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Date: 2025-03-12 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00019382

Digital Gaming
Apple versus Epic Games

Everything About This Sucks ... about the Apple AppStore

Burgess COMMENTARY
This is an interesting business conflict, but in the end it really does not matter who wins or loses because it is merely a question of whether it is Apple or Epic Games that gets to keep the profits. A much more important question is how much a purchaser / user of the product has to pay and how much of the profit gets to be kept by the creator / producer and the distributor. Everyone is aware that there is a big investment in creating the product and a very low marginal cost when the digital product is replicated. The price paid by a consumer needs to be high enough so that new products are going to continue to be created and the creators / producers and distributors should get to keep enough of this profit to encourage them to stay in business ... but there should be a way for the truly massive profit from blockbuster products to be TAXED in some way for the benefit of society at large. A long time ago, not long after WWII, when I was young and training to be a Chartered Accountant in the UK, there was a substantial ‘excess profit tax’ that made price gouging in a world of shortage less attractive ... this idea could be reworked to help finance public goods while not doing much damage to pricing that is the foundational incentive to create new product. An excess profit tax would only cut in after the product has created a truly huge amount of financial return ... but not the sort of amounts that have become the norm in much of the digital world.
Peter Burgess
EDITORIAL Everything About This Sucks lukeplunkett Luke Plunkett Yesterday 7:30PM • Filed to: FORTNITE 416 7 Illustration for article titled Everything About This Sucks Screenshot: Epic Games I woke up this morning to the news that Epic Games, a plucky corporate underdog worth $17 billion, was trying to enlist the world’s help in taking on Apple’s “anti-competitive” practices. And my skin wanted to crawl right off my body. Illustration for article titled Everything About This Sucks Fortnite Removed From Apple And Google Stores, Epic Taking Both Companies To Court Following Epic’s release of its own direct payment method for Fortnite on Apple and Android mobile… In case you’re just joining us, earlier today Apple booted Fortnite from the App Store for violating its payment policy. Epic Games, the creators of Fortnite, responded quickly by filing a complaint of legal injunction against Apple. In addition to the legal struggles between the two companies, which are essentially built around a disagreement over the fact Apple takes 30% of App Store money, and Epic doesn’t want to pay that, Epic Games also launched a concerted public relations campaign built around a parody of a TV ad made (by Apple!) at least 15-30 years before most Fortnite players were even born. I don’t have the time or emotional bandwidth to delve into just how fucking stupid this video is, enlisting the spirit of resistance to totalitarian government (already diluted by appearing in an advertisement) to...get people onside in their quest for some more money. I would, however, like to give a shout out to the people responsible for looking back at the last ten years of video game community relations and deciding that “weaponising a fanbase of angry gamers” was a really healthy and fun thing to do here. So let’s instead move right onto the legal battle itself, which has already seen plenty of people taking sides. That’s an easy, and very human thing to do! Fortnite players on iOS (and now Android as well) will want their game back. Other companies equally frustrated with Apple’s sizable cut of their profits have someone to cheer on from the sidelines. Illustration for article titled Everything About This Sucks Why People Are So Mad About The Epic Games Store For more than a decade, Steam has dominated the PC gaming market. More than 100 million people have Read more People who don’t like Epic, meanwhile—and there’s no shortage of them in the video game space—can root for Apple, and people who like Apple have someone to defend their favourite home and mobile computing company against. Before you go deciding to take a side in this, though, keep in mind shit like this: Ah yes, Spotify, fellow champions of the people, who pay the artists at the heart of their service an average of $0.00318 per stream, and whose CEO complained earlier this year that albums aren’t being released fast enough. Real feel-good stuff. So perhaps the safer thing to do is not take a side at all, right? Maybe, but that’s also complicated! Despite claiming to do this for the benefit of everyone, Epic is obviously doing this for Epic, but Apple’s store policies are terrible, and any kind of progress made in this space would greatly benefit a lot of folks, especially smaller studios and indies. If that sounds like a similar dilemma to the one at the heart of the Epic Games Store v Steam debate, that’s because...it’s almost exactly the same situation. In the end, then, there is no right or wrong here, no champion or underdog. It’s just 2020's latest example of everything sucking all at once, and all we can do is sit by and watch helplessly as it continues to suck even more. Luke Plunkett Posts Email Twitter Luke Plunkett is a Senior Editor based in Canberra, Australia. He has written a book on cosplay, designed a game about airplanes, and also runs cosplay.kotaku.com.
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