Thursday, February 23, 2023 9:47 amThursday, February 23, 20233 Comments

• Opinion

In the 15 years since it launched the App Store, Apple has proved again and again that it cares very little about games, even as it’s happy to make billions from them, Neil Long, who was an App Store games editor for seven years, writes in The Guardian.

Neil Long for The Guardian:

It all started so well. When the iPhone and iPad arrived, those devices transformed games almost as much as they upended the rest of the tech world. Suddenly everyone had powerful games machines in their pockets, and it was amazing…

So what did Apple do next? Nothing really. It seemed to create a whole new games ecosystem by accident, and ever since has presided over it like a contemptuous landlord. It takes a tasty 30% cut of almost every in-app purchase while doing next to nothing to earn that fee…

Apple could have reinvested a greater fraction of the billions it has earned from mobile games to make the App Store a good place to find fun, interesting games to fit your tastes. But it hasn’t, and today the App Store is a confusing mess, recently made even worse recently with the addition of ad slots in search, on the front page and even on the product pages themselves…

Happily things may be about to change – including that 30% commission on all in-app purchases. After a bruising US court battle between Apple and Epic Games over alleged monopolistic practices, government bodies in the UK, EU, US, Japan and elsewhere are examining Apple and Google’s “effective duopoly” over what we see, do and play on our phones.

MacDailyNews Take: Could the App Store be better? Yes.

Does Apple really not care about games? No.

Games dominate the front page of the App Store. The first tab of the App Store after “Today” is “Games.” Apple has its own Apple Arcade stocked with exclusive games.

Long’s hit piece reeks of resentment and ulterior motives.

It’s Apple’s App Store. Of course they have a right to charge commissions.

Apple’s App Store isn’t a charity and it’s not free to operate.

How much did it cost developers to have their apps burned onto CDs, boxed, shipped, displayed on store shelves prior to Apple remaking the world for the better for umpteenth time? Apple incurs costs to store, review, organize, surface, and distribute apps to over one billion users. — MacDailyNews, June 10, 2022

The bottom line is clear: Epic Games wants to enjoy all of the benefits of Apple’s App Store, including access to well over one billion of the world’s most affluent users for free. That is illogical, unfair, and, basically, theft. – MacDailyNews, May 4, 2021

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