Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple, Epic, and the App Store

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 781 posts

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#371

Post by [deleted] »

bttrfl wrote: post #359
cromwellian wrote: post #352

"But Apple needs to fund the App Store. XCode, payment processing, reviewers, it all costs money". Yes, very little in comparison. Apple made $50 billion in revenue from the App Store in 2019. $50 BILLION. The data centers costs to serve up this are miniscule in comparison. Apple could build 50 datacenters PER YEAR EVERY YEAR for that revenue. Reviewers? A staff of 10,000 fulltime reviewers paid $200k per year would…

Following your logic, Fortnite's add-ons should clearly be free since the cost to make and sell them is minuscule in comparison to 400M Epic made in April alone [0]. [0] https://venturebeat.com/2020/06/15/epic-games-shareholders-s...

[deleted]

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#373

Post by naikrovek »

bttrfl wrote: post #359
cromwellian wrote: post #352

"But Apple needs to fund the App Store. XCode, payment processing, reviewers, it all costs money". Yes, very little in comparison. Apple made $50 billion in revenue from the App Store in 2019. $50 BILLION. The data centers costs to serve up this are miniscule in comparison. Apple could build 50 datacenters PER YEAR EVERY YEAR for that revenue. Reviewers? A staff of 10,000 fulltime reviewers paid $200k per year would…

Following your logic, Fortnite's add-ons should clearly be free since the cost to make and sell them is minuscule in comparison to 400M Epic made in April alone [0]. [0] https://venturebeat.com/2020/06/15/epic-games-shareholders-s...

You may not know how to follow logic.

No one is saying that Epic are doing bad things in order to maintain their monopoly position.

Epic doesn't have a monopoly on any market.

People ARE saying that Apple are doing bad things to maintain their monopoly position, and others are justifying that by saying that "running a business is expensive" as if that justifies a monopoly or monopolistic actions.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#374

Post by Spivak »

cromwellian wrote: post #352

"But Apple needs to fund the App Store. XCode, payment processing, reviewers, it all costs money". Yes, very little in comparison. Apple made $50 billion in revenue from the App Store in 2019. $50 BILLION. The data centers costs to serve up this are miniscule in comparison. Apple could build 50 datacenters PER YEAR EVERY YEAR for that revenue. Reviewers? A staff of 10,000 fulltime reviewers paid $200k per year would…

I don't really think it's about the number. I try not to think about these kinds of things in terms of what different companies "deserve." Apple can get away with demanding a 30% cut on their platform and they do so without much arm twisting. Nobody has to support macOS or iOS, and both developers and customers can completely ignore their existence. They'll be missing out on a lucrative customer base but that's true of realestate in high-traffic areas as well.

Apple being able to pull off such huge margins in markets where they have competition on every front I think paints a picture of just how ahead they are. The fact that the gap is so big and nobody has been able to step up and close it is mind-boggling to me. You can only blame so much on slick marketing because for 64% gross margins I think other companies would be happy to put up the marketing cash.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#375

Post by mdoms »

darkwizard42 wrote: post #162
tc wrote: post #41

Here's the thing. Even if you're OK with Apple (or whoever) controlling what you can run on your computers, this is a centralization of power that will be co-opted. Let's say that Australia wants to ban consumer encryption. This would currently be difficult to enforce for PC software. But on mobile, this is easy. Just make Apple and Google enforce it! Make them ban such apps from their stores. Now you've achieved per…

I don't think you are using two points that are similar enough. If Australia bans encryption, you as a consumer who resides in Australia has a high switching cost (moving, new job, residence, etc.) and thus the consumer loses out. If Apple starts to use that power badly... you can switch to a number of competitor feature phones with largely the same feature and app capabilities (Android being the most obvious) In a m…

It's rare to see someone so comprehensively miss the point. Bravo.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#376

Post by jarvar »

I think apple's 30% cut of app purchases is too much and I think they know this. With that being said I think this is part of apple for a long-term plan.

iPhones are getting more expensive to build considering all the tech their cramming into each iPhone and other products. eventually they might get so expensive that Apple would be forced to sell them at a price that will not work well wih consumers. If you think about how much apple has invested in services that only function on their devices, I think apple will start selling products at a loss, with the plan to make that money back and more through services they offer on devices. In the same way that Sony and Microsoft lose money with every console sold, but recoup those loses many times over with games purchase fees.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#377

Post by misnome »

cromwellian wrote: post #352

"But Apple needs to fund the App Store. XCode, payment processing, reviewers, it all costs money". Yes, very little in comparison. Apple made $50 billion in revenue from the App Store in 2019. $50 BILLION. The data centers costs to serve up this are miniscule in comparison. Apple could build 50 datacenters PER YEAR EVERY YEAR for that revenue. Reviewers? A staff of 10,000 fulltime reviewers paid $200k per year would…

I don't understand these arguments either. It's not illegal to have high product margins, right? Why can't they charge whatever they want? It comes across as pure moral "I don't like it" objection, which is fine, but don't use it as a legal argument.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#378

Post by czhiddy »

naikrovek wrote: post #373
bttrfl wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Following your logic, Fortnite's add-ons should clearly be free since the cost to make and sell them is minuscule in comparison to 400M Epic made in April alone [0]. [0] https://venturebeat.com/2020/06/15/epic-games-shareholders-s...

You may not know how to follow logic. No one is saying that Epic are doing bad things in order to maintain their monopoly position. Epic doesn't have a monopoly on any market. People ARE saying that Apple are doing bad things to maintain their monopoly position, and others are justifying that by saying that "running a business is expensive" as if that justifies a monopoly or monopolistic actions.

If Apple has a monopoly on the iOS App Store market, then it follows that Epic has a monopoly on the Fortnite add-on market, right?

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#379

Post by nottorp »

spanhandler wrote: post #201
reaperducer wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, this is so different from the way I think that I find it utterly surprising Seven billion people on the planet. It shouldn't be surprising to learn that not everyone thinks the way that you do. I wonder if it's an age thing. When you're young and have more time than money, tinkering with the technical hassles of your phone is worth it to save a buck or two. When you're older and have more money than time,…

Age was it, in part, for me. I used to do lots of hardware and OS tinkering. Now the last goddamn thing I want to do is troubleshoot graphical glitches in x-windows, or try to get my audio to handle changing outputs correctly, or cross my fingers while "dist-upgrade" runs, or fix scaling and font rendering in GTK apps, or whatever, when I'm just trying to do something else. At some point I became acutely aware of eve…

You just described why i switched to Mac OS from Linux :)

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#380

Post by mdoms »

enra wrote: post #236

While I don't like Apple's 30% cut on multiplatform/subscription products, I think Epic's real motivation here is to run their own App Store, build a bigger moat and get the profits themselves (they take 12% cut, 5% if you use Unreal Engine, from developers in their store). They also make exclusive deals, bribing developers with funding/marketing support, so that the games can only bought in their store for 6-12mo. C…

> While I don't like Apple's 30% cut on multiplatform/subscription products, I think Epic's real motivation here is to run their own App Store, build a bigger moat and get the profits themselves (they take 12% cut, 5% if you use Unreal Engine, from developers in their store). They also make exclusive deals, bribing developers with funding/marketing support, so that the games can only bought in their store for 6-12mo.

Sounds great to me. Truly. Who loses here, other than Apple, one of the biggest, wealthiest companies on the planet?

> Buying games on PC now means that you have to install 5 different app stores which are usually slow, buggy and not that well written cross-platform code (pretty much like Fortnite itself).

It sucks that there's so much slow buggy software (with Steam being, by far, the biggest offender), isn't it great that we have such a thriving competitive market on PC? I think it's awesome. I think the PC gaming market has never been better.

Post reply on HN