Comment by strogonoff
4 hours ago
Is there anything wrong with walled gardens hypothetically taxing the shady microtransaction-infested unregulated-gambling games and data-mining apps 5x and using that to correspondingly reduce fees for honest indie developers?
(Setting aside the issue of defining who are the goodies and who are the baddies in a way that does not enable the baddies to purely technically comply with the goodie guidelines while remaining baddies.)
The walled gardens don't give a shit about the "honest indies", they make 30% off of the micro transactions while doing nothing. Billions in effortless money.
>while doing nothing
Designing entire hardware, software, and backend platforms and investing billions of dollars into them every year is not nothing. If what these companies built took no work, try making your own platform to release games on and see how little work it truly needs.
> The walled gardens don't give a shit about the "honest indies", they make 30% off of the micro transactions while doing nothing. Billions in effortless money.
Do you give a shit about honest indie devs? Putting them in quotes says you probably don’t.
If you did, perhaps you’d find that this is an obvious path to a better state of affairs that to walled garden operators is zero cost (or even profitable), financially and reputationally, while making it more economically viable to make good games that don’t use dark patterns to keep your kid glued to the screen and regularly asking for money to exchange for some in-game coins and lootboxes.