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Penny Arcade - Comic - Finding Out
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Finding Out
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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There are no good guys in this fight. It is, however, intensely interesting and entertaining.
For what it's worth, I am -tentatively- on Apple's side (as someone who does not own, nor has ever owned, any iProducts) - Tim's (Sweeney-Tim, the Epic one) rhetoric on Twitter and publicly is too.... fuckin' weird, man. It's all, "Traitorous and dispicable tyrannical overlords put the boot on the neck of the working dev and e'er shall this evil persist lest good men of vision stand up 'gainst the Tide of Darkness!"
... Like I said, just fuckin' weird. I do not trust anyone who puts that much effort into anything.
This fight is the most critical legal front on tech right now, and we should all be hoping Apple loses it. the App Store paradigm is essentially the future of software, and what apple is doing is maneuvering to a place where they basically get a cut on any/everything that is installed on your Apple product, regardless of platform or use-case, to quote our wonderful hosts "this is a neo-cyberpapacy buying its own indulgences".
Sweeney/Epic isn't exactly a great team and you are right to question their motives, but they more closely align with the general public for the moment, as evidenced by the judges own words, She wasn't convinced that apple isn't a monopoly, only that Epic didn't prove it.
If MS/Google/Apple become entrenched as the gatekeepers for all software on their platforms in the name of "Saftey" and "Security" this will be a net loss for all of us.
I'd watch that movie!
It's literally one of the cornerstones of the software industry and has been since the '80s, when Nintendo asserted strict controls over anyone who wanted to develop for their platform.
- John Stuart Mill
Yeah, sort of. The thing there was that they sold hardware at a loss, with the sales model that they'd make it up by taking a cut from developers. Developers got the benefit of a company taking all the risk of setting up a platform for them (again, at a loss). Hence it's been a cornerstone of the console industry since the 80s. Because that made sense when you were selling loss leaders. (Note that this was never how PCs were sold.)
Apple has never sold products at a loss. If anything, they've done the opposite. One of the reasons the Mac failed despite a GUI OS leagues ahead of its time was the huge price tag they put on it. Though even that was a bargain compared to the $10k they wanted for its predecessor, the Lisa (that's $25k in today's dollars). The iPhone has always been priced to make a profit on hardware.
When you're making bank off your products, and then the products become super attractive because of the software that other people make for them, it feels a bit abusive to then also be required to pay the toll.
Nintendo has almost always sold their hardware at a profit, I think the only time they sold at a loss was when they cut the price of the 3DS when it didn't sell as well as they were hoping. They even specifically used outdated tech so they could sell their systems at a profit while making the price low enough to entice consumers, "lateral thinking with withered technology" as their saying went.
So it would actually probably help Apple in the long term. Either that, or cutting the profit margins way down to make iOS devices more competitive. But Apple has a history of blowing their lead.
The reason they don't do that stuff is they want all the money and they want it right now. See also: Draconic levels of wealth.
Which makes absolutely no difference, so far as the law is concerned (something the judge specifically pointed out when Epic tried that talking point in court).
- John Stuart Mill
You didn't say anything about law. You talked about it being "literally one of the cornerstones of the software industry". It's not. It hasn't been. It only was in the special case of the loss leaders. I'm not sure why you're bringing up this tangent now.
I guess we should be clear about what profit we're talking about. First off, Nintendo isn't very open about it's internal doings. They'll say something like "we're not selling the Switch at a loss", but they'll never tell you how much it costs to make. But back to the profit. If you only take the view that a console only costs the price of its internal components, yeah, Nintendo's aren't loss leaders (Xbox and PS are). But if you look at the total costs involved, they are (at least, initially). There's a lot of costs in development and marketing, and in getting those actual units into customers hands. For example, the Switch cost $257 to make (based on Fomalhaut). Okay, you can quibble with some of that, based on maybe getting a better bulk buying price, etc. But they didn't include any of the labor, shipping or markup. And they definitely didn't include what was probably hundreds of millions of dollars on R&D and marketing. I think once you factor everything in, it quite a while before the Switch itself was making a per-unit profit. But the games helped. Especially the games that sold well that Nintendo didn't have to make.
As far as the NES goes, there's no hard data I can cite. But I have to think that retailers wanted to mark it up way more than they do consoles today, because - especially after the video game market crash - there was zero assurance that they'd make money on additional game sales. They weren't planning on making money on the console but on the games produced.
I will admit to some ignorance in that both Atari and Nintendo never planned on taking a cut from 3rd-party games. They didn't plan on having these games on their systems at all. They planned for it to be a self-contained ecosystem. It was only when they settled a lawsuit against Activision (they were trying to block them from making games for the Atari system) by taking royalties that this profit model for consoles was truly born. This was to make up for the Activision titles being able to sell for the system much cheaper, since all their costs were just for developing the games and making the cartridges for this established well-selling console.
This was before Nintendo hit the scene. When they came along, they were also not going to let 3rd-party games on their systems. But Namco and Hudson Soft came to them asking to make games for the system, and they okayed it as long as they got a 30% fee. That fee was because these games would compete with the games being sold by Nintendo. Games were pretty expensive back then compared to now. Zelda's $50 would be equivalent to $125 today.
I don't think the same really applies today. Especially to Apple. They're just not a software company, at least when it comes to consumer software and especially games. And the software they tend to make that's not core operating system and services is more on the MacOS side, and comes free with the hardware. Same is true of Google, with them being primarily an ad company, and giving away all kinds of software/services for free.
(Also - because this didn't fit in anywhere - Nintendo had to sell the Wii U for a per-unit loss on release. That continued for at least 9 months. That was preceded by a tumble in sales of the original Wii. This resulted in them losing hundreds of billions of dollars. This also has to be factored into the risks they, as the hardware company, are taking with launching the console. Developers do not have to worry about those kinds of risks.)
Except, you know, PCs. There were tons of IBM compatibles. Also tons of DOS compatibles. Even Intel compatibles. Everyone laughs at Microsoft when they try to make Windows Store anything more than a token vestigial thing
Nintendo's control (also their contemporaries) was not absolute either, it was possible to create unlicensed games. Accolade essentially won a lawsuit vs Sega and a tiny company Color Dreams was AFAICT never actually challenged by Nintendo for their bypass
There really isn't any difference between a closed system that runs entry at a profit from one that operates as a loss leader, aside from the fact that selling at a loss to lock customers into your ecosystem is arguably even less competitive than what Apple does.
What part of "one of the cornerstones" suggested that it was the only important element? The existence of alternatives ecosystems doesn't change the fact that closed platforms have been a key part of the software industry for decades. An yes, there were unofficial Nintendo games. Nintendo didn't sue Color Dreams because they didn't really have to. They just leaned on retailers to not carry any of their games. There are also unofficial iPhone apps. You could probably draw some reasonable parallels between jailbreaking a phone and modchipping a console.
- John Stuart Mill