I think people have covered the personal opinions but I'm still surprised of the desire to consider the monopolistic abuse as fair business. Whatever we think of the Tims I think its strange to be an apologist for the failed regulation of tech companies.
It's not monopolistic abuse when the harm done to Epic was self-inflicted.
I think it was due time a company with enough clout created a precedent case. This will be interesting to follow - there was no other way to start breaking the monopolies as the US antitrust regulation is not doing its job.
If anything, Epic is showing that it's perceived clout is much lower than it thinks it is. This news is making a splash in the gaming sphere, but Apple will snuff this case out and move on to the next lawsuit.
Is that crossCloud, tenCloud, or exCloud? I can never tell with Apple.
To be fair this has been covered across European media at least and I spent quite some time talking about it on national tv in Finland - this is being recognized as the consumer rights issue it is.
You might assume xCloud is short for iiiiiiiiiiCloud, but xCloud is Microsoft, not Apple
You think that Epic requesting special treatment for itself as a corporation, intentionally violating its user agreement as a corporation, and fighting over a piece of the pie with another corporation is a consumer rights issue?
This is not about Epic. The case is whether a third party service provider can charge for in-app purchase without Apple/Google taking an obnoxious cut from the content provider.
Not all of those vendors are simply storefronts. Many, such as Steam, PSN, etc. are platforms with many tools beyond a simple storefront.
no, they just show that part of their business model is offering a higher cut to publishers
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www.theverge.com
That graph is somewhat missleading tho. Look at Steam and you'll see that it's 30% or less. While EGS is 12% with hidden fees added on top of that. For example the customers have to pay the transaction fees for many payment methods which make up to 8%. Or Developers have to pay 2% for the "support a creator" program. And the EGS is operating at immense losses so it's questionable how sustainable their 12%+X cut really is.
Why are the cuts obnoxious? If 30% is too high, what is the alternative, and what would you base the new number on?
If you're this late the topic and still think that Epic is fighting this for anybody other than themselves, you've got some catching up to do on the story, the emails, and the lawsuit.
they can say all they want, but we've already seen how they behave when they're actually on an open platform
Just leaving this here
WordPress founder claims Apple cut off updates to his completely free app because it wants 30 percent
Update: WordPress has already caved.
Humble barely makes profit (with the 15%) and its mainly a key seller, not its own platform, so it offloads a lot of the long term costs to the other platforms that have to handle that (mainly Steam).
It's covered in the article, WP decided to remove those parts from the App but Apple insisted they had to put they payment stuff in the app so they could extract their sweet 30%
Epic are in for themselves here. Nothing more. They're just saying for everyone so it helps their cause somehow; to ultimately make more money for themselves alone, not to help everyone else.
Epic allows you to use your own payment methods for IAP (so for mtx) in EGS mainly because they have no overlay to work that ingame (and because they are using that as a proof that "hey, we can do that in our loss leading store, everyone else can do it in their profitable stores!" in different lawsuits).
No, they take cut for purchase through EGS (12%) and that includes DLC you buy through the store. IAP you can have the option of use your own payment method were you get 0% (so for example GTAV Online mtx done ingame when you own the game in EGS would give 100% of hte money to Rockstar). Basically one of the things Epic is asking for in one of their first letters.
