mdriftmeyer

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mdriftmeyer
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  • Apple 'won't make an exception' for Epic to skirt App Store rules

    mdriftmeyermdriftmeyer
    I'll just say having worked for Steve twice, if he were presently alive and most likely the Chairman of Apple he would demand EPIC be banned for life after the parody video of 1984 that he and his team worked their asses off to introduce the Macintosh to the globe. Obviously, he would have officially gone through legal channels but I wouldn't have put it past Steve to really hang out the CEO of EPIC by going on say CNBC or some other Wall Street show to explain how such a destructive stunt it is for professionals to pull when trying to build long term relationships.

    Tim is far more judicious. Steve would have belittled the hell out of him as only Steve could do.
    Beatstmayspock1234macplusplusaderutterradarthekatmacxpresspulseimagesSpamSandwichcat52

  • Intel details power efficiencies of its upcoming Xe LP graphics architecture

    mdriftmeyermdriftmeyer
    You’re high if you think this is comparable to AMD. Hell RDNA 2.0 is out in a month or so, and RDNA 3.0 in 2021.

    Nothing Raja has will touch either AMD or Nvidia.
    watto_cobra

  • Epic sues Apple after Fortnite removed from App Store

    mdriftmeyermdriftmeyer
    Perspective summed up well on Arstechnica

    An Apple App Dev posted views on 30%


    DOOManiac Ars Tribunus Militum

    REPLYAUG 13, 2020 11:09 AM

    • POPULAR
    I don't know about Android, but this is absolutely 1000% against Apple's rules for doing in-app purchases on their platform. I'm curious to see how fast the ban hammer comes, and how this plays out.

    [edit]
    Well that didn't take long. Seems this whole thing was scripted from the start...
    [/edit]

    Given the work-to-cut ratio, 30% may have been fair a decade ago when there wasn't a new app every 10 seconds and you actually got something out of being on their store, but these days, with the economies of scale being what they are, its just way too much. Especially on in-app purchases.

    But I do want to dispel the myth that Apple/Google/Steam are doing "nothing". Here's what me and my fellow developers are getting for our 30%:

    - Credit Card transaction processing
    - No liability from credit card processing. This is a big deal so I list it twice.
    - Handles all refunds, stolen credit card chargebacks, fraud
    - Placement (even if buried) on an easy to use store used by millions of customers
    - Fast, reliable hosting & distribution on global CDNs
    - Scheduled release times, possibly staggered by region
    - Regional pricing (sometimes automatic)
    - Platform services (user logins, leaderboards, in app purchases, authentication, anti-piracy measures)
    - Maybe 5 minutes of marketing as your app/game shows up in the "new" section for the blink of an eye on launch day. Maybe.

    Every time I get upset about the 30% cut I remember all this - especially credit card legal liabilities - and I am fine with it again. Would prefer if it was only 15% or 20%, but I would much rather have the status quo as it is now than have to deal with that mess myself.

    Last edited by DOOManiac on Thu Aug 13, 2020 4:23 pm

    Up +104 (+116 / -12) Down


    Second Observer shows the conservative cost of popular “free w/ in-app purchases” for ‘hosting popular apps with constant updates:


    JacobProbasco Smack-Fu Master, in training
    So, I actually am going to take issue with Epic here. There are definitely costs incurred that directly relate to downloads of their game. Download metrics are hard to come by, but when fortnite came to the App Store it took about 5 months before 100,000,000 downloads of the game (which is free to play!). Assuming it was about 1.5GB (it’s 1.8GB today), that’s 150 PETABYTES in 5 months time and it’s been on top of the free charts since then.

    Let’s assume that user saturation around 200milliom downloads, but on top of that there have been at least 100 patches (source: https://www.ign.com/wikis/fortnite/Upda ... nd_Updates ) over the years downloaded from Apple’s servers! With nearly no downtime? With free advertising on the most valuable App Store on the planet?

    In those first five months, if you took those 150PB of downloads, enter that into an AWS S3 cost estimator, you’d likely find what I did: nearly $90,000 a month for those five months that Apple made immaculate uptime with no promise of return profit on the free downloads.

    Now, of course Apple doesn’t pay AWS, so let’s say they have been providing this service gratis since July 2017 at a cost to them of $50,000 a month for this one app. 37 months at $50,000 = $1,850,000 in services since joining the App Store. This is likely a low-ball estimate if my suspicions about the sizes of the above updates are true.

    Apple is providing all of this and more (app certificate signing, CloudKit free storage, secure and safe platforms free of hackers and aimbots, etc etc etc) for what? Epic’s $99 developer fee they pay to Apple each year?🤣

    There needs to be a middle ground. Apple needs to allow corporations to opt out of the current flat rate 30% cut (of PURCHASES, nothing when free!), and get the itemized cost valuation of their services invoiced to their organization. most likely NO CORPORATION will go itemized after that first estimate because they will realize that, holy crap, duplicating Apple’s role in this would likely not be cost efficient. 

    That way, if Epic directly pays for what they clearly take advantage of with the App store then they can bypass the 30%, use their own payment system, and be free of Apple’s tyrannical 30%.... who knows, maybe that would be more profitable for them; it wouldn’t be for most.
    Up -2 (+18 / -20) Down
    12 posts | registered 10/23/2019
    Rayz2016FileMakerFellerradarthekatGG1watto_cobraDetnator

  • Microsoft aims to replace your iPad and iPhone with new Surface Duo

    mdriftmeyermdriftmeyer
    That Google Search field is quite humorous.
    qwerty52watto_cobra

  • Apple's block of Xcloud & Stadia game streaming apps is at best consumer-hostile

    mdriftmeyermdriftmeyer
    9secondkox2 said:
    As much as Apple has their reasons, this is not a good look. 

    A consumer buys a device, has an internet connection, so they should be able to do what they want. 

    This is kind of shocking. 

    If those services were full of horrible code, that’s one thing. 

    But blocking them based on business model? 

    It’s really kind of difficult to take Apples side here. 

    I owe MS an apology for a post I made a few days ago. Really surprised here. 
    Let me know when Microsoft xCloud publishes their APIs for review and their architecture and its necessary communication and security privileges open to share across its Azure Cloud back end with iOS security protocols and privileges. Same goes for Google. If folks insist this is a sandboxed dumb terminal ala VT3270 emulation just leveraging iOS drawing services aka a video stream then you’ll believe in anything.


    tmaywonkothesane