hriw-annon@xs4all.nl

johnbear said:

georgie01 said:

It’s hilarious and pathetic to see Epic complain they have to pay Apple to use their App Store and then complain they won’t have access to Apple’s freely provided development tools. Why do they think they deserve these things for free? That’s so infantile and entitled. As long as they aren’t developing their own platform and building the devices their work needs and building a huge customer base with that work, then their perspective is childish and arrogant.

A small percentage is fair but Apple charges these 30% fees like mafia mob. Shame on them.
imagine Visa and MasterCard charging 30% per transaction for using their system;)

Apple does more. It reviews the apps and has a curated store in multiple languages where 80% of apps are free. The free stuff, curation and app review are what makes it appealing to the users. But all that has to be paid for by those making money.
The big guys like Epic and Microsoft don't benefit form any of that so they don't want to pay.

Or, it could be that it's not about the money at all for Apple. It's about control. They don't want to cede control over their customers to others, as they would be doing by allowing Epic and xCloud on their platform. Microsoft might have been ready to talk money with Apple, but Apple was not interested because Microsoft has nothing Apple wants, they already have more money than they can sensibly spend.

It looks like Apple cares about money, but maybe they just care of being in control of their own destiny.
If you are in control and execute competently, money will follow.

polymnia said:

InspiredCode said:

macplusplus said:

KITA said:

Interesting. This may impact iOS/macOS gaming even further, potentially making third party developers choose to drop support of iOS/macOS or find a new game engine.

It told Epic that by August 28, Apple will cut off Epic’s access to all development tools necessary to create software for Apple’s platforms—including for the Unreal Engine Epic offers to third-party developers, which Apple has never claimed violated any Apple policy. Not content simply to remove Fortnite from the App Store, Apple is attacking Epic’s entire business in unrelated areas. 

If the Unreal Engine can no longer support Apple platforms, the software developers that use it will be forced to use alternatives.

Apple would lose out on Unreal Engine 5 as well it sounds like.

...

Although they are the owner of Unreal Engine, there are less than fifteen iOS games developed with it, according to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

A recent mainstream game for the Mac is Borderlands 3, but it requires a graphics card of 8 GB on the Mac ! What a game engine is that !

So not many people will miss them once they are gone, and the whole affair will be forgotten in a couple of months even in the blogosphere that feeds it and life will continue as usual...

The Wikipedia article is just showing a few examples.  There are 1000s of games using the engine.  It is very popular for both Indies and big studios.

I wonder what Epic charges for an Unreal license? Is it (mostly) free if the licensee doesn’t charge for the software using Unreal? Is it a % of sales if the resulting software is purchased?

If I remember correctly Unreal is free below 1 million revenue and 5% of revenue above that.
And if you want to sell your stuff in their store they want 12%, which might be what it costs to host.

KITA said:

Interesting. This may impact iOS/macOS gaming even further, potentially making third party developers choose to drop support of iOS/macOS or find a new game engine.

It told Epic that by August 28, Apple will cut off Epic’s access to all development tools necessary to create software for Apple’s platforms—including for the Unreal Engine Epic offers to third-party developers, which Apple has never claimed violated any Apple policy. Not content simply to remove Fortnite from the App Store, Apple is attacking Epic’s entire business in unrelated areas. 

If the Unreal Engine can no longer support Apple platforms, the software developers that use it will be forced to use alternatives.

Apple would lose out on Unreal Engine 5 as well it sounds like.

Judging from the WWDC presentations Apple seems to be quite chummy with Unity. Unity may be getting deep early access to Apple Silicon, which will be a big leap in GPU performance, taking it close to (or maybe exceeding) discrete GPU performance.

Another thing I noticed was the absence of SceneKit presentations at WWDC. Could they be cooking something up with Unity to replace it?

What if Apple just wants the AppStore to continue to exist? If Apple allows developers to run their own store on iOS, lots of developers will go elsewhere for payment processing. (Just look at the Mac AppStore, it's a ghost town) Maybe most will stay, because most are small and need Apple to do the bit of marketing and customer relations that they are too small to handle themselves.
But most developers is not most of the revenue. The big developers, that bring in the majority of revenue, don't need Apple for anything, they could do (and are doing) marketing, customer relations and payment processing just fine by themselves. If the big ones leave, that could more than 60% of the revenue. Then the AppStore has to operate below break even. Running something below break even is not in Apple's DNA. 

Mandating that chargers be sold separately is something I would like. I hate paying for stuff I don’t need.