Yet the vast majority of those games seem to have very questionable business models. This is great for shareholders but from a point of taste this is nothing to be proud of. Apple though used to be or at least tried to be the company of taste.
Not just games, both apps and games in the appstore today seem to follow the "gym" model, where they count on your signing up and forgetting about it.
A perfect example of this is an app called "DayCount". The app's concept is very simple, enter a date, and the app will tell you either how many days until this date, or how many days have passed since this date. When you open the app for the first time you're immediately presented with a "Pro" version, for $3.99/month.
And almost every app does it now, many are "free" but as soon as you open it you realize that you actually have to "subscribe" to the app. Now don't get me wrong, some apps work great with this model. I just happily paid 1Password for another year of service, but 1Password is a genuinely useful application, and they keep my passwords, and paying them $2/mo to take care of this is a great deal in my opinion.
But what kind of value does a "day counting" app add that would warrant an annualized price of $48? I will say that DayCount is better than others, because it actually does something. I once saw an "Emoji Keyboard", a re-implementation of the default emoji keyboard, offered for $9.99/month.
Apple needs some more rules around what is and isn't allowed with iAP purchases. Subscriptions should have extra scrutiny put on them, make sure they actually add value and don't just extract money from users.
Hell it might be a good idea to nuke "Subscriptions" entirely. I get Netflix, Hulu and other services that give you ongoing value. But the notes app you threw together in half an hour using tutorials on Youtube does not deserve to charge $4.99/month for it's "Pro" version.
Wow. According to the listing in the app store, there are actually 4 in-app purchases in DayCount. DayCount Premium ($9.99), DayCount Forever ($27.99), DayCount Pro ($12.99), and StreakCount ($12.99).
The first says it is a 1 year subscription when viewed on in the store on my iPad, but does not say subscription when viewed in the store on the web. The other three do not say subscription on either the web or iPad.
I can't find anything anywhere either on the store or on the developer's site that says what any of those actually do above what the free version does.
You’re suggesting that the App Store impose more rules on developers in this day and age when the App Store is deemed onerous, restrictive, rent-seeking, etc. The other side of this argument is that developers will always find ways to make money — they need to pay bills. As long as they are following the rules of the platform — use IAP, don’t abuse user data, etc. — the App Store should allow the app on the store regardless of the future subscription cost. Whether it is affordable or not is an individual subscriber’s decision, not that of the App Store. So, should Target not carry items at a price point higher than a threshold that it sets arbitrarily?
If users don’t want to pay a subscription for a service that they don’t think is going to add value — not for you or me to determine the value an app has for its legion of users just because it is not of value to us — they shouldn’t download the app or pay for it. Maybe users can use the day counting app to count down days until when their free subscription ends, then unsubscribe. Apple has made it super simple to unsubscribe to a subscription purchased through the App Store. If users don’t use said feature, that’s on them; it’s not the responsibility of the App Store.
Let’s take responsibility for our actions & subscriptions.
Gone are the days of Jelly Car. Now it’s enormously rare to find any sort of mobile game that does _not_ have either invasive ads with arbitrary timers and intentionally hard to click dismiss buttons or egregious in-app-purchase models
This is very interesting and good to know. I rarely game on my phone these days, but every now and then I get that itch. I’ll check out their catalogue.
They have also been adding games that aren't exclusives to them and initially launched on the main App Store. They are all the games that have a "+" after their name. Essentially the same game will all IAP removed/made free.
I love those so much—so many great older games out there have since become unplayable because of constant intrusive ads. Like, shortly before Cut The Rope+ came out, I tried replaying the original Cut The Rope, and got an unskippable ad after every reset (or every other?). Apple Arcade gave me a way to play it again, without spending more time watching ads than actually playing.
Ads breaking old games is so frustrating. I wanted to play Risk and downloaded the official app but the ads are broken such that they never "finish" and I have to kill the app and relaunch between games to continue. I'm happy to pay for removal but I refuse to pay without being able to try the game. Same story with PvZ, they added ads everywhere and ruined the game that I paid full price for. They don't even let you remove ads or restore purchases (which feels very wrong) until you've played the first 10 levels or so. I loved PvZ so much but EA ruined it completely.
Not too much, AFAIK. I worked for one of these companies way back in my career (didn't realize what they were when I signed on.)
Our whale customer profile was something like "Saudi oil-tycoon's trust-fund kid trying to keep up with the Joneses [other Saudi oil-tycoons' trust-fund kids] by throwing money at lootboxes until they get the high-spec or rare equipment required to be equal-or-better in social status."
The way to make whales spend money wasn't to make our mechanics more addictive; it was to "seed" a rare item to one whale in a friend-group of whales, and watch the others scramble to acquire it too, so as to not suddenly be relegated to lower status.
We actually built measures into our game mechanics that would try to subtly disincentivize people from playing if they looked to be genuinely addicted—and for truly severe cases, we actually reached out to customers to get help (since if they're addicted to our game, they're probably addicted to other games, too, so just kicking them off ours probably wouldn't help.) These people were never the key user-story for us, so doing things like this was essentially free publicity.
> Our whale customer profile was something like "Saudi oil-tycoon's trust-fund kid trying to keep up with the Joneses [other Saudi oil-tycoons' trust-fund kids] by throwing money at lootboxes until they get the high-spec or rare equipment required to be equal-or-better in social status."
I have seen no evidence that is true. I guess most of them would be a person working a regular office job who has $1000 dollars to spend per month and throws it at the game since they are bad at managing money / say no. There are way more middle class people who are bad at money than there are rich people who care enough about games to throw money at them.
The story about the trust fund kid millionaire is to help you sleep, it isn't reality. For example, I had a friend who spent thousands of dollars on league of legends over the years, he worked minimum wage jobs. That is the norm.
Edit:
> The way to make whales spend money wasn't to make our mechanics more addictive; it was to "seed" a rare item to one whale in a friend-group of whales, and watch the others scramble to acquire it too, so as to not suddenly be relegated to lower status.
Seeding rewards early to a person/group is a common way to trigger gambling addiction. So to me it seems like you are doing the worst of the worst kind of gambling addiction scheme here, since you admitted to not having fair chances per try but instead seed out items to trigger gambling addiction in people.
I saw hard data for at least the company I worked for, which may not be widely generalizable, but is still better than nothing. We also knew a lot about our player-base; we had community forums, regular meetups, bought gifts for "high rollers" as if we were a casino with attached hotel, etc.
Those Saudi trust-funders aren't made up examples; they're real people — high-touch "tier 1" users, that would regularly request features from the dev team to cater to their ability to better screw with one-another.
> I guess most of them would be a person working a regular office job who has $1000 dollars to spend per month and throws it at the game since they are bad at managing money / say no.
That's not a whale. Whales — at least for us — were people spending at least $10k/mo on the game — with a few spending $100k/mo or more. You can't even do that without being disgustingly rich. It's like collecting F1 cars as a hobby; there are only certain people in the world who can even start down that road, and none of them are going to go bankrupt doing it.
Maybe our games were an exception in the industry, in that there were effectively ways to spend as much as you want, as fast as you want in the games, with money directly translating to a marginal increase in relative "power", without any rate-limiting bottleneck of needing to serially buy and open lootboxes, and especially no bottleneck of there being lootboxes that don't actually get you anything. Because of that, our whales were so profitable in aggregate that we really didn't need to care about making a single dollar from our non-whale users.
But like I said, we did made almost all of our money from the whales, and then basically discouraged anyone else from giving us more than the bare minimum amount of money. If a player was spending trivial (for us—which even included $1000/mo) amounts of money, as a series of smaller, high frequency transactions, we then considered that to be a profile of "an addict spending whenever they get money", and set up our backend infrastructure to detect such players and degrade their gameplay experience over time to suck all the reward-feeling out of the game for them, without actually cutting them off cold-turkey (which we believed would just have them switch over to another addictive game.)
The whole thing was a scheme to bilk the rich, rather than a scheme to make as much money as possible. Sort of like a product that's free for individuals and a million dollars per month for companies.
> Seeding rewards early to a person/group is a common way to trigger gambling addiction. So to me it seems like you are doing the worst of the worst kind of gambling addiction scheme here, since you admitted to not having fair chances per try but instead seed out items to trigger gambling addiction in people.
I don't know why you're focusing so much on gambling; we had some lootbox-like elements, but they weren't the money-makers (this was 2012; lootboxes weren't the same all-encompassing front-and-center business model they are today.) Our "games" were essentially continuous auctions for leaderboard positions. People could still get addicted to them—but not for anything like the reasons people get addicted to gambling.
I briefly worked at a slot machine app company (microtransactions, but you cannot win real money) and my guess would be a lot. I did not feel good about that job.
I used to sit by the customer support agent, and she mentioned that one of our players frequently opens tickets asking for more "slot chips", promising to make a purchase as soon as their next paycheck comes in. It seemed even sadder to me than pouring your paycheck into a real slot machine, there wasn't even the potential of a reward beyond worthless chips and endless levels. I was only there about 4 months.
From talking to the folks at the company, I got the impression the target demo was lonely, often alcoholic people in their forties and fifties. Although I find it pretty hard personally to see what the appeal of our product was, I do think the business model was based on getting these people addicted.
If you want to see what the product was like, just search slots on iOS or Android app stores, the company in question doesn't exist anymore but it's all the same stuff. Google and Apple must be making a killing off of it.
One hilarious consequence is games like Angry Birds Reloaded. This game has a variety of "boosters" that can be bought with a currency that I'm guessing could be bought for real money before. It can also be earned very slowly by playing the game. Now this game is on Apple Arcade with the boosters and premium currency intact, but no micro-transactions. As a result it just feels like a game with a borderline-useless booster system tacked on because the time needed to earn these boosters makes them impractical to use on a regular basis.
It's a pretty good illustration of how MTX crappifies game design.
I came here to comment with that exact though. Apple does seem to care that the things it supports are "good" in the general sense. It feels like this mobile gaming thing grew up under them and it makes them so much money they just sort of turn a blind eye.
So many of their devices (iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, now MacBook) seem like such obvious decent gaming machines, far overshadowing something like a Nintendo Switch in specs, that it's really sad we can't get much worth playing on them (personal opinion).
Apple's decisions foster a culture. Of all the many arbitrary rules they set up on their app store, I do wonder how many actually kept abuse at bay and why they turn a blind eye on the very obvious one.
If there's a walled garden to begin with, it's fine to criticize the way it is being run.
I don't know what other evidence one would need for antitrust.
They have to my knowledge never produced a game, or a "real" console, yet they rake in more gaming money than any other? That's a hostage situation by any measure.
I would say you are looking at this wrong, mainly that there are better arguments to support what you want to occur.
For example, it is a weak argument to point out they have not produced a game or a gaming-first console, ie marketed to gamers primarily with the additional capabilities of doing other things. Gaming has been "the other thing".
The reason being that antitrust and anti-monopoly actions from the government are to highlight antimcompetitive practices towards other competitors. Simply winning the lion share of the market has no regulation against it, becoming more vertically integrated or it being pure happenstance that consumers choose to generate revenue for you on the platform is not something we regulate.
Now, by "hostage situation" you must be referring to the developers? You might have an angle here but not in a way that would really change anything. Antitrust regulation here would simply make Apple provide the ability for developers to have alternative payment methods.
So, not clear exactly what you are referring to or want to happen. But I think there are stronger arguments to support what you want to happen. As long as Apple doesn't ever do anything to Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo etc in the gaming space, they'll be fine.
Apple made games in the early days. The Apple II was built to be able to play Breakout amongst other things and the computer shipped with paddle controllers.
You don't get to exclude iPhones and iPads from being "real" consoles - you can play games (and sell them) on almost any general computing device. Steam has been doing that for years and I suspect they beat Xbox/PlayStation revenues too.
Yes, they have been doing it on a platform (Windows, originally) that didn't come preinstalled with it, by being better than any other storefront, even when taking 30% and you have other options.
Appstore is doing it by being the only allowed storefront on a general computing device.
So yeah, your comparison is great if you mean to say that Appstore and Steam should compete under the same conditions.
Get Steam onto iOS and we'll see if the store cuts stay the same, for either party.
IMO, yes. Their cut is the same as the big gaming companies (30%), they're just in more hands - they have a bigger market than the consoles.
EDIT: TFA is comparing Apple to Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo here, all of which have walled garden stores on their consoles, which all charge ~30%. This is rather important context.
Apple's cut is the same as Xbox, Playstation and the Switch and you _do_ have to use their stores and their physical media sales also gets a cut. The Switch can already be hacked to run Android and play other games from other stores, the latest Xbox and Playstation are essentially just blessed configurations of PC hardware, but everyone is totally cool with that situation and those devices being locked down and restricted. Why is nobody up in arms about those?
The standard being asked for and the outrage only being applied to Apple seems... fake.
This made me think about why I'm more and more OK with hardware being limited to "blessed" activities.
The older I get, the more time I like to spend doing activities, as opposed to spending time configuring software and hardware to do activities. I don't value getting things working as its own endeavor anymore.
As such, and after spending several decades fighting Microsoft, Apple, and Linux to play videogames on my PC, I value a console's focus on playing games as their core competency.
I like that I can turn on my playstation, pick a game, and not have to figure out the optimal settings for my graphics card, installation options, or wonder if my drivers are properly updated for this game.
Sure, it's not perfect, but it's also no longer my job to perfect.
I still use a computer to do general computing tasks, but it's only doing the tasks I can't do elsewhere. And those tasks are few in number, though great in importance to my hobbies.
Apple sells many times more iphones than Nintendo sells switch consoles, so even if you consider those as equivalent products it makes more sense to complain about Apple since they are a dominant force on the market while Nintendo is tiny in the handheld space in comparison.
Not really. They're general computing devices which perform "blessed" activities. They simply have a broader (though, not that much broader these days - you can do a surprising amount on a console) range of blessed activities.
Consoles still play games as a core competency, but they can also also run a broad array of apps. I can, for example, watch YouTube and Hulu, and browse the web, on my Switch.
Please explain how the Xbox isn’t then. It has storage, runs applications, has a web browser, standard PC input peripherals and hard drives work for it. The hardware is essentially just PC hardware. It seems like marketing difference more than anything else.
Oh, so you don't have those options to install Retroarch from Nintendo and you're ok with the Switch needing to leverage a hack to freely do what you want?
How is this a qualitatively different situation from Apple then?
The ‘Steam’ platform never appears on any list comparing financials. I suspect it’s because the parent company ‘Valve’ is privately held, not publicly traded.
Possibly but not necessarily. For any rate of fees > $0, there exists a point at which mobile is so much more popular than consoles that Apple makes more money.
The problem with Metal is that it's not Vulkan. People don't care that Metal came first, especially not game developers who are transitioning deeper into the Vulkan pipeline year-after-year. Apple used to have pretty good gaming support on MacOS back when OpenGL and 32-bit apps were in vogue, but upon pulling the plug for those technologies and not offering a suitable cross-platform replacement, many developers just walked away from the platform entirely. Valve in particular completely dropped Proton support for MacOS, wiping out a lot of user's game libraries come Catalina.
Now, Apple knows this. There are technologies (MoltenVK) that are actively being developed to fill this gap. A lot of this tooling is in it's infancy though, and requires an insane amount of overhead to run (doubly so on ARM). The current consensus is that Apple's graphics APIs are too unstable for most cross-platform titles to target, and most game studios would rather not divide their dev teams into "the Mac people" and "the every-other-platform people".
It’s not the one the whole gaming industry prefers. And as a result, Mac gaming is limited to a few legacy open GL games and modern mobile shovelware on Apple Arcade.
Given that it's not just on the Mac, but on the Mac & iOS—and the fact that this article claims that Apple's piece of the gaming market is bigger than the console makers combined—that seems like a really large, (relatively) wealthy market to be abandoning?
Apples gaming revenue is not on AAA gaming or dedicated gamers. It in micro transaction mobile games that rake in absolute fortunes. Those kind of games don't care what the graphics API is as they are mostly 2d anyway.
Apple is clearly doing extremely well for themselves and I'm not claiming it's a mistake on their part. But as a user who enjoys playing games, MacOS is by far the worst system for it. Linux is leagues ahead now due to proton and Vulkan.
The hardware is powerful enough for some gaming on macos but nothing supports it. I can get CSGO and RuneScape running reasonably well but those are almost certainly on OpenGL and not Molten.
I think the only significant Molten support has been in the pro video / 3D space.
This definitely seems to be the case. Molten is promising, but extremely basic in it's current form. Getting it to work a-la Valve's Proton would take an unconscionable effort, and that's before you've even figured out how to load the 32-bit libraries that most of these games are going to be lugging along with them. Once you factor in how poorly Wine is maintained on MacOS, I think it's safe to assume that most current games are off the table. You can hope for ports, but like you said, the economics of it don't shake out in favor of the developers.
In short, getting games to run in any capacity on MacOS right now is just not worth the effort. Linux was barely able to do it with the full cooperation of the kernel developers. It's a suicide mission on a system like MacOS.
It's such a shame because the Macbooks are so close to being the "do everything" machine. I want to sell my gaming desktop because it seems like such a waste to have such an expensive machine sitting there getting used a few hours a week to play games which would run fine on the macbook if it had software support.
My hope is that if the macbooks start to take up more of the market, either Apple will cave on Vulkan or Valve will find some way to make proton work.
I wouldn't count on Valve voluntarily hopping aboard any Mac-specific stuff right now. Vulkan support on M1+ seems a lot more likely to me, but if the new Macbooks sell well I see no reason for Apple to bother adding it. They'll just use it as more ammunition for the 'muh metal' argument that we've all heard ad-nauseam. It's an unfortunate situation indeed, but I'm pretty happy with how Linux handles being my 'do everything' OS as-is. Perhaps by the next big redesign they'll be ready to admit their software faults, too.
I get what you’re saying, but as an outsider it seems like your reasoning is backwards. The people are there, the money is there. What isn’t there is the developers. But developers see nobody else is there and think “nobody’s making games for this audience, so I’m not going to bother, either”. Sure, but then you’re leaving those billions for King and its ilk.
Developers don't care. Their job has always been about picking the path of least resistance and moving product, they probably care about the iOS userbase as much as they care about their Star Wars fan demographic. That's before you factor in how hostile Apple is towards cross-platform developers, and by the time you get to picking out a suitable graphics API they'll have probably moved on to a new one.
If games programming was about economics, we wouldn't be hiring developers in the first place.
Hostage situation, how? Developers are free to go to a huge number of competitor platforms. Apple does extremely well in an important market: wealthy people, people who can afford a $1000 smartphone will spend exponentially more than people buying a cheapo Android. The market they own happens to have the highest ARPU.
> Developers are free to go to a huge number of competitor platforms.
There are no other platforms on the devices. Saying I can buy another house if I could only choose one electricity provider or ISP isn't a good defense (in those cases either).
If you're looking for the number of potential customers for purchasing games - it absolutely does. More customers, more game purchases, more game revenue - even if the absolute percentage of game players is less.
Just look at how big ATVI's mobile gaming revenue is: it rivals (and sometimes beats) the revenue from their "core" products (a'la Call of Duty).
> But the size of potential customers for games is still much smaller than the market for a pocket sized computer (roughly everyone on earth).
And if that second install base is 8B, and even if only 10% of them play a game, that's still an 800M user market - which is bloody huge.
The actual percentage of game players is significantly higher - some online queries put it at of 50% of smartphone users. That's a potential market of over 4B if we use your assumptions.
Additionally, if you own a phone, you have the potential to buy a game at any time. You just need to be converted (and Apple puts a lot of effort into that in their app store). It's also much lower friction to get a game on a phone than a standard computer (which is, admittedly, pretty low to begin with).
The 'limited capability' label is becoming less and less relevant as times goes on - about all you can't do on one these days is take calls, at least when compared to an iPhone.
Music, check. Videos (including streaming platforms), check. Games, triple-check. Browser, check. Apps to make games, check. Exploitative apps, check.
Which kind of gets to the point. The limited capability is only artificial, and only on things that would give users more freedom (and themselves less money).
It's forced Internet Explorer on Windows, except 100 times worse because it permeates through the entire platform.
You can't get any other storefronts because that wouldn't funnel money to them. You can't get any game streaming apps, because see first point.
They're general purpose devices in anything that makes them money, and nothing else. It's not because they won't spend money to introduce that functionality, but that they specifically spend money on denying that functionality.
AOL won a suit against Microsoft for integrating IE in Windows. How on Earth is Apple any better? Just to make an add-on point they even force every other browser on iOS to use webkit.
If iOS devices were Switches, you would have a point. Phones are very commonly peoples only computing device, where they do everything from banking, identification, purchasing to socializing as well as gaming etc which people used computers for before, when the Windows debacle occured.
Do you think the ruling in AOL v Microsoft was wrong?
You completely dodged that aspect by linking to a comment about games consoles.
If you want to sell your overpriced chocolates, you're better off selling at Whole Foods rather than Walmart. Just because Whole Foods is the market that the wealthy prefer doesn't make them antitrust.
Market power makes it an antitrust situation and since you can't run a profitable app business without going through Apple, that certainly makes this a hostage scenario.
We haven't seen the last antitrust case against them. I'm certainly looking forward to them getting knocked down a few pegs. Only a stool pigeon would defend their behavior.
Apple probably makes more profit from Gaming than from every game developer on the planet combined, despite not making any games.
If anyone is thinking of working in the Games Industry: don't. All of the profit will be skimmed off by platform owners. Its why wages and conditions are so poor at development studios.
This is BS. The publishers make the larger take. If a Game Developer can release a game on it's own without a Publisher (with iOS allows) then the developer will make most of the money. Ask Epic how much they made when Unreal was sold at stores. Less than 40%!
There are more studios than ever with great work conditions and reasonable pay. Of course, it depends a lot on where you live. But, living in Sweden, I've had decent working conditions and wage across two companies and several games.
This makes me sad. I played a ton of video games as a kid and can look back on those experiences and stories as fond memories. I wonder if folks mostly gaming on mobile will be able to do the same.
For anyone that does mostly mobile gaming: I’m curious if you feel it’s enriched your life or has just been there to pass time?
The element that is missing from mobile games when comparing to gaming in decades prior with older consoles is people. You could grab the disc/cartridge and go to a friends house and have a blast trying to beat a game or beat each others high scores. That type of nostalgia and enriched experience of having fun with friends, food, staying up late, trash talking, etc. is going to be more memorable than playing a mobile game by yourself.
It doesn't matter the complexity or hardcore-ness of a game, its comparing a social experience to an anti-social experience. Social elements of mobile games, to my understanding, are mostly asynchronous like sharing a score or turn-based games. The asynchronous part eliminates the enriching factors of making it memorable.
Haha, I don't mean offense, but your comment sounds like "back in the day we did things better". There's a huge variety of really games available on iOS that cater to all but most hardcore gamers. Even the games that seem trivial on the surface (Candy Crush) can provide hours of deep entertainment, and best of all you don't need to commit 30 minutes to 1 hour to it in a single sitting.
Personally, I think the best games on iOS are better than the best games of the 90s. Reasonable people may disagree, however, it's definitely not far.
> For anyone that does mostly mobile gaming: I’m curious if you feel it’s enriched your life or has just been there to pass time?
> Personally, I think the best games on iOS are better than the best games of the 90s. Reasonable people may disagree, however, it's definitely not far.
I think the best iOS games are on average much more polished, but less deep/engaging than what we had in the 90s. Some of this is due to the nature of the platform - iOS games are often designed to be played in short sessions instead of sucking you in for hours like a SNES era JRPG.
The elephant in the room though is micro-transactions. Early console games were a complete experience that you bought (or convinced your parents to buy) once. A lot of top grossing iOS games are constantly trying to get more money out of their audience. This skews the design of these games in all kinds of ways like unnecessary timers, pay2win multiplayer, unfair difficulty curves that require "boosts", or repetitive, daily chores to keep people coming back. I think it's these elements that make me long for 90s era video games.
Yeah, I agree. Microtransactions are indeed the elephant in the room. I purposely spoke about the best games, because once you go below that you run into developers who build games that strongly incentivize you to spend lots and lots of money on microtransactions, and completely ruin mechanics of the game that make it engaging.
So when gamers brag that the games industry is larger than the movies industry they are mostly bragging about those cassino-like exploitive mobile games, not just their dear AAA games?
Grand Theft Auto made about a billion last year alone.
Madden Football (which comes out every year): $1.62 billion.
There are a lot of games "bigger" than movies in not just revenue but total players/viewers. Engagement isn't even close as players stick to games far longer than the average 100 minute movie.
Correct. I enjoy video games (my favorites this year are Psychonauts 2 and Metroid Dread), and it's disheartening to see exploitative psychology-hacking games become so dominant.
The gaming industry became larger than the movie industry long before smartphones or micro transactions and just continued growing since. Today the movie industry is tiny compared to the games industry.
I believe Apple's userbase may also exceed Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo combined.
The interesting thing about this is whether or not Google is in the same ballpark.
I have not worked on mobile games, so maybe someone in the know can educate us. Is the Play Store comparable in revenue for a given game ? Anecdotally, I have heard not. But with in-app purchases being more common now I would have expected that to equalize.
"Further, the evidence demonstrates that most App Store revenue is generated by mobile
gaming apps, not all apps. Thus, defining the market to focus on gaming apps is appropriate.
Generally speaking, on a revenue basis, gaming apps account for approximately 70% of all App
Store revenues. This 70% of revenue is generated by less than 10% of all App Store consumers.
These gaming-app consumers are primarily making in-app purchases which is the focus of Epic
Games’ claims. By contrast, over 80% of all consumer accounts generate virtually no revenue,
as 80% of all apps on the App Store are free." (pg 1)
"With cross-platform games like Fortnite available on multiple devices, these platforms
are truly competing against one another for these in-app transactions. For instance, an internal
Epic Games email from September 2018 notes that “purchase behavior may have changed with
the addition of mobile, especially Apple and more recently Android, where users are just logging
onto their mobile app to purchase.” In other words, “most players are still playing on PC/Epic
platform[s] as they did before, but purchasing on other platforms like mobile because it may be
easier and more convenient [i.e.] when the store updates.”422 This is despite the fact that iOS
Fortnite players consisted of only approximately 10% of daily active users, and Fortnite players
generally prefer playing on alternative platforms." (pg 84)
From these paragraphs, a clear picture arises:
* Most App Store revenue comes from a small number of high-spending whales purchasing in-game items.
* The reason Apple gets to claim its cut for games like Fortnite is not because people play these games on Apple devices, but because phones are the most convenient way to buy in-game items.
* These high-spending whales disproportionately own Apple devices over competitors like Android, to no one's surprise.
Given these facts, it is no surprise that Apple makes more money than those other companies. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo tend to make more money from full-priced games rather than free-to-play games with IAPs.
Personally, having tried games from both models, I find one to be clearly more ethical than the other, and it is definitely not the one that forms the backbone of Apple's app store revenue. (I have issues with how locked down game consoles are, but Apple's total control over its personal computing devices is a million times more serious.)
Addendum: Personally, I'm really excited about the Steam Deck. An open mobile gaming platform that runs Arch (!) and consists of primarily full-priced experiences seems like just the right fit for me.
It’s exclusively from their App Store so I don’t understand why this wouldn’t be considered App Store revenue in the category of gaming. Also this is rent-seeking bullshit considering they get to take a 30% cut for adding nothing to the platform other than owning it.
> take a 30% cut for adding nothing to the platform other than owning it.
Since you're the one making the claim:
Please put together some numbers of what it costs to work with an international payment processor, managing refunds, customer support options of any sort, managing multi-state and international sales tax revenue and accounting, an update and distribution platform, a CDN equivalent, an easy beta release mechanism, decent security and signing options, your own marketing website, software developer time or salary to build and integrate all of these things, etc. It's possibly more than 30%. Plus if every indie game ISV had to do that stuff that they may not really enjoy just to launch a game, they may not bother writing the game in the first place. This is all value added to the platform.
Which is why everyone has been cool with paying basically the same cut for literally every other platform as well.
I don't disagree that those are difficult to implement. My claim is that Apple has wiped away any competition for any of those things by locking everyone else out of their platform and now claim that they're doing you a favor by not allowing anyone else to compete with them. Maybe no one else could do it at the margin Apple is doing it, maybe they could. We'll never know because of Apple's anti-competitive practices.
They're just unwilling to participate in Capitalism as far as their platform is concerned by pre-emptively blocking off any competition. They want a dictatorship and they want you to pretend it's out of their benevolence.
I thought that capitalism meant that, if it’s their platform they set the rules, and should be allowed to decide what gets sold there and under what conditions.
If you want to sell anything in a physical shop or in Disney World, you have to deal with the conditions of the shop owner, too. It wouldn’t even surprise me if Disney took a cut on each ice cream sold in their theme parks (sellers might even prefer that over a fixed price contract as it moves part of the bad weather risk out of their hands)
The only reason to deviate from that here may be the sheer size of Apple’s platform. That may make them so powerful that their free reign over their store must be restricted (a similar thing has happened in some countries with big supermarket chains versus producers of goods. If Walmart were to decide to stop selling brand X as a negotiation tactic to get better conditions, a court could forbid that)
Imagine that half of the US was Disney World, wherein everything is dictated by Disney because they managed to get there under capitalism.
Capitalism is a great tool and all, but as all other tools, it doesn't solve every problem. In this scenario, it has stopped working inside Disney Nation/World.
How can you ignore Android, the dominant platform, existing and providing these exact things for you? Why hasn't this magic-capitalism argument won or at least out-performed already?
Also investing billions into the platform. Creating libraries and offering them for free use on their platform even Epic uses these libraries, read their comments on iOS Metal APIs.
> WSJ reported that “6% of App Store game customers in 2017 accounted for 88% of all the store’s game billings for the year, according to court records.”
So thats why iOS games are upsell garbage. Theyre building for the 6%.
I don’t think they will fail on the 30% commission part. If they lose on that, console gaming as we know it will end because commission/licensing fees is how console manufacturers make money too - the hardware is sold at near break even cost; with licensing fees being how they make back their R&D and misc cost.
Good old mobile gaming. It's huge, just hidden as part of "how I use my phone". Phones are certainly powerful enough to game, but they lag behind even the Switch because of poor heat dissipation.
