561–570 of 671 posts
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You’ll probably find the actual rules even more arbitrary. In year 2, your January sales will still pay a 30% commission if you hit $1M the prior year.
That would be an incentive to drop the price is almost 0 until January if you see that you're trending towards $1M at the end of the year.
Fire sale prices on apps around the holidays sounds like a consumer win to me.
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Apple is the largest company in the world and sells the most successful product in human history. Of course nobody ‘compares’. But compared to almost any other iOS developer Epic is a giant.
And Epic isn't asking for a benefit for themselves: They're using those billions to fight for not just themselves, but thousands of smaller developers. Over two hundred of them joined Epic's little "app dev union" of sorts recently. Yes, Apple sells one of the most successful products in human history... and they also illegally use that power to control the market and extract revenue from thousands of other companies…
False: Epic wants to pay less commission themselves, and to be able to take a cut of other developers work.
One big difference between Apple and Epic is that Epic didn’t do any work to create the platform.
As to those smaller developers. Apple just cut the commission for them in half. A lower level than Epic was promising. Apple seems to care about the smaller developers.
Epic is not fighting for anyone but themselves.
Let’s note that more than half of Epic’s profits belong to just one man.
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You are correct that Epic Games made 5 billion dollars in revenue in 2019, according to Venturebeat [1]. However, Apple Insider reports that Apple made 59.7 billion dollars in revenue in their third fiscal quarter (March, April, and May) of 2020 [2]. Epic's definitely not a little guy, but compared to Apple, it looks more like a respectable medium-sized company. I find Apple's revenue numbers and market value truly s…
Apple is the largest company in the world and sells the most successful product in human history. Of course nobody ‘compares’. But compared to almost any other iOS developer Epic is a giant.
Although, if we're going by how popular the apps are on the store...I could see how Epic would be considered a heavyweight on the App Store.
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Really? It's not progressive [1]? This page suggests it is: https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/italy/individual/taxes-on-perso... (Yes, this is a foreign third party so may be wrong; I can't read Italian.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax (See the Computation section for how the higher rates only apply to the higher portions of a person's income, with their lower portions taxed less.)
He's talking about freelance people. This link is for employees.
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> You don't need to distribute on Steam. [...] alternatives exist. Sure, if you want your business to go bankrupt. Itch? I love the place but good luck supporting your business with the number of sales you’ll make if you’re only available there. Epic? GoG? Humble? Those are curated stores; you have to be invited in; you can’t just choose to sell there. And even if you could, they still don’t have anything even remote…
Minecraft didn’t distribute on Steam, they managed just fine. Neither does Fortnite come to think of it.
> and yes, you can point to a small handful of digital games which were highly financially successful without primarily selling through Steam, but those are the hyper-viral one-in-a-million exceptions, not representative business cases that you should be betting your business on replicating
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This is literally not what’s happening. The iPhone is their product. If you don’t want to use their products and their store you do not have to. Buy a different device. There are plenty . Apple doesn’t get to tell Google, Samsung, Huawei, LG, OnePlus, Fairphone, etc. how to build their devices. The one device they do get to decide how it works is the iPhone. Because they created it, they own it, and they get to decid…
> Their device, their decision. Once I buy an iPhone, I own it and it is my device.
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The difference is just a historical choice. The desktop platform owners chose to be open in that way, but they didn't have to. Games console makers chose to go the locked down route at about the same time (in the grand scheme of things). The Mac launched long after many locked down games consoles existed. They just chose different strategies.
Apple takes some yearly fees from developers though, that's nearly a platform tax for Mac os.
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Epic has a 40% stake, and controls Epic’s access to the Chinese market. There may be other rights attached to their share. Sweeney may technically still have the majority vote, but he can’t do anything they seriously oppose, or not do anything they are strongly in favor of without facing serious consequences.
This is entirely false. Because while Blizzard, the NBA, and every other "American" company was busy sucking up to China in the last year, Tim Sweeney blatantly stated players in his games should feel free to support Hong Kong . Epic didn't bow to China like other American companies did. And Epic didn't even stay silent. Epic made a clear statement in opposition to China . That should've put to bed any of this silly…
Support Hong Kong?
How is that in opposition to China? Hong Kong is part of China, and I’m pretty sure the Chinese government thinks of itself as supporting Hong Kong.
All Sweeney actually did was make some carefully worded statements about free speech and said that they wouldn’t filter messages on their platform.
He made no statement encouraging support of any particular political stance.
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I love how we suddenly have better ideas for how the most successful public company should allocate their resources to serve their customers (developers are second tier, sorry). We sometimes forget they are sitting on mountains of money because they execute good company decision making, not because they are doing weird things to protect a monopoly. Like there is some meeting near the top between execs happening where…
With this rationale no monopoly should ever be investigated, broken up, etc. The whole problem with monopolies is that they actually harm the consumer by protecting their monopoly from encroachment by someone else. So yes people really think decisions are being made by a monopoly to protect their monopoly (and their profits). A chunk of those billions they have is actually money generated by these monopolistic practi…