Apparently the 30% cut has it's origins in a deal between Nintendo and Hudsonsoft. 10% licensing fee, and 20% manufacturing costs for physical cartridges.
> Rogers has adjudicated various cases against Apple. In 2012, Rogers dismissed a class action lawsuit with prejudice, upholding Apple's defense that the "Illinois Brick doctrine" from the Supreme Court case Illinois Brick Co. v. Illinois, 431 U.S. 720 (1977) applied, as only the developers of apps could be damaged by Apple's policies, and consumers did not have statutory standing to bring suit on the developers' behalf. The Court specifically noted that the 30% fee Apple collects is "a cost passed-on to consumers by independent software developers".[8] The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed her decision, and the Court of Appeals was upheld by the Supreme Court in Apple Inc. v. Pepper.[9]
> In December 2014, Rogers presided over a jury trial against Apple, in which plaintiffs claimed DRM on Apple iTunes violated antitrust laws. On December 16, 2014, the jury reached a verdict in favor of Apple.[10]
> The Court specifically noted that the 30% fee Apple collects is "a cost passed-on to consumers by independent software developers".
This is a somewhat shocking conclusion to come to since the independent developers neither set the fee, nor process the payments. I can see why it was overturned.
This is a super literal take. In the 80s/90s the expense-incurring activity was physical cartridge production. Today it’s bandwidth & delivery infrastructure, card processing, any myriad of things.
> This is a super literal take. In the 80s/90s the expense-incurring activity was physical cartridge production. Today it’s bandwidth & delivery infrastructure, card processing, any myriad of things.
Are the current-day costs of those "myriad things" in any way comparable in magnitude to the 80s cost of cartridge production? I highly doubt it. Bandwidth is cheap enough that single webpages are several megabytes each, if you load everything. Card processing fees are 3-4%. My bet the breakdown of Apple's 30% is >25% "licensing" and <5% cost of provided services.
The cartridges are actually kinda a funny story to themselves if memory serves. Nintendo required that they manufacturer the cartridges themselves (and they had minimum orders), which was separate from the licensing side of things. Then you had disk based game systems come along early 90s which were a couple of bucks to manufacturer (on avg). I remember reading about wild deltas depending on your company size & how much you shipped on what you could expect your take to be on a title, which also makes it hard to compare.
Yes, but it's hard to imagine that 30 years of technological progress has not changed the underlying cost structures of these businesses. After all, it's changed the cost structure of almost every other business that has some connection to computing and data delivery by orders of magnitude. Yet, strangely the 30% cut has not changed a bit.
Nintendo console games still cost $50, and seem to outsell $1-$5 games despite the fact that the vast majority of users already own a phone, and consoles cost extra (and there are more than two platforms to choose from.) So I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the market does not consider these to be equivalent products.
The still costs $50 is interesting to me, because inflation adjusted this is a pretty steep discount. The 30% stayed the same, but inflation adjusted on something like this the revenue netted is down to what 15% would have previously got you.
All I’m really getting at is that the layers of complication are thick. I feel like one could unwind this with a lot of effort, but I doubt anyone is being utterly fleeced (or is utterly innocent, for that matter).
For which a customer spends hundreds of dollars, comparable to purchasing a game console that took cartridges. Apple doesn't provide that, buyers provide that. Apple is trying use their leverage to dominate every angle of the action. Surprise, surprise, surpriiiiise.
I wouldn’t be so sure. How many man hours go into developing ARKit, Foundation, Swift etc.? How many developer accounts would be required to fund all of that plus the R&D for the ideas that didn’t work out?
I think the $99 is more of a filter, like a captcha, for developers that mean business.
Probably a more accurate analog to the cartridge would be the storage and distribution services. That takes some infrastructure in networking and storage.
It's not really the same because the reason Valve built out all of this infrastructure was so they could take the middleman's cut. Basically, GameStop buys games cheaper wholesale and resells them at a higher retail price. Valve gets all of that by being the direct retailer to the end consumer.
Not even having to manufacture a physical good is a separate cherry on top of that.
Apple actually gives developers 1PB of free storage per app with CloudKit, and it even has some nice privacy features for users. Of course it has limitations, so most developers prefer rolling their own backend.
Consider a game that holds a leaderboard on steam, or any app that stores user progress on its servers.
Not exactly pertinent to your comment but pertinent to the conversation as a whole:
If Apple/Google/Steam stored all app data for developers and also did the marketing for developers, that is closer to what 30% is worth imho. For hosting the platform, yes your grandfather was the first to stab a flag into the digital real-estate, and for that I owe you 30%? Feudalism that manages to shift cost to both consumer and developer at the same time -- impressive, but not very noble.
That's not a good analogue for a cartridge, though. The cartridge or the device itself stored data locally. Modern gaming consoles store their data on HDD's. Anything beyond that is entirely developer's prerogative.
And according to another user, they do offer storage through CloudKit... which it appears they do, included in the dev account/App Store distribution model—1 PB: https://developer.apple.com/icloud/cloudkit/
The is the wrong history though. It only matters if you accept the App Store == console analogy, which I don't. Historically speaking, App Store was not based on game consoles, it was based on the iTunes Music Store. Everything about the App Store design was exactly the same as the iTunes Music Store, right down to being in iTunes itself. App developers even uploaded their apps to iTunes Connect (which has only very recently been renamed to App Store Connect).
That’s a little like saying since the facts of how the people at Apple arrived at the original 30% disagree with your philosophical views on this matter, it seizes to be relevant. A personalized reality, with personalized facts. Alleged fact, much as it may not make sense to some in hindsight, is they used the Nintendo-Hudson Soft price model and it doesn’t change how they decided that because of anyone’s preferences. It’s totally different than to accept, it’s been this way - for too long - it’s time to change for a more equitable price model. But then that’s the crux about bringing this suit to court in a country whose judicial system is based on precedents.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-30percent-fee-...