It's the large scale clients that are hurt the most by the 30% cut. Old timer indie devs who used to have to manage payment and distribution themselves, like Jeff Vogel, will tell you that Steam's cut is absolutely fair given the value it brings. On PC there are different platforms competing for Steam, which might be a reason why Valve introduced discount tiers for more successful titles. If an outcome of the PR stunt is that Apple decreases its cut, it will likely be a similar arrangement which does not benefit the small businesses.
The issue with the App Store is not the cut, but that it is the only gate to the iOS walled garden.
Steam provides loads of functionality and APIs to developers that is simply not on Epic's storefront: the best controller API out there, networking/server API infrastructure, achievements, friends-list, group chat/voice, a storefront to help people find games, an extensive patching and versioning system, everything is cross-platform and most windows games automatically work on windows thanks to Proton.
It's good that Steam has competition! And I wish Epic's was competing on features, but at the moment their platform only competes by having a lower cut and payed exclusives only. The only benefit to users has been that Epic funded certain games that would otherwise might not have happened.
I don't buy that, because most developers would roll each of those features on their own if it meant they could reduce the cut.
I get what you're saying, but I think companies monopolising eyeballs then charging you an entry fee is... Kinda bull. Skimming is fine, but I want their margins to be tiny.
December is actually the tenth month. Jan & Feb were added later. It’s the tenth month that was added, though not the tenth month since the start of the year. The array of calendar months was shifted to make room for two additional months at the beginning of the year.
If I have a son, in December, then I have another son the next year in January, which one is my first son?
My tenth son will always be my tenth son. Though his birthday falls 10 months after that of my twelfth son (whose birthday came in the second month of the calendar year in which he was born), my tenth son will always have come out of the womb tenth!
In that case, he would have never been my tenth son, I would have only thought he was. No matter how hard we try, birth order is one of those things that can’t be changed, even with a revelation. Our mental model of it can be corrected, but the order itself is immutable.
Soon we will be told that a century cannot refer to a 100 year period but only a unit of Roman soldiers. The list of words that no longer mean what they once did is very long and it's lame (and wrong) to "correct" people like this.
You've got two "aCkShuAlly" comments in this thread and they're both wrong.
1. The historical origin of "decimate" does not define the English word. Many words have historical origins that differ with their current definitions.
2. The word "fiscal" does not refer only to "taxes" but also to financial matters in general.
I find it odd that in your first point, you seem to argue that only the most popular, most used dictionary definitions shall count as being “correct” and in your second, you seem to argue just the opposite!
By the way, I never the said the guy was wrong to say fiscally. It was sort of a sloppy usage of the word—in my opinion of course. Which I hope its obvious that this is, seeing as its a comment in a forum!
And I’m certainly not wrong to say that fiscally is to do with taxes. I might have been wrong assuming that he or she was looking for a less ambiguous word. I do tend to assume the best in people, and am often wrong.
> "...only the most popular, most used dictionary definitions shall count..."
No, I just understand that words can have multiple definitions and any of them is perfectly valid to use. You were simply wrong to "correct" them in both cases.
Here's what you did:
> "...a comment in a forum"
I think you meant "a comment on a web site" because a forum means an ancient Roman marketplace...see how stupid this game is?
I never corrected anyone, nor called anyone stupid— like you have.
Both comments were tongue in cheek.
Apparently since more explanation is clearly warranted, I’ll provide it.
In the comment about fiscally, I thought it odd that the person appeared to be concerned with whether indie developers, of which I am one, were going to be contributing to government revenues, since I’ve only ever heard fiscally used in a tax context by professionals. And certainly when I approach my financial strategy, taxes are always a consequence of the goal, and not the goal itself.
In the other comment, I was making a joke, which seems to have gone a bit over your head.
By the way, a “web site” is simply the location where an arachnid...
Nah, I didn't call you stupid. I just meant that those kinds of "technically..." comments are lame and so often wrong. And they create boring threads like the one we're in here :-)
Anyway, I think you get my point and hopefully I wasn't too harsh but sorry if I was. Have a good day/night!
Apple must charge some fees so even with a 15% cut there is almost no difference in how much return you get from your app unless you have a high enough sales volume. Indies don't care about the cut because they don't get enough sales in the first place. Indies mostly focus on surviving, not about how to optimize their margin.
It seems likely the purpose was to cause more people to think about the game Fortnite by virtue of the publicity from this.
It seem like something their lawyers pitched to them as “hey if it works, great, you save millions a year on the App Store percentage, and if it doesn’t, hey, at least you’ll get a whole lot of publicity, which should drive your sales up enough to more than compensate for the losses of being off the stores for a bit.”
