6 ms·

Epic's "First Run" program does all the things they got mad at Apple and Google about. You don't have to pay any license fees for Unreal Engine if you use Epic

by mike_d 2y ago

Epic's "First Run" program does all the things they got mad at Apple and Google about. You don't have to pay any license fees for Unreal Engine if you use Epic exclusively for payments. They give you 100% revshare for 6 months if you agree to not ship your game on any other app store. Let's not kid ourselves, Epic never cared about consumer choice or a fair playing field, they only want the ability to profit without having to invest in building a hardware platform.

ethbr1 2y ago
All I care about is having some healthy competition in the marketplace again. If that takes tying Google's hands behind its back for a few years, fine. Taking a 30% cut should have been, prima facie, evidence of monopoly abuse.
- bsimpson 2y ago
  As I recall, the original App Store argument was "It would cost a lot more than 30% to mint CDs and sell them in Waldenbooks, so we're doing developers a favor by _only_ charging 30% to distribute."
  - hu3 2y ago
    How generous! That's the kind of argument that only gets a pass if you have no other option as a user. Wink wink.
  - callc 2y ago
    There are a myriad of points which make this metaphor a insufficient argument at best (at worst intentionally obfuscating the nature of digital publishing and digital marketplaces as having similar physical analogues) in favor of the current app store landscape: 1. AFAIK anyone can manufacture and distribute CDs 2. The argument that anything below the cost to manu CDs is acceptable only holds water if you have an inefficient market that doesn’t reflect the actual cost of digital distribution.
    - rahkiin 2y ago
      It was 30% vs whatever parties like Symbian asked at the time. Or other existing platforms like consoles where developers were left with less than 70%. Safely distributing software was a pain in 2007 and did involve a lot of expensive publishing
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        The problem is that cut hasn't come down in the last 20 years, because there's no competitive pressure within ecosystems to force it to.
        lotsofpulp 2y ago
        It’s because no one wants to wade through the oceans of malware that exist online, and reputation is expensive to build. I told my family many years ago now that they get no tech support for issues caused by downloading things outside of the App Store. I will download from outside of the App Store, but I have zero confidence that the vast, vast majority of people will ever be able to not get fooled, and if they do, they won’t be able to fix it. With an Apple problem, my relatives call Apple, and the Apple tech support person remotes into their phone and walks them through a solution. Or gives them a refund. And the thing with phones and computers these days is that they are your identity, they are your wealth, they are your life. You lose control of that, and you are in for a world of hurt. Someone can clean out your brokerage and bank accounts. The stakes are too high.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Tying Google's hands while giving Apple a clean bill of health isn't going to increase competition, it's going to solidify Apple's lead in the US. The competition that actually matters is between whole platforms, it's only Epic's lawyers who want everyone to get fixated on the idea that the app store markets are the whole story (or even really a significant portion of the story). I could totally get behind efforts to prevent Google and Apple from together duopolizing the entire mobile phone space, but this is not that.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    The important competition isn't Google v Apple. It's everyone else v Google and/or Apple. Ironically, forcing this onto Google might be the best thing for Android, as it's the openness the platform really needed to compete against Apple, but costs Google too much revenue to ever do it if left to their own decision.
    - elevatedastalt 2y ago
      Then why is there one result for Google and the opposite one for Apple?
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        follow the money. Which judges handled which cases in which location? but the non-partisan bailey answer is along the lines of "android promised freedom, IOS never did".
        elevatedastalt 2y ago
        So it's better to be bad than to try to be good and fail?
        johnnyanmac 2y ago
        Based on the legelese here, yea. I guess an equivalent is how you can be a for profit corporation with no issue, but if you're a non profit and you honestly mismanage some $10k as an accounting error, you get the book thrown at you.
bitwize 2y ago
There were lots of times Microsoft filed amicus briefs against patent trolls and the like, claiming the need for a "free and open internet" or "open standards in the X space", while still in the hot seat for bundling Internet Explorer. Large companies will clamor for freedom and consumer choice when it benefits them. They will put a hammerlock on consumers when it benefits them.
LadyCailin 2y ago
I will find it deliciously ironic and welcomed if precedents set by Epic are eventually used against them. The even more hilarious news though is that apparently PC users hate their platform so much though, that exclusivity on Epic is perhaps more of a liability. I read the other day that that new open world Star Wars game had “disappointing” sales because of that.
- protimewaster 2y ago
  It's strange to me, because there's literally more competition in the space, but people are unhappy about it. PC games used to regularly be Steam exclusive for years on end, and now games are often available on multiple stores within months or a year from release, but people are for some reason unhappy about this fact. For example, Borderlands 2 (on PC) was Steam exclusive for something like 7 years and nobody seemed to mind. Borderlands 3 (on PC) was EGS exclusive for 6 months and people got very upset about it. How is it not better to have a game available on two launchers within 6 months than to have a game available on only one launcher for 7 years?
  - isatty 2y ago
    That’s because people don’t actually give a rats ass about competition directly. They care about _cost_ AND _convenience_. Steam is great on both fronts and you don’t have to create yet another account or have another buggy pos launcher on your computer.
    - protimewaster 2y ago
      I'm not sure why people would actively want their game to require either EGS or Steam, though, even if it's convenient. EGS has business practices that drive a lot of people crazy, and Steam has an awful security track record and was also convicted of anticompetitive pricing. (Though people seem to like Steam's business practices even with that conviction, which also always struck me as a little weird.) It seems like not requiring either one would be the more neutral, agreeable position to take.
cyberax 2y ago
I don't get it. Epic is offering a different pricing model that might or might not be more advantageous to developers That is literally what competition should look like.
- nicce 2y ago
  From the judges decisions: > Google also can’t: > Offer developers money or perks to launch their apps on the Play Store exclusively or first
  - heavyset_go 2y ago
    Makes sense that privilege was taken away, given that Google is facing legal consequences for abusing their position in the mobile app distribution and payments markets.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - cyberax 2y ago
    There's nothing wrong with limited exclusivity deals if you are not a monopolist. And the problem with Google was not their exclusivity, but that EVERYBODY was forced to do it or jump through hoops with side-loading.
kaba0 2y ago
No companies (at least above the “tiny” category) care about anything, they are paper-clip machines and the only thing preventing them from extracting iron from our blood is the law.
protimewaster 2y ago
That sounds more akin to a standard exclusivity agreement and seems much different (at least to me) from what Google got in trouble for.
015a 2y ago
List of extremely tired and boring things: - Not fully understanding something, but having an opinion about it, with no attempt to learn more. - "All companies are evil" yawn Next time, can you try a more exciting criticism of Epic? We've been going through these lawsuits for four years now, every easy original thought has been thought and poasted about, you need to think a bit harder for your next comment.
- fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
  I also disagree with GP's post because you don't need to use any of Epic's software. At the same time, I don't think your response is in line with HN's guidelines and is unnecessary. >Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
jonny_eh 2y ago
> You don't have to pay any license fees for Unreal Engine if you use Epic exclusively for payments That's optional. Play Store requirements around payment methods is not.
flykespice 2y ago
They just want max profits without paying any fees.
TiredOfLife 2y ago
Epic doesn't make phones that run Epic made OS.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
I fail the see the correlation. Epic is synergizing with its platform that is a tiny fraction of its market and its engine that is also not a monopoly (Unity still the most used engine). This context does indeed matter a lot. Hard to lock out competition when your competition is 8x the market share. >Epic never cared about consumer choice or a fair playing field of course not. But enemy of my enemy. As of now their arguments benefit the consumer. If they ever do form a monopoly and keep doing these tactics, we can talk lawsuits.
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  > synergizing with its platform That's some beautiful corpspeak. "Your honor, it is not anticompetitive practice, it is synergizing with our platform"
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    > This context does indeed matter a lot. Hard to lock out competition when your competition is 8x the market share. If you're a new company and lack any monopoly power to abuse, I don't see the issue. I wouldn't mind hearing alternative strategies to compete.
croes 2y ago
And we don't care about Epic and still want the benefits of their trials.
wraptile 2y ago
Nobody cares "who's right" here; consumers just want competition because when businesses compete the consumers win.
pnt12 2y ago
Their vision, which I disagree with, of customer choice, is that its store is an alternative to Steam. Probably they justify their exclusives by not being a monopoly, which gets weird: steam has the monopoly numbers, but epic has the monopoly practices. They got a few customers from their giveaways - they should stick to those and further improving their store, maybe some people will actually want to use it.
- madeofpalk 2y ago
  There's no such thing as "monopoly practices". Being a monopoly isn't illegal. Exclusivity deals aren't illegal. What's illegal is using your powerful position in a market (a monopoly) to prevent competition. It's really the "prevent competition" bit where companies get in trouble. An exclusivity deal from an upstart could be how they actually enable competition to exist.
madeofpalk 2y ago
When Epic ships a phone or computer with the Epic Store as the only optional for installing apps or games, then we can talk. Epic Store on Windows can't be accused of this monopolistic behaviour because Windows is not locked down and alternatives to the platform's distribution exists. Epic Store is one of those beneficiaries. Windows and Epic's deals demonstrates there exists a market with competition and choices for developers and users. Developers can chose to take Epic up on their deal. Users can chose to use the Epic Store or not. The courts ruled that this choice does not effectively exist on Android because of all the dealings that Google did to prevent competition. The whole point of this lawsuit is that Google suppresses alternative pricing models in the Play Store. You can not like a proposed alternative payment structure (as a developer), or not want to use Epic Store on Android. It would be great if the market could decide on what it wants here, instead of Google preventing any competition.
wackget 2y ago
> they only want the ability to profit without having to invest in building a hardware platform Well yeah; they're a software company. I also write software. Should I build my own hardware platform to release my apps?
- boringg 2y ago
  Your defense has no merit to their actions -=-> "Well yeah; they're a software company." You are giving them a free pass.

by mike_d 2y ago

ethbr1 2y ago

All I care about is having some healthy competition in the marketplace again. If that takes tying Google's hands behind its back for a few years, fine. Taking a 30% cut should have been, prima facie, evidence of monopoly abuse.

bsimpson 2y ago
As I recall, the original App Store argument was "It would cost a lot more than 30% to mint CDs and sell them in Waldenbooks, so we're doing developers a favor by _only_ charging 30% to distribute."
- hu3 2y ago
  How generous! That's the kind of argument that only gets a pass if you have no other option as a user. Wink wink.
- callc 2y ago
  There are a myriad of points which make this metaphor a insufficient argument at best (at worst intentionally obfuscating the nature of digital publishing and digital marketplaces as having similar physical analogues) in favor of the current app store landscape: 1. AFAIK anyone can manufacture and distribute CDs 2. The argument that anything below the cost to manu CDs is acceptable only holds water if you have an inefficient market that doesn’t reflect the actual cost of digital distribution.
  - rahkiin 2y ago
    It was 30% vs whatever parties like Symbian asked at the time. Or other existing platforms like consoles where developers were left with less than 70%. Safely distributing software was a pain in 2007 and did involve a lot of expensive publishing
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      The problem is that cut hasn't come down in the last 20 years, because there's no competitive pressure within ecosystems to force it to.
      - lotsofpulp 2y ago
        It’s because no one wants to wade through the oceans of malware that exist online, and reputation is expensive to build. I told my family many years ago now that they get no tech support for issues caused by downloading things outside of the App Store. I will download from outside of the App Store, but I have zero confidence that the vast, vast majority of people will ever be able to not get fooled, and if they do, they won’t be able to fix it. With an Apple problem, my relatives call Apple, and the Apple tech support person remotes into their phone and walks them through a solution. Or gives them a refund. And the thing with phones and computers these days is that they are your identity, they are your wealth, they are your life. You lose control of that, and you are in for a world of hurt. Someone can clean out your brokerage and bank accounts. The stakes are too high.
lolinder 2y ago
Tying Google's hands while giving Apple a clean bill of health isn't going to increase competition, it's going to solidify Apple's lead in the US. The competition that actually matters is between whole platforms, it's only Epic's lawyers who want everyone to get fixated on the idea that the app store markets are the whole story (or even really a significant portion of the story). I could totally get behind efforts to prevent Google and Apple from together duopolizing the entire mobile phone space, but this is not that.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  The important competition isn't Google v Apple. It's everyone else v Google and/or Apple. Ironically, forcing this onto Google might be the best thing for Android, as it's the openness the platform really needed to compete against Apple, but costs Google too much revenue to ever do it if left to their own decision.
  - elevatedastalt 2y ago
    Then why is there one result for Google and the opposite one for Apple?
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      follow the money. Which judges handled which cases in which location? but the non-partisan bailey answer is along the lines of "android promised freedom, IOS never did".
      - elevatedastalt 2y ago
        So it's better to be bad than to try to be good and fail?
        johnnyanmac 2y ago
        Based on the legelese here, yea. I guess an equivalent is how you can be a for profit corporation with no issue, but if you're a non profit and you honestly mismanage some $10k as an accounting error, you get the book thrown at you.

bitwize 2y ago

There were lots of times Microsoft filed amicus briefs against patent trolls and the like, claiming the need for a "free and open internet" or "open standards in the X space", while still in the hot seat for bundling Internet Explorer. Large companies will clamor for freedom and consumer choice when it benefits them. They will put a hammerlock on consumers when it benefits them.

LadyCailin 2y ago

I will find it deliciously ironic and welcomed if precedents set by Epic are eventually used against them. The even more hilarious news though is that apparently PC users hate their platform so much though, that exclusivity on Epic is perhaps more of a liability. I read the other day that that new open world Star Wars game had “disappointing” sales because of that.

protimewaster 2y ago
It's strange to me, because there's literally more competition in the space, but people are unhappy about it. PC games used to regularly be Steam exclusive for years on end, and now games are often available on multiple stores within months or a year from release, but people are for some reason unhappy about this fact. For example, Borderlands 2 (on PC) was Steam exclusive for something like 7 years and nobody seemed to mind. Borderlands 3 (on PC) was EGS exclusive for 6 months and people got very upset about it. How is it not better to have a game available on two launchers within 6 months than to have a game available on only one launcher for 7 years?
- isatty 2y ago
  That’s because people don’t actually give a rats ass about competition directly. They care about _cost_ AND _convenience_. Steam is great on both fronts and you don’t have to create yet another account or have another buggy pos launcher on your computer.
  - protimewaster 2y ago
    I'm not sure why people would actively want their game to require either EGS or Steam, though, even if it's convenient. EGS has business practices that drive a lot of people crazy, and Steam has an awful security track record and was also convicted of anticompetitive pricing. (Though people seem to like Steam's business practices even with that conviction, which also always struck me as a little weird.) It seems like not requiring either one would be the more neutral, agreeable position to take.

cyberax 2y ago

I don't get it. Epic is offering a different pricing model that might or might not be more advantageous to developers That is literally what competition should look like.

nicce 2y ago
From the judges decisions: > Google also can’t: > Offer developers money or perks to launch their apps on the Play Store exclusively or first
- heavyset_go 2y ago
  Makes sense that privilege was taken away, given that Google is facing legal consequences for abusing their position in the mobile app distribution and payments markets.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- cyberax 2y ago
  There's nothing wrong with limited exclusivity deals if you are not a monopolist. And the problem with Google was not their exclusivity, but that EVERYBODY was forced to do it or jump through hoops with side-loading.

kaba0 2y ago

No companies (at least above the “tiny” category) care about anything, they are paper-clip machines and the only thing preventing them from extracting iron from our blood is the law.

protimewaster 2y ago

That sounds more akin to a standard exclusivity agreement and seems much different (at least to me) from what Google got in trouble for.

015a 2y ago

List of extremely tired and boring things: - Not fully understanding something, but having an opinion about it, with no attempt to learn more. - "All companies are evil" yawn Next time, can you try a more exciting criticism of Epic? We've been going through these lawsuits for four years now, every easy original thought has been thought and poasted about, you need to think a bit harder for your next comment.

fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
I also disagree with GP's post because you don't need to use any of Epic's software. At the same time, I don't think your response is in line with HN's guidelines and is unnecessary. >Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

jonny_eh 2y ago

> You don't have to pay any license fees for Unreal Engine if you use Epic exclusively for payments That's optional. Play Store requirements around payment methods is not.

flykespice 2y ago

They just want max profits without paying any fees.

TiredOfLife 2y ago

Epic doesn't make phones that run Epic made OS.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

I fail the see the correlation. Epic is synergizing with its platform that is a tiny fraction of its market and its engine that is also not a monopoly (Unity still the most used engine). This context does indeed matter a lot. Hard to lock out competition when your competition is 8x the market share. >Epic never cared about consumer choice or a fair playing field of course not. But enemy of my enemy. As of now their arguments benefit the consumer. If they ever do form a monopoly and keep doing these tactics, we can talk lawsuits.

Ferret7446 2y ago
> synergizing with its platform That's some beautiful corpspeak. "Your honor, it is not anticompetitive practice, it is synergizing with our platform"
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  > This context does indeed matter a lot. Hard to lock out competition when your competition is 8x the market share. If you're a new company and lack any monopoly power to abuse, I don't see the issue. I wouldn't mind hearing alternative strategies to compete.

croes 2y ago

And we don't care about Epic and still want the benefits of their trials.

wraptile 2y ago

Nobody cares "who's right" here; consumers just want competition because when businesses compete the consumers win.

pnt12 2y ago

Their vision, which I disagree with, of customer choice, is that its store is an alternative to Steam. Probably they justify their exclusives by not being a monopoly, which gets weird: steam has the monopoly numbers, but epic has the monopoly practices. They got a few customers from their giveaways - they should stick to those and further improving their store, maybe some people will actually want to use it.

madeofpalk 2y ago
There's no such thing as "monopoly practices". Being a monopoly isn't illegal. Exclusivity deals aren't illegal. What's illegal is using your powerful position in a market (a monopoly) to prevent competition. It's really the "prevent competition" bit where companies get in trouble. An exclusivity deal from an upstart could be how they actually enable competition to exist.

madeofpalk 2y ago

When Epic ships a phone or computer with the Epic Store as the only optional for installing apps or games, then we can talk. Epic Store on Windows can't be accused of this monopolistic behaviour because Windows is not locked down and alternatives to the platform's distribution exists. Epic Store is one of those beneficiaries. Windows and Epic's deals demonstrates there exists a market with competition and choices for developers and users. Developers can chose to take Epic up on their deal. Users can chose to use the Epic Store or not. The courts ruled that this choice does not effectively exist on Android because of all the dealings that Google did to prevent competition. The whole point of this lawsuit is that Google suppresses alternative pricing models in the Play Store. You can not like a proposed alternative payment structure (as a developer), or not want to use Epic Store on Android. It would be great if the market could decide on what it wants here, instead of Google preventing any competition.

wackget 2y ago

> they only want the ability to profit without having to invest in building a hardware platform Well yeah; they're a software company. I also write software. Should I build my own hardware platform to release my apps?

boringg 2y ago
Your defense has no merit to their actions -=-> "Well yeah; they're a software company." You are giving them a free pass.