Comment by harry8
4 years ago
"The 30% cut was considered very good at the time."
Let me fix this.
There was a full range of views. Some considered the 30% cut to be good at the time, some didn't consider it much at all, some considered it to be a criminal abuse of market power. I remember commenting myself that microsoft would be crucified for attempting to tax everyone who wanted to write software for windows 30% of revenue. I don't recall anyone suggesting that was a controversial comment.
You want to talk about a criminal abuse of market power?
Microsoft used to charge ridiculous fees for things as simple as submitting a patch for an XBox 360 game.
>Double Fine's Tim Schaefer pegged the cost of submitting an Xbox 360 patch at $40,000 in an interview with Hookshot Inc. earlier this year.
"We already owe Microsoft a LOT of money for the privilege of being on their platform," he said. "People often mistakenly believe that we got paid by Microsoft for being exclusive to their platform. Nothing could be further from the truth. WE pay THEM."
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/microsoft-comes-under...
People who think a 30% fee is outsized tend to have no idea whatsoever what the costs were previous to that.
I don't know the specifics of Xbox and patches but I do know that in general, at least in the past, shipping a game on Playstation required thousands of hours of testing by Sony employees. They didn't take your word for it that your app worked. They ran it through a battery of manual testing. Examples, does it recover if someone turns off the power in the middle of saving a game. At that point the save game file may be corrupted. The game better at least boot and let the player start a new game and not just crash.
Other examples include checking all the text meets the platforms spec. It's says "DualShock Controller" not "Joypad". It's always Press ○╳□△ and in the correct color for that button, and responds to the region/system setting. For example that X = select in USA, and ○ = select in Japan
The point being that the game console owners don't just trust that your patch didn't break the rules of their technical requirements checklist. Someone actually has to check and it's not a small amount of work. Maybe $40k is too much but $0 is arguably too little
AFAIK, Apple and Google don't do this much. Certainly not to the same extent as Sony/Nintendo/XBox
What does that have to do with submitting a simple bug fix?
How can that possibly cost $40,000 except through an extreme abuse of monopoly power?
A simple 30% cut with no other price gouging additional fees was a huge improvement over the status quo.
That article has a developer literally saying that in the end, their percentage of the profit on the XBox 360 was a negative number.
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I don't get it, why make a exclusive game and pay Microsoft for it...a vulcan would say illogical...it's not like MS has any Hardware, that no one else has.
The costs of making a game work on multiple platforms might exceed the expected revenue from the additional platforms, especially for a smaller organisation.
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> $40,000
There are probably a few developers who’d love to pay just 40k to Apple.
Given that review costs are fixed, what is the cost of distribution?
The cost of vetting your app and it's updates are included in the 30%, not an additional $40,000 fee on top of it.
Note the developer saying that with all the additional costs, they ended up in the hole instead of making a profit.
Let me fix this.
Microsoft did worse, they did charge more than 30% to everyone that published software for the xbox.
People with skin in the game, game publishers, game developers, mobile app developers for nokia, blackberry, samsung, motorola, etc, considered Apple taking "only" 30% to be an excellent deal at the time. It was so good in fact, almost all other store splits collapsed shortly thereafter to the same 30% to compete with Apple.
Others complained, sure. I too complain Ferrari charges way too much for customizing the color of the thread of the interior lining on their cars, I don't know why they don't seem bothered.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Steam and Xbox Live Arcade (small games akin to mobile today, not mainstream games) were both 30% before the iPhone existed.
Apple, however, transformed the phone industry by bringing that same model to mobile that had already existed in PC/console game storefronts.
You don't think there was a range of views. And anyone who disagreed with your view had no skin in the game and so can be ignored. I disagree with that.
I know there was a range of views. I'm pointing out not all opinions have the same weight.
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I have worked in mobile since 2004. How anyone felt about it is irrelevant.
The fact is that 30% was far less than the carriers and Qualcomm were taking with their stores.
Hoping someone will chime in and share ringtone royalty rates back when they were selling by the millions. I’d bet labels got under 50% and artists got basically nothing.
the iPhone is a PDA. There's 20 years of PDAs before iPhone. There was no price to put an app on my 1998 Windows CE PDA, nor my Sony Clie, nor my Dell Axim. Just install the software same as PC. The software vendors had the option to sell direct, go through a distributor, a publisher, various stores, etc..
Phones were an entirely different world.
For instance, Verizon was sued for disabling the ability of phones on their network to transfer photos using Bluetooth, because they wanted to charge you money for a simple file transfer.
https://www.eweek.com/mobile/verizon-wireless-users-sue-over...
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I think there's a lot of truth to this take. Pre-iPhone phones were a completely different category of phone. They ran limited, special-purpose operating systems. Smartphones of today are pocket computers that just happen to be able to make phone calls.
And yes, they connect to a wireless carrier's network. But I can also connect my laptop to a wireless carrier's network by buying a USB dongle and a SIM card. I'm certainly not expecting anyone to pay 30% of their revenue to sell me an app on my laptop.
Also consider the iPod Touch. It is much closer to being a PDA than a phone, despite the fact that it's essentially an iPhone without a cellular modem.
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Microsoft didn't really have a comparable App Store at the time, not to mention, Apple hadn't really made a comparable App Store for the Mac yet either. The iPhone app model was more analogous to the business model of gaming consoles (and Steam), except with lower barrier to entry.
Today, I'm sure you could still publish independently of Steam... but you'd be at a disadvantage.
Microsoft also never managed to build a system that was secure enough to do e.g. banking on. I just noticed how I can do everything from my iPhone just using my fingerprint and don't even feel unsafe about it. I love that there are different approaches like you mentioned and hope that they continue to exist and are not overruled by a central authority as you suggest.
In the mobile world there were so many intermediaries and costs to publish then that included:
-the mobile carriers cut - up to 70 percent
-the publishers cut (depending on whether you used them). up to 70 percent (carrier fees included).
-some publishers requiring apps to be code signed like Java Verified (a cost that could go up to 50 thousand dollars PER J2ME/JAVA ME app) or Symbian Signed or BREW.
It was a horrific time to build mobile apps.
I am still not defending the 30 percent cut. Just that the cost was seen as trivial then (also the miniscule 99 yearly membership fee that included code signing - Blackberry started at 2500 USD a year).
A simple solution to all this mess is to have rules allowing us to download apps (at our own risk) from outside the app store like you can on Android.