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Naiyas said:

CheeseFreeze said:

quench said:

So Epic agreed to the contract because they know Apple has an enormous base of customers. Then epic got greedy and thought they could be dishonorable and cheat the company (Apple) that helped them become a worldwide sensation.
epic you suck for your dishonesty, lying to customers when you blamed Apple for the situation that you forced onto itself, stealing from the company that made you extremely wealthy. 

I don’t care what quality games you produce, I will not support a greedy, lying, stealing company ever again.
I'm done with you epic!

And you don’t think Apple is greedy? Charging 500% of the retail price for storage in your new iMac, or soldering the SSD in your motherboard because then you’ll buy a new iMac sooner when it dies? And still 30% in 2020 on app purchases, while the vast majority of developers are drowning and disappearing in the offerings of millions of apps? 

This is not 2009 when your app actually was discoverable on the App Store. 30% for essentially hosting your game and not getting any service out of Apple for anything else (except MAYBE getting your game on their release stream - discoverable for what, like, 3 days maybe?), and then having to PAY for advertisements on the App Store on top the 30%... That is killing developers. 

Do you know how much devs are SPENDING and risking before that game launches? Do you have any idea about the economics of it all? I guess you don’t. 

Well, I do, I have released over 40 games on the App Store - both licensed IP’s and games for marketing purposes, some successful and some not, and I can tell you the App Store today is a shit show because of the sheer amount of content. 

Top tier earners keep earning because they BUY their users with their earnings. Hundreds thousands per day. You have no chance of turning the tides in your favor. It’s a mess.

Epic is one of the exceptions - they are incredibly successful - but they are fighting the PRINCIPLE here and that’s not just for themselves. They don’t need Apple’s iOS revenue. They want CHANGE. Their philosophy in revenue sharing with developers for their own tools is much more developer friendly. They are much more values driven here. Apple is in fact the greedy one here. It’s not a coincidence they reaches a 2 trillion market cap here!

There’s several examples of Apple being greedy.
Stop defending Apple like it’s some exception to the rule and that it’s some kind of amazing company that is out there to help developers rich. They don’t care about that. They care about their own valuation.    

As a developer myself, admittedly not for games, I’m very familiar with the problems the App Store has for developers, and the thousands of dollars it takes to build an app that will attract buyers. But to promote that this “battle” between Epic and Apple will help us is disingenuous.

1. Epic want to have their own store on iOS.
2. Epic want to have their own store on iPadOS.
3. Epic want to have their own store on tvOS.

Thats it.

Epic don’t care about the 30% fee level, which for us is the bigger concern as it strips away a large chunk of our margin. They also don’t care about the additional ad spend we feel we have to do to promote our apps in the App Store as they charge for the same thing in their store.

This Epic vs Apple battle will not help us until it transitions to the fee level which, I agree with you, is probably a little high now given the changes in the marketplace over the last decade. But we signed up to the terms knowing full well what the cost was going to be so the argument isn’t a legal one.

The argument is an economic one. Can we take our apps out of the App Store and survive on non-Apple device revenue? You know, earning our living in a market free-for-all like the Android space is and is how Epic wants the Apple space to be. THAT is how developers force Apple’s hand on the 30% by abandoning the platform, but it won’t happen.

My revenue/profit stream mix may not be reflective of yours (or any other developers) and it is definitely not like Epics, but the App Store distribution is close to 65% of my revenue, and 80% of my profits. I literally can not afford not to be in the App Store with its 30/15 fee as I don’t have the time or resource depth to build out myself what I get for being in the App Store. Having more stores may create market forces to bring the headline fee cut down, but there are other costs you get hit with that mean the overall costs for each platform or store distribution channel are far higher than the headline price appears.

I’d rather focus my limited time (being a developer is not my main job) improving my apps rather than building out distribution and payment systems I’m afraid.

But that is just my own opinion based on my own situation and Epics push for an open free-for-all space in the Apple iOS based platform is not one that will help me at all.

ElCapitan said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

ElCapitan said:

Tim does not in any way represent the legacy of Apple. Him taking that name is an insult to everyone who carried Apple. 

Given that Jobs hand-selected the guy, this seems false at its face.

Also "everyone who carried Apple." Who is inside that classification?

Every day Tim is spitting in the face of the Mac users, the great programmers who made MacOS and great, game changing applications a reality. These are the men and women who carried the Apple through the hard years while Tim was still at Compaq. He also spits in the face of all those customers who believed in the company despite the continuous and relentless onslaught by the press, the finance sector, the naysayers in enterprise IT and telecoms, and Microsoft in particular. Without them, Apple would have been long gone, and you all would have been stuck with not so great products. 

It is a disgrace how the Mac has been handled under his "leadership". It is a disgrace how he has politicized the company and it will backfire on him spectacularly in the long run.

buckkalu said:

Or maybe Apple should be fair and pay what is owed for using licensed technology.  Why does Apple always get the benefit of the doubt here. Apple is just as greedy.

USMC5939 said:

fastasleep said:

That's a bummer. So if it's an app, can it have a thing linked to it in Wallet? If not, I probably won't bother, though the card readers at the self checkouts at my local QFC are infuriatingly unreliable. Been hoping to be able to use Wallet on the Watch to check out at some point. Oh well.

If it's anything like Walmart pay, then no. I have my Kroger rewards card in my Wallet app, and that's good enough for me. I've no interest in using any more standalone payment services. This is getting ridiculous with every company wanting their own piece of the pie, and forcing more confusion on customers. In addition, it is well-known that services like Walmart Pay scan your purchases (to find "savings" or build "recommendations"), but we all know they are logging information about who buys what, just to sell that information off to some advertiser. Apple Pay does not leak any details about purchases, so I think I will stick with that. I feel Kroger made a huge misstep here when they could have easily set up access for Apple Pay instead of devoting resources to make their own app (or to have it built in to their existing app), and it will probably be used by a very, very small number of people (I've never seen anyone use Walmart Pay and Walmart is always infinitely more crowded than Kroger is where I live).

curtis hannah said:

entropys said:

This has nothing to do with net neutrality, but the inappropriate phone contract County Fire chose with Verizon. Verizon, as you would expect, handled this badly, becuase it is Verizon. But really, wtf was Santa Clara doing buying a contract for emergency services that included throttling after a certain bandwidth was used?

So to cover up its mistake, County Fire has sent out the distraction squirrel of net neutrality. The political operatives in charge must think the average Californian is an idiot.

Am I wrong, but don't all Verizon plans throttle after a certain point, just the "unlimited" throttle at like 50 GB or something.