111–120 of 590 posts
Which large corporation is paying anything close to 4% for credit card processing? Based on what's available to me in my small business, I'd be astonished if anyone doing any significant volume was paying as much as half of this percentage.
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Visa and Mastercard provide entire global payment platforms, yet only (generally?) take a small fee per transaction. Apple seems to do a lot less, but wants ~1/3 of every transaction.
Steam also takes 30% despite all platforms it operates on being entirely open. So it doesn’t seem to be that unreasonable
Whereas Apple's relationship seems more predatory/antagonistic (at best).
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I'm a full-time developer of Roblox games. It's wild that Apple or Google make as much from my games as I do. Obviously it still works out well enough since I'm not abandoning the platform, but strange anyway.
why is it wild? Microsoft keeps 30% of xbox store sales. Apple, Google, MS, etc. play a massive part in attracting users to the platform.
It's very different on the mobile side: Apple sells iOS devices at full cost. With Android, it gets even more mucky as Samsung, the hardware vendor, gets 0% of the sales on their handset (unless the user, for some reason, uses the Samsung store), and Google gets the full 30% for only their software work. So the fact that Google gets 30% is wild.
I guess if your costs are high enough, you can eat any amount of profit.
They clearly need to get their expenses under control (if they care about generating an actual profit). There's only so much you can grow once you get to a certain threshold, and they must be getting near it.
Spending 2b on opex seems kinda crazy (3.2b revenue vs 1.2b income). Most games are opex-light, capex-expensive. Their capex is definitely not cheap either, though that seems to be a tradeoff they choose to have.
Of course, this all presumes the people running the company care about generating a profit (by no means a guarantee!). I'm sure all of the employees are making out like bandits, based on other commenters, and if management is happy to spend the money, well, that's all there is to it. It would be hard for anyone to argue with their success in growing their userbase, if nothing else.
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Apple is already collecting a 30% cut when you're buying ads on an iPhone: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/704141224249342/
Unreal. Apple’s gonna take a 30% off everything they possibly can.
> Unlike other social platforms, Roblox’s revenue is nearly all via user spending rather than advertising. As such, Roblox pays 25% of its revenue to Apple and Google (30% of transactions on those platforms) whereas Facebook, Snap, et al pay effectively 0. Note that Facebook, which has structurally lower costs to service users than Roblox and is far more mature, has an operating margin of roughly 40% — if the company…
I'm a full-time developer of Roblox games. It's wild that Apple or Google make as much from my games as I do. Obviously it still works out well enough since I'm not abandoning the platform, but strange anyway.
I know, the big ones are always "evil", but...
How about being real?
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Curious, why is Roblox in violation of Apple's App store policies?
> Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps. Roblox is in clear violation of this clause, downloading and executing entire games written in Lua. Apple does have an exception to this policy for HTML5 games and…
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I'm a full-time developer of Roblox games. It's wild that Apple or Google make as much from my games as I do. Obviously it still works out well enough since I'm not abandoning the platform, but strange anyway.
Would you rather do the hardware/OS platform yourself as well? I know, the big ones are always "evil", but... How about being real?
One thing the article doesn't touch on is that Roblox has yet to tap into the China market, where 25% of the world's gaming revenue reside.
Given China's experience with the West's sordid attempt to subvert them via opium, it seems highly unlikely that roblox would ever be legalized there.
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why is it wild? Microsoft keeps 30% of xbox store sales. Apple, Google, MS, etc. play a massive part in attracting users to the platform.
Google gives you an App Store and maintain the OS that other hardware vendors (and sometimes themselves) implement hardware around. They take a 30% cut for distribution in their special app store and not much else. Microsoft and Sony take similar cuts for access to their game consoles. In return they provide: - High quality, robust developer APIs. - High quality debuggers, graphics debuggers and CPU+GPU profiling too…
Much of this comes second hand as I wasn't on this particular team when they were working on Stadia bring-up for proprietary AAA engine (I joined about 2 weeks before Stadia was officially canned).
But the quality of support from Stadia for developers was leagues above what you get from Android. Every few weeks I'll hear from other team members how good it was working with Google for Stadia. The tooling was great. We got developer kit hardware. We had documentation and direct support channels and Google was actively managing outreach and development on tooling to ease transitioning into their systems (Google was one of the biggest driving forces behind DXC's SPIR-V target).
Compare this against the same people commenting on the Android experience and it's the complete opposite. We're left out to dry with poor support while trying to target devices that barely work.
What's the difference? Google actually had to fight to get us to come to their store. They had competition and weren't acting as a toll collector to a captive market. Game developers had the choice to tell Google to kick rocks, Xbox and PlayStation aren't going anywhere. Google had no choice but to play ball with good support and fair pricing. No such pressure exists on Mobile, and they crank the toll as a result.