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Epic vs. Apple Case: Judge Rules Apple Must Allow Third Party Payment Options | MMORPG.com
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Epic vs. Apple Case: Judge Rules Apple Must Allow Third Party Payment Options | MMORPG.com
The Epic vs. Apple case now has a ruling (pending any possible appeal) and Apple must open up its model to allow for third-party in-app purchases.
Comments
Yep. Not a lot of grounds for forcing a company to support and provide another companies product. They'll just keep fortnite off of iOS.
Edit: damn these fat fingers of mine!
Well the same way Steam does. People choose the convenience of your store front over others. Does Google play take a cut of every app you download from it? I honestly don't know.
With that said, I'm curious what the precedent for this is. If this ruling survived all appeals does that mean every OS needs to provide royalty free access to other apps for download? This would also impact consoles.
Apple takes advantage of developers simply because their devices are popular and the developers don't have another choice if they want those users.
Courts look down on companies that try to keep others out of some businesses...trying to figure out which ones, (mostly it looks like the successful ones) that get ruled against.
Apple been riding pretty high for a while. They need to remember, the raised nail gets hammered...all the exclusivity and non 3rd party repairs and such, starting to rub lots of people the wrong way.
But go ahead and blame other countries for how US judges apply US laws if it makes you feel better.
Apple doesn't just build a store and that's it. They build the physical hardware, they build the operating system, development tools, and so forth. Indeed, Apple builds their own stuff to a greater extent than any of the other game consoles, as they build their own CPU cores and their own programming language, among other things. If they don't have the right to restrict software sales on their platform, then the other game console developers surely don't, either.
So for consoles it would not affect box prices at all - buying them through the console maker could still be the only alternative. It would only affect microtransactions and subscriptions.
However even if the ruling stays in effect, it only applies to Apple, and likely also to extend Google because Android is in similar situation. For consoles it would likely require a separate court case and a separate judgement.
Also by the time we'd get that far, the lawmakers could decided to step in and pass new legislation. Mobile phone and console ecosystems are much newer thing than our competition legislation, and in cases like these the legislation often needs to be changed.
Honestly I think the real winner is ... us? Now that alternate payment methods are going to be allowed, any dev that wants to implement them will have to incentivize users to use them (either with lower prices or whatever else they can think up). Epic can't be happy with this as they get nothing, and Apple can't be happy as they lose their guaranteed share of in app revenue.
Seems like a good ruling from where I stand, as someone completely ignorant of the law. Perhaps I only like it because this felt like two huge tech companies trying to bully each other, and they both lost.
If you try to say that if something is fundamentally a store and not a game, Apple can kick it off, then all that the store app has to do is to become some middleware. Implement this store in your game and list your game as "free" in the Apple store and require payment after the download, and the middleware will do it with a smaller cut of your sales than Apple takes.
This doesn't necessarily apply to Android, as Android is an open platform. If Apple kicks you out of its store, they've kicked you off of iOS entirely. If Google kicks you out of the Google Play store, that makes distribution harder, but there are other stores or you could even make your own.
As for lawmakers deciding to step in and make a new law, don't hold your breath. They'll get around to that sometime after they get around to modernizing Section 230, rather than leaving the legality of social media to depend on the thin reed of customary interpretations of an orphaned section of an unconstitutional law that was written for a totally different situation entirely and whose textual application to social media is ambiguous. In the meantime, they're too busy debating whether to spend $3.5 trillion that we don't have on a wish list of random items that has yet to be assembled.
When there is a "monopoly", you can't simply and easily go elsewhere for those (or compareable) goods or services. Apple can't have or be a monopoly as long as Android exists, and vice versa.
Making people play by your rules in your playground is not a monopoly as long as other similar playgrounds exist with reasonably similar access and service.
I don't support Apple because of their heavy-handed gatekeeping, but Epic wants to play, so they play by the rules or take their ball and go home.
No one "won" this case. Apple potentially loses out on future revenue, and Epic still can't access the App store.
And no US legislation will ever exist to force Apple, Google, MS, Sony or Nintendo to change their gatekeeping, so stop clamorring for government overreach, *ahem*, I mean "regulation", where it isn't needed.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
Who said anything about support?
The support is paid for ... with the 100$/year developer tax.
Calm your fanboy tits a little.
Nobody is forcing companies to pay those fines, honestly. The EU has very strict, very consumer oriented law. If you wish to trade/work within the EU, you have to comply with the law. Fucking logical isn't it? These companies WANT to be on the European market, thus they pay their dues. They broke the law, they pay the fines.
It's the same with China, really. Where big American companies bend over to the CCP just to be allowed within the market.
On your point of Apple's engineers making great devices - yeah. They are making great devices. With great profit margins. The iPhone is 100-200$ in parts. It sells 5 times that.
Your favorite corporation will be fine even without Epic's funds, trust me.
And honestly, there's only 1 or 2 major OSes and 1 or 2 major browsers and 1 or 2 hardware vendors BECAUSE of shitty business practices. Let that sink in.
If Intel had it's way the way they imagined it, there would be no AMD 10 years ago.
If Microsoft had its way the way they imagined it, there would be nothing other than Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer or whatever they cooked up at Redmont.
Also, back on the payment solutions, you should really figure out that making payment processors is harder than it looks. A lot of developers will opt-in for Apple's store due to convenience. And a lot of clients will choose to pay through Apple's store (Apple Pay etc.) because of said convenience. In fact, I trust Apple of removing my subscriptions per my request more than I trust some chinese developer's payment system. Same goes for credit card gateways. I'm super selective of where I put my credit card details these days. And the list of companies can be counted on the fingers of one of my hands.
This ruling is not the end of the world, honestly.
Also I don't know why people with 0 knowledge of the law get to comment and fearmonger about consoles?!? Microsoft is partnering with Epic on this one. Just in case you didn't know, lol.
So I was thinking about this and I don't see why Apple couldn't require app makers to not undercut the prices for purchases on the OS. And if they can do that they could probably require that there not be any other benefits to purchasing in a way that escape Apple's cut.
I don't think those requirements would run afoul of the law as it's basically Apple saying if you want access to the people on our OS you won't try to screw us. (I hate apple btw, but I'm not a fan of courts interpreting laws in ways that were never intended. Congress is just really crappy at keeping up with changing times.)