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Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

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Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#681

Post by matheusmoreira »

narrator wrote: post #631
yesenadam wrote: post #619

"in 2020, Apple’s app store commission revenue was close to $15bn, which was larger than total global revenue from the entire digital music industry... Around 90% of this revenue comes from games, and almost all of that comes from in-app purchases." https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/5/13/apples-ads...

Has someone written a treatise on in-app game purchases? It's a huge aspect of human behavior that I cannot understand intuitively and I guess I ought to. I have no desire to do it. I'll pay under $10 for an old Grand Theft Auto game that I can play start to finish, but the in-app stuff I don't get. It's like some sort of exploit for human psychologically that is phenomenally lucrative that somehow I got a patch for.

It works like this:

  1. Make the game require resources to play
This has many names: food, energy, stamina, etc. The fundamental concept is virtually identical in all cases though. It represents how much fun players can have. Once they run out, they can't play anymore.

  2. Use timers to rate-limit the player's progression
Distribute resources periodically. These timers place an upper limit to how quickly players can progress in the game. There's only so much players can do with the resources it periodically gives them.

Distribute resources at predictable intervals and only if the player has used the previous items. This will create a powerful habit in players: they will feel the need to log into the game frequently in order to use up resources and keep the timer running at all times.

  3. Allow players to pay money to reset the timers
Paying customers get to buy resources directly instead of waiting for the timer to run out. They essentially pay to reset the timers and can therefore progress at unlimited rates.

  4. Make players outspend each other
Once players can pay to advance, the game is reduced to a spending competition. The player who spends the most money on the game wins.

Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#682

Post by saagarjha »

eloff wrote: post #653
Lazare wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really can't agree more. It's clear that the App Store offers significant value for many vendors, and charging for it is fine . Epic apparently generates $500m of revenue per year from the iPhone, and they're doing so using platforms, tools, and APIs that Apple built to help developers do that. It's reasonable that Apple would get a slice of that. The company I work for makes, well, a lot less revenue that Epic, but…

> Apple's stance here is a little like if AWS tried to force people who use any AWS service to use their overpriced egress bandwidth for everything, and sued customers found to be using Cloudflare to reduce their costs. Is that a good example? I think that's how it works. Egress out to cloudflare is billed at the full rate last I checked. GCP gives you a discount, but not AWS.

I assume the situation here was using Cloudflare in front of your AWS so it doesn’t get hit as much, so your costs stay low. Of course AWS↔Cloudflare is going to cost money, but ideally they will be doing caching for you do the traffic on this is less.

Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#683

Post by perryizgr8 »

topkai22 wrote: post #280

My problem has always been that Apple is both the gatekeeper and a competitor in its app store. I'd have a lot more trust in Apple as a consumer if they didn't offer up first party products such as Apple TV and Apple Arcade. It makes the shutdown of game streaming services seem particularly disingenuous. The payments issue is more complex, but I can't get a metaphor to origins of monopoly law out of my head: If payme…

This is the best solution. Apple should not be operating the platform and then compete on that same platform.

They can either shut off all their services and operate the store, charging whatever tax they like. Or they can shut off the store, allow others to operate stores on iOS, and continue distrbuting stuff like Apple music over any third party store they like.

Otherwise it is just a blatant abuse against apps like Netflix and Spotify. I'm surprised why those companies are not fighting this.

Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#684

Post by perryizgr8 »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #600

I bet that Apple will be forced to make big changes to its App Store policies, including allowing third parties payment processing for digital goods. But it will remain the only store on iOS.

I think so too, because even with those concessions app store combined with the absolute control over a billion phones is outrageously profitable.

On the other hand allowing users to use their phones as they see fit would result in huge loss of profit. Users like me would literally never pay a penny (apart from $1200 for the hardware) to Apple after that happens.

Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#685

Post by saagarjha »

paulmd wrote: post #602
azinman2 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except now there isn’t just 1 inspector, but many. And you have to figure out which you trust. Now imagine there’s a very popular restaurant, but it uses an inspector you don’t know if you trust. But you want to eat the food because all your friends are already there… so you’ll go. This is exactly what would happen— various companies once they reach a certain size will just want to have their own store because either…

facebook literally already got their hand slapped for abusing the very limited sideloading mechanisms that Apple already provided. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-... This would generalize that and allow them to sideload for everyone. They straight-up would pull out of the app store, block Safari users from the website, and force everyone to sideload a tracker build on day 1.

Facebook’s apps have significantly more access than their website does, but they still allow users to use the web to access their services.

Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#686

Post by eloff »

saagarjha wrote: post #682
eloff wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple's stance here is a little like if AWS tried to force people who use any AWS service to use their overpriced egress bandwidth for everything, and sued customers found to be using Cloudflare to reduce their costs. Is that a good example? I think that's how it works. Egress out to cloudflare is billed at the full rate last I checked. GCP gives you a discount, but not AWS.

I assume the situation here was using Cloudflare in front of your AWS so it doesn’t get hit as much, so your costs stay low. Of course AWS↔Cloudflare is going to cost money, but ideally they will be doing caching for you do the traffic on this is less.

Yes, if your using it as a caching layer, that's correct.

Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#687

Post by saagarjha »

azinman2 wrote: post #432
kmonsen wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would more be like if food safety inspections were optional, but only restaurants that opt in would be allowed to show a sign they were inspected either physically or on their web page. It would be trivial to be able to check for this. Door dash would show a sign saying which restaurant is safe to avoid being sued after an incident. If you think restaurants and food safety is a good analogy it’s not a good argumen…

Except now there isn’t just 1 inspector, but many. And you have to figure out which you trust. Now imagine there’s a very popular restaurant, but it uses an inspector you don’t know if you trust. But you want to eat the food because all your friends are already there… so you’ll go. This is exactly what would happen— various companies once they reach a certain size will just want to have their own store because either…

> Given Apple mostly makes money selling hardware

Sadly, it looks like they’re trying to diversify away from this, and every time they do we see misaligned incentives that cause them to do the wrong things.

Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#688

Post by mensetmanusman »

lucasyvas wrote: post #137

There appear to be a lot of comments effectively saying that Apple's "altruism" is what keeps the app store advocating for user privacy and security. Let's say that's both true and a good quality of the app store that could be lost on another curator's store. This is still not a problem, because Apple can instead improve the iOS permission API system to achieve a similar result. The store that delivers you the app is…

One issue with this is that people are finding humans essentially become more gullible and trusting as they age as part of the natural dying process.

Insurance companies are even considering whether they have to create a new class of fraud insurance that becomes activated after a certain number of years of age.

To put it simply, we all become grandma

Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#689

Post by aahortwwy »

narrator wrote: post #631
yesenadam wrote: post #619

"in 2020, Apple’s app store commission revenue was close to $15bn, which was larger than total global revenue from the entire digital music industry... Around 90% of this revenue comes from games, and almost all of that comes from in-app purchases." https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/5/13/apples-ads...

Has someone written a treatise on in-app game purchases? It's a huge aspect of human behavior that I cannot understand intuitively and I guess I ought to. I have no desire to do it. I'll pay under $10 for an old Grand Theft Auto game that I can play start to finish, but the in-app stuff I don't get. It's like some sort of exploit for human psychologically that is phenomenally lucrative that somehow I got a patch for.

Yes.

"who killed videogames? (a ghost story)" by Tim Rogers.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120128084303/https://insertcre...

Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#690

Post by rjzzleep »

Lazare wrote: post #640
ajkjk wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dystopian is the word for it. It's fucking insane that you can't talk about why it's priced that way. Of course, if you include the fee explicitly then people will think to look elsewhere and realize they can avoid it. But that's fine, taking a cut is stupid anyway. Really just seems like the app should be paying more to Apple (like a physical store paying rent on real estate) up front and getting the full price of t…

Really can't agree more. It's clear that the App Store offers significant value for many vendors, and charging for it is fine . Epic apparently generates $500m of revenue per year from the iPhone, and they're doing so using platforms, tools, and APIs that Apple built to help developers do that. It's reasonable that Apple would get a slice of that. The company I work for makes, well, a lot less revenue that Epic, but…

A lot of the design elements that are part of modern iOS, macOS design were first created by third party developers for free.

Simple example is the sidebar [1]

Before it became the commonly used it is not in early OSX i twas third party libraries that would allow you do use these views. A lot of what is now macOS HIG was first made popular by third party developers (for free) then integrated into the OS X and then third party developers would migrate to the officially supported version.

To pretend Apple created all of this in a vaccum is a convenient lie people tell themselves.

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

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