maybe this article should be: what if apple and google weren't draconian dicks with their app stores? maybe valve and apple could reach some kind of agreement

maybe this article should be: what if apple and google weren't draconian dicks with their app stores? maybe valve and apple could reach some kind of agreement anyway, but the real blocker there i see is that steam fundamentally violates the app store requirements because apple don't want anyone to sell anything unless its through their app store. google i'm less sure about, i'm not up to date with the latest dev requirements, but i suspect they have introduced similar things recently. however... cross platform integration is something that developers can do anyway i don't see any reason why savegames can't be shared if the api is based on normal current network technology and is platform agnostic. an obvious example would be a rest api interface to a server for save games - such an api can be used identically across all platforms, although gamedevs might want something lower level and less filled with cruft than a TCP/IP connection with HTTP over the top, even those constraints aren't very prohibitive... UDP communications work fine across everything, and the good ol' BSD sockets/Winsock are easy to work with cross platform so long as you respect things like using network byte ordering and don't rely on exotic socket options.