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sony and Valve, take 30% of the sale price in perpetuity? Publishers and developers are are investing everything to create these games over a number of years, and just because a bunch of companies are created walled-gardens, or lucrative marketplaces, they get to take 30% of every sale? :???:

That doesn't seem proportionate to me, although I know the economics of the industry - particularly in the console space - is complicated. So these are opportunities for the industry to explain why a 30% cut is reasonable. Seems fair, right?
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That's a whole socioeconomic argument on what profits people allowed. What's the markup on golf-clubs? Why are golf-club manufacturers allowed to ask such a markup? Same on cars. Same on watch batteries. I knew someone who worked in a jewellers. They said watch batteries are 0.5c to make. They are sold to the suppler for 5c. The supplier sells them to the jewellers for 50c. The jeweller sells them to the consumer for $5. Who decides who is allowed to charge what profit margins? The current economy allows people to operate without much regulation, relying on a free market to regulate prices. The only things regulated are (some) essentials and real monopolies that prevent the free market from working properly.

I don't see why the 30% fee needs investigating while not every other product and service on the planet does. Where do you draw the line, or don't you? I can see the need to investigate a monopoly, but Sony is clearly not a monopoly in gaming. The case identifies Sony as a majority in the 'console market' which it defines as 'Xbox and PS' but reality is people who want to play games have access to many platforms and Sony are very far from monopolising it.

Ergo this case makes no sense to me within a free market where there is no obvious monopoly. I guess the case rests on the assertion that Sony is operating an monopoly, and legally that'd need to be (dis)proven.

But some of the points are clearly nonsense. eg. Sony has a monopoly on selling content to PS owners, that if you own a PS, you have to buy games through Sony's store. Well, go into a bowling alley and you have to rent the shoes from them. There aren't another couple of independent shoe rental kiosks inside, and it'd be bonkers to think there should be. A notable part of the operations include shoe rental. You don't go to Disneyland and find some independent sellers of tickets, or visit the cinema and have a choice of ticket suppliers, or a choice of food vendors operating inside.
 
wco81 said:
But you don't necessarily need apps.

Certainly not the millions of apps now available for smart phones.
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You need apps to actually function in society these days. Id authentication and payments are example of things you basically need to do these days.

Going to China is a pretty crap experience if you can't activate Wepay or Alipay for example.
 
DSoup said:
@wco81 and the apps generally considered necessary (or even essential) for living, such as banking, monitoring and paying utilities, accessing public services and transport, are generally all free to begin with and Apple and Google make nothing off of these. Although that is divorced from the cost of owning a smartphone with a data plan or access to wifi to use it!
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The thing is that Apple (and Google in a lot of cases) can terminate access to those if they want to.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
That's a whole socioeconomic argument on what profits people allowed. What's the markup on golf-clubs? Why are golf-club manufacturers allowed to ask such a markup? Same on cars. Same on watch batteries. I knew someone who worked in a jewellers. They said watch batteries are 0.5c to make. They are sold to the suppler for 5c. The supplier sells them to the jewellers for 50c. The jeweller sells them to the consumer for $5. Who decides who is allowed to charge what profit margins? The current economy allows people to operate without much regulation, relying on a free market to regulate prices. The only things regulated are (some) essentials and real monopolies that prevent the free market from working properly.
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You can buy watch batteries directly from the maker if you want to. You can't do that with apps (or games), you have to go through the platform holder.
 
It's simple for me: I value Sony's freedom to charge whatever they want and gamers right to refuse their products if they don't like the cost, and for other participants in the market to make cheaper alternatives like Game Pass. That's the free market that I think is a critical element of our civilization and should only be fucked with in very rare circumstances.

This is a shakedown, pure and simple.
 
tuna said:
You can buy watch batteries directly from the maker if you want to. You can't do that with apps (or games), you have to go through the platform holder.
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On Android, someone sells their apps thru their own website or Patreon or that indie website I forgot the name.

On PS you just can't. While on xbox, you can just release it as webapp and people can play thru edge. You also can install your own apps to your Xbox
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Ergo this case makes no sense to me within a free market where there is no obvious monopoly. I guess the case rests on the assertion that Sony is operating an monopoly, and legally that'd need to be (dis)proven.

But some of the points are clearly nonsense. eg. Sony has a monopoly on selling content to PS owners, that if you own a PS, you have to buy games through Sony's store. Well, go into a bowling alley and you have to rent the shoes from them. There aren't another couple of independent shoe rental kiosks inside, and it'd be bonkers to think there should be. A notable part of the operations include shoe rental. You don't go to Disneyland and find some independent sellers of tickets, or visit the cinema and have a choice of ticket suppliers, or a choice of food vendors operating inside.
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I don't think the EU has taken any action against console makers but the DMA and DSA would allow them to when they feel like it.

The choices of targets come down to money, nationality, visibility. EU goes after the very large American tech companies, which EU has been unable to compete against, despite trying for decades. So the EU regulatory authorities have been driven by complaints from Spotify and other EU companies.

The existing antitrust laws would make it difficult to term any of these markets monopolized. So the EU has crafted new legislation with criteria for which companies fall under possible regulation under the DMA and DSA only limited to American companies so far. But if they felt like it, they could toss in Sony and Nintendo, though EU doesn't have as many aspirations in gaming.

EU countries in the past have complained about cultural hegemony of Hollywood TV and movies. So maybe Netflix better be wary too, though they commission a lot of content from EU studios and production companies so maybe they better not stop spending on EU production.
 
tuna said:
You can buy watch batteries directly from the maker if you want to. You can't do that with apps (or games), you have to go through the platform holder.
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The point about the watch is profit margins. Even from the supplier the markup is 1000%. What makes 1000% markup okay for a battery but not 30% for a gaming ecosystem? If people are going to state that x% is too much, there needs to be a measure and rule system to determine what profit margins are and are not allowed, no? 30% for a downloadable game can only be too much when the right percent is codified in law - a law that states 450% is okay for golf clubs and trainers 700% is okay for snow shoes, and the upper limit for modelling clay is 14.8% profit margins.

Isn't that the only way to be fair about Sony's profit margins, to control all and everyone's profit margin??
 
Shifty Geezer said:
That's a whole socioeconomic argument on what profits people allowed. What's the markup on golf-clubs? Why are golf-club manufacturers allowed to ask such a markup? Same on cars. Same on watch batteries.
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Sure, but it's also the law, hence why this court (the Competition Appeals Tribunal) is allowing this case to proceed. There is no merit in debating it. As for the examples you give, there is competition in all of these markets whereas there is little competition in the videogame ecosystem market.

Shifty Geezer said:
I don't see why the 30% fee needs investigating while not every other product and service on the planet does. Where do you draw the line, or don't you? I can see the need to investigate a monopoly, but Sony is clearly not a monopoly in gaming. The case identifies Sony as a majority in the 'console market' which it defines as 'Xbox and PS' but reality is people who want to play games have access to many platforms and Sony are very far from monopolising it.
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You've not been pausing attention because the EU and UK are both putting in place legislation for greater powers to regulate walled garden ecosystems.

Shifty Geezer said:
Ergo this case makes no sense to me within a free market where there is no obvious monopoly. I guess the case rests on the assertion that Sony is operating an monopoly, and legally that'd need to be (dis)proven.
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Sony is a monopoly. For the purposes of the UK's competitions regulation a monopoly is when a single firm controls 25% or more of a particular market. Why so low you might ask? Because the regulator also needs to be able to act if a company is seen to be engaging in abusive practices before it can detrimentally damage that market.

Shifty Geezer said:
Nope. As a developer with a Steam account, I have access to Steam's T&Cs, Steamworks. The section there tells me as a dev how I can get keys to distribute. There is no option to buy keys. You can get keys from Valve, but you cannot buy keys.
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Sure, the standard Steam developer T&C states that, but larger players work with different rules. That's how thousands of reviewers get review codes and how tens of thousands of valid game codes are bundled with graphics cards and CPUs. I am an iOS developer and I can see the standard condition that requires me to agree that Apple take a 30% 'transfer fee' on all financial transactions. You know whose iOS developer account don't include that condition? Amazon. And plenty more.

You don't really think every major publisher or firm operating in these ecosystems are the operating from the same default T&C as the likes or you and I, do you?
 
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