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Apple to Collect 27% Commission on Third-Party App Payment Systems in the Netherlands
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I guess we'll never know. You can say it as many times as you want, that doesn't make it any more true.
How is rent seeking illegal? Are there no landlords in the EU?
? In which industry or line of business do (virtually) all big B2C customers charge the same rates or prices?
Tacit collusion at play. That's it.
It's not normal for competitive markets that all of the suppliers charge the same 30% - when you can operate profitably at half that.
It’s pretty normal from what I’ve seen. Called industry standard rates.
There are. Many in fact. That's why housing markets are competitive markets.
Rent-seeking is an economic term that is related to but does not mean the same as renting (or letting out).
If you are of this view about Apple then why doesn't every business do the same, charge what ever they want for the products they make or the services they provide?. You know full well why because you the consumer would not allow it because as soon as price rises occur you will start cursing that things are getting too expensive but wait, when it comes to Apple, suddenly your view is they can charge whatever they want??
Really???? get real!!!
Voting with your dollars works very well. It seems some MR posters don’t like the way the majority of customers have been voting with their dollars. That is the problem. The buying public en masse is okay with the way apple is being run.
That doesn't mean they aren't essentially "rent-seeking" (literally). They make money through ownership of a good, not through creating new value with a product or service. Also I wouldn't necessarily call housing markets competitive- rents tend to rise and fall in tandem, and housing has inelastic demand being that it's a necessity.
I'm aware. The point is that rent-seeking is not illegal. Many facets of our economy can be considered rent-seeking (such as the App Store). I don't see how that makes them automatically illegal.
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- CMS
- Business apps (e.g. Workspace/365)
- Business VOIP/Telephony
Not really B2C applications, are they? (Though admittedly I should have written B2C vendors in the quote, not customers obviously).
Also, a couple if dollars per user is some difference in enterprise.
It’s quite simple. They know they can charge 30% because others do. What incentive is there to drop the %? Particularly when the developer is in all stores anyway.
Don’t forget that the 30% across all stores isn’t entirely the same when Microsoft, Sony, Epic, Steam all pay developers large sums for exclusivity periods. Which in a sense is a reduced % of sales to be only in their store.
If you’re not going to get exclusive deals why drop the commission, when competitors are taking the same?
Or a simply a follow the leader mentality. When company x does real well with with a product everybody and his brother in that industry generally copies (generally a carbon copy) that model in a get money real quick without thinking. Heck, Yahtzee even called remakes (a variation of this) "money-spinning for the terminally unimaginative".
Never mind Apple pulled their 30% from Nintendo's playbook (that link is having issues so here is an internet archive version)
This all ignores before all this the physical stores charged well over 30% as demonstrated from this 2011 comment (Apple's app store launched in 2008): "Revenue is usually split 60 percent to the store and 40 percent to you, although everything is negotiable. If your product is a "hot" item or helps drive extra traffic to that retailer, you can start at 60/40 then maybe move to a 50/50 or even 40/60 split."
This idea of any collusion between these companies when perfectly good Occam's Razor solutions abound is silly.
"The three companies agreed on a 10% licensing fee for appearing on Nintendo's proprietary platform, but with Hudson Soft unable to manufacture its own cartridges, it paid Nintendo an additional 20% to manufacture the cartridges for its games as well"
10% licensing fee for appearing on the platform.
20% for manufacturing cartridges.
Apple doesn't manufacture physical cartridges.
Physical brick-and-mortar stores today do not distribute smartphone apps. The argument and/or comparison ignores that we're not living in the 1990s anymore, where physical cartridges were manufactured and put on store shelves in rented store space.
Either way and whatever you call it, there's an apparent lack of competition in mobile app stores.
Same as with game consoles back then, yes - many of which also did the technical "lockout" thing (chips/signing keys).
It's only that game consoles used to be pure-play entertainment devices.
Smartphones aren't.
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Apple had to use something for a baseline and remember even Jobs thought, even with everything digital, that 30% they pulled from Nintendo's playbook was going to be unprofitable: "(T)hese statements reflect Apple’s initial expectation that the App Store was not projected to be profitable for Apple. Apple’s miscalculation, while hugely profitable, does not evidence consumers lock-in with iOS devices. While Apple’s calculated risk returned incredible profits, the reality is that Apple has maintained the same general rules with both consumers and developers since the inception of the iOS devices." - Case 4:20-cv-05640-YGR
Tim Cook stated that the App Store commission mostly exists to generate a return on the value of their intellectual property during the case against Epic Games. That's it. No breaking down the value of anything, because that's not how they decided on it. They just decided that their IP happened to be worth 30% (27%) of in-app purchases. Yes, it's arbitrary, and there is currently no law that prohibits them from charging whatever they want for their intellectual property. That's why lawmakers are taking action.
Why can't lawmakers simply make a law that says "No platform can charge a commission that is more than 10% of the sticker price" or whatever?
The problem developers have had all along is Apple's commission.
Most of these new regulations don't really address that.
What's the point of using a 3rd-party payment processor if you still have to pay Apple 27% anyway?
I thought the whole reason developers complained was because of Apple's high commission.
🤔
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Because that kind of price regulation only gets considered for essential services or utilities. The App Store is not an essential service.
The commission is the main sticking point, but differs between developers, and it also interests me that lawmakers don’t seem to target the commission. We might end up in a situation where Apple charges pretty much exactly the same and nothing really changes. At the same time, the lawmaker approach seems to come from a perspective of fostering ‘competition’ and not completely dictating Apple’s financial model while dictating limits to it at the same time, if you understand what I mean.
At the same time, regulating Apple’s right to monetize their IP without risking unintended consequences by being too broad, or too easy for Apple to avoid or play around by being too specific and arbitrary is a difficult line to walk.
Because who decides whether 10% is "fair" or not?
For the simple reason that there are discounts and a host of other things that mess up that "sticker price". Never mind there would be no way the console makers would stand for that even being suggested. If they didn't kill the bill in committee or subcommittee (where some 90% of bills die anyhow) it likely would be so watered down to be effectively useless.
This is ignoring the fact that even Epic said its 12% doesn't cover the cost of its store and despite Epic trying to claim they will break even in 2023 "Current estimates indicate negative overall earnings in the hundreds of millions of dollars through at least 2027." (Case 4:20-cv-05640-YGR Document 812) So how could anyone make a profit on 10%?
Anyone can claim a profit in the future but that is speculation. How many developers have produced buggy games and claimed they would fix them in the future but never did? Same BS.
More over Epic is privately owned while Apple is publicly traded and would have to justify a 10% to their shareholders and the political backlash to that would be nightmare.
No what they were really complaining about was having to pay Apple anything (Epic's stalking horse). Remember when this all started 30% was the industry standard. Itch.io had (and still has) a developer names percentage set up. If these developers had really wanted to dodge the "high commission" they would simple have gone to Itch.io or android. And yes, Itch.io has games that are stated as being for iOS.
The reality is these developers want the benefits of Apple's service without paying any of the cost.
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Good
Screw non apple fanboys. I don’t want apple opened up