3 ms·

Why are these things not mutually exclusive?

sam0x17 5y ago
Anything over 5% is highway robbery and the kind of thing that only exists in concerningly unregulated capitalism. I promise you someday legislation will put an actual legal limit there. Just wait for these zoomers to reach voting age.
- weird-eye-issue 5y ago
  Payment processors charge around 3% plus fees (charge back fees and transaction fees). I think the value that Roblox adds makes them deserve much more than a measly 2% more than a generic payment processor would get. 15 or 20% is probably a good middle ground
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    I assume they have a deal with Apple and Google for less than 30% on in-app transactions. That probably means Roblox is getting between 10-20% of the transaction.
    - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
      They also have PC and Mac version of it. I have some friends who have played Roblox on PC and my younger cousin plays on iOS. I wonder what the market share looks like between them
      - withinboredom 5y ago
        That's interesting. I didn't know about the PC version! I'd also be curious of the market share there.
  - sam0x17 5y ago
    Right, that's why they get an extra 2%.
- bscphil 5y ago
  Why is making 6% from your one funding source on an otherwise free-to-play product unreasonable? Do you think any markup of more than 5% is unreasonable? What about Apple's physical products? What about ... every retail store in existence? > Just wait for these zoomers to reach voting age. Ah yes, 50.
  - sam0x17 5y ago
    Any scenario where a single company controls an entire marketplace I do believe that company's markup should be limited to 5% to prevent abuse, yes. If there are multiple marketplaces serving the exact same devices, and with equal status, then that's another story, and price-fixing is already illegal, so that situation is covered. Vendor-specific app stores on platforms where third party app stores are not allowed or are centrally discouraged in any way are monopolies and should be treated as such. It isn't enough to say that android apps compete with ios apps -- we aren't talking about selling iphones and android phones, we're talking about selling vendor-specific apps, and these are different ecosystems. Apple is sitting there gatekeeping everything allowed in their ecosystem and charging an extremely hefty toll, in exactly the way a monopoly prefers to, because they have made sure competition is not allowed. On that note, I also think this level of gatekeeping should not be allowed, but that's a whole other rant. There is nothing Apple (or Google, or Robolox) does to justify more than a 5% cut. 5% is generous. In many cases they don't even take the time to have a human review every submission. You can say they built the platform, but aren't we already paying for that with our 5%? And to your point, yes, when Zoomers reach 50, we'll see awesome things like companies losing the rights to their IP if they submit 3 bogus DMCA claims, extreme regulation of things like content-ID that threaten the existence of fair use in practice, outright banning of all lobbying and corporate political donations, things like this, etc etc.
  - sam0x17 5y ago
    > Do you think any markup of more than 5% is unreasonable? What about Apple's physical products? What about ... every retail store in existence? Retail stores maintain a physical presence and have actual overhead, as do online retailers that have to maintain warehouses, subsidize free shipping, etc. What is the overhead on an app submission, or an app purchase? Charging 30% overhead for $0.0012 cents of bandwidth, an algorithmic review of your app that only might be supplemented by an actual human review, and a literally free file copy operation comes nowhere close to that. This is a lot closer to payment processor fee territory in terms of the actual work being done by the provider. You would think they would do more for their app developers with such a hefty fee, but they don't, so they need to be regulated. These fees are just theft. In the case of Roblox, you can argue "but what about the platform?" but 5% is still a metric-crap-ton of revenue and is more than enough to keep their platform afloat (especially if they don't have to give 30% upstream to Apple/Google). We've just become accustomed to ridiculous % cuts because monopolies have normalized this practice. In the early 00s, the idea of an app store even taking a cut was viewed as laughable. Then it became normal.

Anything over 5% is highway robbery and the kind of thing that only exists in concerningly unregulated capitalism. I promise you someday legislation will put an actual legal limit there. Just wait for these zoomers to reach voting age.

weird-eye-issue 5y ago
Payment processors charge around 3% plus fees (charge back fees and transaction fees). I think the value that Roblox adds makes them deserve much more than a measly 2% more than a generic payment processor would get. 15 or 20% is probably a good middle ground
- withinboredom 5y ago
  I assume they have a deal with Apple and Google for less than 30% on in-app transactions. That probably means Roblox is getting between 10-20% of the transaction.
  - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    They also have PC and Mac version of it. I have some friends who have played Roblox on PC and my younger cousin plays on iOS. I wonder what the market share looks like between them
    - withinboredom 5y ago
      That's interesting. I didn't know about the PC version! I'd also be curious of the market share there.
- sam0x17 5y ago
  Right, that's why they get an extra 2%.
bscphil 5y ago
Why is making 6% from your one funding source on an otherwise free-to-play product unreasonable? Do you think any markup of more than 5% is unreasonable? What about Apple's physical products? What about ... every retail store in existence? > Just wait for these zoomers to reach voting age. Ah yes, 50.
- sam0x17 5y ago
  Any scenario where a single company controls an entire marketplace I do believe that company's markup should be limited to 5% to prevent abuse, yes. If there are multiple marketplaces serving the exact same devices, and with equal status, then that's another story, and price-fixing is already illegal, so that situation is covered. Vendor-specific app stores on platforms where third party app stores are not allowed or are centrally discouraged in any way are monopolies and should be treated as such. It isn't enough to say that android apps compete with ios apps -- we aren't talking about selling iphones and android phones, we're talking about selling vendor-specific apps, and these are different ecosystems. Apple is sitting there gatekeeping everything allowed in their ecosystem and charging an extremely hefty toll, in exactly the way a monopoly prefers to, because they have made sure competition is not allowed. On that note, I also think this level of gatekeeping should not be allowed, but that's a whole other rant. There is nothing Apple (or Google, or Robolox) does to justify more than a 5% cut. 5% is generous. In many cases they don't even take the time to have a human review every submission. You can say they built the platform, but aren't we already paying for that with our 5%? And to your point, yes, when Zoomers reach 50, we'll see awesome things like companies losing the rights to their IP if they submit 3 bogus DMCA claims, extreme regulation of things like content-ID that threaten the existence of fair use in practice, outright banning of all lobbying and corporate political donations, things like this, etc etc.
- sam0x17 5y ago
  > Do you think any markup of more than 5% is unreasonable? What about Apple's physical products? What about ... every retail store in existence? Retail stores maintain a physical presence and have actual overhead, as do online retailers that have to maintain warehouses, subsidize free shipping, etc. What is the overhead on an app submission, or an app purchase? Charging 30% overhead for $0.0012 cents of bandwidth, an algorithmic review of your app that only might be supplemented by an actual human review, and a literally free file copy operation comes nowhere close to that. This is a lot closer to payment processor fee territory in terms of the actual work being done by the provider. You would think they would do more for their app developers with such a hefty fee, but they don't, so they need to be regulated. These fees are just theft. In the case of Roblox, you can argue "but what about the platform?" but 5% is still a metric-crap-ton of revenue and is more than enough to keep their platform afloat (especially if they don't have to give 30% upstream to Apple/Google). We've just become accustomed to ridiculous % cuts because monopolies have normalized this practice. In the early 00s, the idea of an app store even taking a cut was viewed as laughable. Then it became normal.