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Can you recommend an objectively more fair alternative? It costs money to run things, and it’s fair for any vendor to charge what they will for a vig, participa

by dchuk 7y ago

Can you recommend an objectively more fair alternative? It costs money to run things, and it’s fair for any vendor to charge what they will for a vig, participation in the marketplace should keep them “fair” in the sense that an unfair market wouldn’t have any participants... Also, if limiting the high percentage does end up being the plan of attack, who exactly is in charge of that?

JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
Cool. So what alternatives to the apple store do I have to reach iPhone users? Choice is why Apple isn't gouging developers with 100 dollar service subscriptions just to sign packages right?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- notduncansmith 7y ago
  The choice is in you wanting to reach iPhone users in the first place. If you don’t want to support Apple and their App Store, don’t make apps for iPhone. Maybe spend your time developing for a platform you feel more ideologically-aligned with. If you can’t make a living doing that, accept the hobby status of that endeavor and live your life. There are plenty of projects I’d love to get paid to work on but can’t yet, because I don’t care to sell to the speculative software development market.
Barrin92 7y ago
>Also, if limiting the high percentage does end up being the plan of attack, who exactly is in charge of that? a regulatory agency. Credit Card transactions in the EU, for example, are capped at a fraction of a per cent and they still make plenty of cash. Infrastructure providers are essentially just glorified landlords and should not be allowed to extract economic rents from market participants. This is becoming a very blatant and obvious problem on a largely privatized internet. Enforcing low margin incentivises the correct behaviour which is openness and continued innovation. If steam would be forced to build new products rather than sitting on their platform we'd probably have had Half Life 3 a bunch of years ago.
- jariel 7y ago
  "Enforcing low margin incentivises the correct behaviour which is openness and continued innovation. " Wow, no, this is just not true. 'Margins' vary widely from system to system, and it's generally best left to industry to figure that out. We spent a good part of the 20th century figuring out why central authorities are not good at setting prices. Where monopolies/oligarchies develop, there are possibly problems, which is why there are regulations against cartels, price fixing, anti-competitive behaviour etc.. Qt is just a small player platform, they are well within reason to charge 'whatever' prices they want for their 'marketplace'. If 99% of software was developed using their tooling, we might want them subject to their tooling, but this just isn't the case, so best to leave them be.
- Chlorus 7y ago
  > If steam would be forced to build new products rather than sitting on their platform we'd probably have had Half Life 3 a bunch of years ago. Steam is a terrible example for this. First of all, Steam isn't a company, it's a product. Valve is the company. Second of all, unlike the App Store or other similar infrastructure, it's not like you're locked into Steam, so they're not really rent-seeking. Steam has had plenty of competitors over the years(Direct2Drive, Games for Windows Live, that garbage GameStop store), they all sucked, and as far as I know there's nothing stopping me from publishing on multiple stores & ignoring Steam. Third, Valve hasn't exactly been doing nothing - they've done more than any other company to the gaming experience under Linux & have pioneered VR. Odds are good they wouldn't have taken those risks had it not been subsidized with comfortable margins they got from Steam. If you had cited, say, the App Store, or something that has actual monopoly power in terms of infrastructure (like our good friends at Comcast) it would have been a much stronger argument.
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    >it's not like you're locked into Steam, so they're not really rent-seeking rent-seeking and monopolistic behaviour aren't the same things. Rent-seeking is the extraction of economic rent without providing new wealth with one prominent example being someone putting a chain across a private plot of land and charging you every time you want to cross over. Whether you've five guys doing that or one isn't particularly relevant. So while competition ameliorates the negative effects of these private platforms slightly the more fundamental broken part is really that they should not be allowed to exist in the first place. What is economically desirable is competition between developers and service providers on a common and open infrastructure with ideally all reimbursements beyond maintaining the platform going to the content creators. In fact, competition among platform owners in many ways makes the system worse because it incentivises walled gardens. This is starting to become obvious in the streaming world with Netflix gaining competition and as a result, platform-exclusive content becoming more important, or companies like Spotify or Stitcher enclosing the podcast ecosystem which used to be a prime example of openness.

by dchuk 7y ago

JackRabbitSlim 7y ago

Cool. So what alternatives to the apple store do I have to reach iPhone users? Choice is why Apple isn't gouging developers with 100 dollar service subscriptions just to sign packages right?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
notduncansmith 7y ago
The choice is in you wanting to reach iPhone users in the first place. If you don’t want to support Apple and their App Store, don’t make apps for iPhone. Maybe spend your time developing for a platform you feel more ideologically-aligned with. If you can’t make a living doing that, accept the hobby status of that endeavor and live your life. There are plenty of projects I’d love to get paid to work on but can’t yet, because I don’t care to sell to the speculative software development market.

Barrin92 7y ago

>Also, if limiting the high percentage does end up being the plan of attack, who exactly is in charge of that? a regulatory agency. Credit Card transactions in the EU, for example, are capped at a fraction of a per cent and they still make plenty of cash. Infrastructure providers are essentially just glorified landlords and should not be allowed to extract economic rents from market participants. This is becoming a very blatant and obvious problem on a largely privatized internet. Enforcing low margin incentivises the correct behaviour which is openness and continued innovation. If steam would be forced to build new products rather than sitting on their platform we'd probably have had Half Life 3 a bunch of years ago.

jariel 7y ago
"Enforcing low margin incentivises the correct behaviour which is openness and continued innovation. " Wow, no, this is just not true. 'Margins' vary widely from system to system, and it's generally best left to industry to figure that out. We spent a good part of the 20th century figuring out why central authorities are not good at setting prices. Where monopolies/oligarchies develop, there are possibly problems, which is why there are regulations against cartels, price fixing, anti-competitive behaviour etc.. Qt is just a small player platform, they are well within reason to charge 'whatever' prices they want for their 'marketplace'. If 99% of software was developed using their tooling, we might want them subject to their tooling, but this just isn't the case, so best to leave them be.
Chlorus 7y ago
> If steam would be forced to build new products rather than sitting on their platform we'd probably have had Half Life 3 a bunch of years ago. Steam is a terrible example for this. First of all, Steam isn't a company, it's a product. Valve is the company. Second of all, unlike the App Store or other similar infrastructure, it's not like you're locked into Steam, so they're not really rent-seeking. Steam has had plenty of competitors over the years(Direct2Drive, Games for Windows Live, that garbage GameStop store), they all sucked, and as far as I know there's nothing stopping me from publishing on multiple stores & ignoring Steam. Third, Valve hasn't exactly been doing nothing - they've done more than any other company to the gaming experience under Linux & have pioneered VR. Odds are good they wouldn't have taken those risks had it not been subsidized with comfortable margins they got from Steam. If you had cited, say, the App Store, or something that has actual monopoly power in terms of infrastructure (like our good friends at Comcast) it would have been a much stronger argument.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  >it's not like you're locked into Steam, so they're not really rent-seeking rent-seeking and monopolistic behaviour aren't the same things. Rent-seeking is the extraction of economic rent without providing new wealth with one prominent example being someone putting a chain across a private plot of land and charging you every time you want to cross over. Whether you've five guys doing that or one isn't particularly relevant. So while competition ameliorates the negative effects of these private platforms slightly the more fundamental broken part is really that they should not be allowed to exist in the first place. What is economically desirable is competition between developers and service providers on a common and open infrastructure with ideally all reimbursements beyond maintaining the platform going to the content creators. In fact, competition among platform owners in many ways makes the system worse because it incentivises walled gardens. This is starting to become obvious in the streaming world with Netflix gaining competition and as a result, platform-exclusive content becoming more important, or companies like Spotify or Stitcher enclosing the podcast ecosystem which used to be a prime example of openness.