lolol no. The App Store has, bare minimum, just on the engineering side: a huge SRE team (this is a global site that sees billions of hits a day), a separate infrastructure team dealing with stuff like the underlying Search engine, the webdev team handling the content side (the thing you interact with on the web and in-app), a separate webdev team handling the iTunes Connect portal side (which unless something has changed recently, is a janky old WebObjects setup), the ingest tooling folks (there's a whole binary static analysis setup on the App ingest side behind iTunes connect that does a lot of things to try to rule out the App binary doing anything sneaky to call blacklisted APIs).
You're indirectly making the case that 30% is way too high. First, if we use your numbers and assume 1,000 staff, let's call it $200K/yr average, that's $200M. 30% of last years $72BN is $21,200M, which is much higher than the previous years $16,600M. Second, raking in that much profit relative to costs means they don't even need to attempt to be more efficient.
If it was jsut "steam being popular" than Microsoft store would have considerable amount of marketshare.
Let me ask you this, if EGS launched on day one with all the same features, how many people with ten years worth say of Steam games in their library and tens or hundreds of friends on the platform, and their payment info already entrusted there, would buy the same game on EGS instead of Steam? Not many I'm guessing. The stores could have all the same features tomorrow and then the argument would change to, "Well this is where I already have all my stuff.", which is absolutely fine and understandable. Years of loyalty means a lot of inertia. Hence the exclusives and the library building with free games.
Could be. I'd imagine you could dig up some info on operating costs from Apple's public fillings, and it will probably feature in their response to Epic. It will be interesting to see how that lines up with the back of the envelope math.
I agree with you.
Doesn't stop anybody from at least trying to develop any features, does it?
It didn't though, so we'll never know.
Is he wrong?
GFWL had a reputation for being notoriously buggy to the point of being essentially non-functional for many people. Like the Windows Store, but much much worse.
Assuming they weren't pissing me off from the jump with their practice of last-second exclusivity money hats like they did with Metro: Exodus and all other features were the same, I'd have probably jumped in on games like Hades and (More recently) Kingdom Hearts. Again, that's assuming all of the same features at the time and not pissing me off at the jump with last-second exclusivity buys.
newsletter.gamediscover.co
Epic vs. Apple - notes from a platform streetfight
I read all 700 pages, so you didn't have to.
I stopped collecting because no one was signal boosting them anymore lol.
So long as they're doing enough revenue that 5% of it covers their development costs, and that's probably not a very large number two years from now, then they should be profitable. That's if they pulled back on all exclusive deals, which are currently being easily funded with a small amount of Fortnite profits.
That's true about growth expectations vs reality. You said death spiral. That suggests constantly losing money until they go out of business. They're losing money right now because of the exclusives. If they stop those in a couple of years, you're right growth may slow, but that doesn't mean they'll be unprofitable or be in a death spiral.
Yeah, that was to be expected.Epic vs. Apple - notes from a platform streetfight
I read all 700 pages, so you didn't have to.
You're @'ing me just to ask everyone to ignore me. I don't even remember your ID, but obviously something I said got to you. What are these moving goalposts you're accusing me of?
Yes, history shows that he is wrong.
You wish.
Spot on.
Wait what? Free games with functionalities that are in the same ballpark with Steam and sleeker UI? Why on earth wouldnt people jump to that?
That went exactly as I expected. You baselessly claimed I've been "moving goalposts" for years yet you don't remember a single example, nor can you find one in this topic. Literally 100% of your posts here are to attack another poster. I wondered if this is how you interact everywhere, so I clicked on your profile, and oh look at that, you hide your own posts.
But how? where's that fortnite cash going? it's not going in the store and it can't be going all back into fortnite so wth
