So, can Apple (and Google, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, etc.) through the legal morass that is an End User License Agreement, compel developers to only use a specific method of in-app purchases, while collecting a fee on them?
Apple has been walking an increasingly narrow path here, and right now it's laid along the distinction between "changes confined to the behavior of the device" and "everything else". That is, if your fee is for helping users purchase lunch, Apple doesn't take a cut. If your fee is for adding a digital skin to an in-game character, Apple takes a cut. They had to draw that line for pretty obvious reasons:
If there was no line and they didn't charge a fee, they would make no money at all from the app store. Every single app would quickly become "free to install" with "unlockable functionality" via in-app transaction.
If there was no line, but they still charged a fee, sellers of real-world goods everywhere would loathe it and shun the app store, using web-hosted "apps" running in Safari instead. It wouldn't matter if iOS had one app store on it, or five, or fifty. Also, the argument against it is not just based on the strength of the players, i.e. "eBay and Amazon and Target and Walmart are so big that they would fight us and win," it's based on the border between one marketplace and another. Is Apple selling software, or are they selling toilet plungers? As long as they stick to a fee from transactions for software and software services, they are on stable legal ground.
This path has been narrowed even more by so-called "reader apps", where you sign in with an account purchased elsewhere, and since there's no commerce taking place on the app, Apple doesn't collect. Developers are chipping away aggressively at the times and places they make transactions happen, and eventually it will get to the point where Apple will no longer be able to guess how much money they are even "passing on" to developers through the App Store because developers will be making it half a dozen different ways, most of which Apple won't be able to track. By then the whole debate over "one store versus several" will seem pointless.
What about hardware used exclusively for gaming? It is "right" for Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo to limit the ways game developers on their platforms get extra money out of their players?
If it's not, that would basically amount to a declaration that any company can be in the hardware business, or the content business, but NOT a combination. (E.g. you can sell a widget, but you can't collect any money when content is viewed with it. Or you can sell content, but you're not allowed to also sell a content player, or the software that connects them.) Because if Sony, or Microsoft, or Nintendo, refused to publish a game on their platform that made them no money but enriched the developer through an alternate transaction system, they could be sued.
Then there's storefronts like "Steam" and "Battle.net". No one - as far as I know - has argued that those are not allowed to dictate how the games they host make money from player. But a few years back, Valve (makers of the "Steam" storefront) started selling "Steam Boxes", which were basically commodity PCs with Linux installed on them, and "Steam" installed on top of that. Did being in the hardware business immediately challenge their right to decide what was hosted on "Steam"? (The product cratered so no one really had time to ask that question.)
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Date: 2020-08-26 10:35 pm (UTC)Apple has been walking an increasingly narrow path here, and right now it's laid along the distinction between "changes confined to the behavior of the device" and "everything else". That is, if your fee is for helping users purchase lunch, Apple doesn't take a cut. If your fee is for adding a digital skin to an in-game character, Apple takes a cut. They had to draw that line for pretty obvious reasons:
If there was no line and they didn't charge a fee, they would make no money at all from the app store. Every single app would quickly become "free to install" with "unlockable functionality" via in-app transaction.
If there was no line, but they still charged a fee, sellers of real-world goods everywhere would loathe it and shun the app store, using web-hosted "apps" running in Safari instead. It wouldn't matter if iOS had one app store on it, or five, or fifty. Also, the argument against it is not just based on the strength of the players, i.e. "eBay and Amazon and Target and Walmart are so big that they would fight us and win," it's based on the border between one marketplace and another. Is Apple selling software, or are they selling toilet plungers? As long as they stick to a fee from transactions for software and software services, they are on stable legal ground.
This path has been narrowed even more by so-called "reader apps", where you sign in with an account purchased elsewhere, and since there's no commerce taking place on the app, Apple doesn't collect. Developers are chipping away aggressively at the times and places they make transactions happen, and eventually it will get to the point where Apple will no longer be able to guess how much money they are even "passing on" to developers through the App Store because developers will be making it half a dozen different ways, most of which Apple won't be able to track. By then the whole debate over "one store versus several" will seem pointless.
What about hardware used exclusively for gaming? It is "right" for Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo to limit the ways game developers on their platforms get extra money out of their players?
If it's not, that would basically amount to a declaration that any company can be in the hardware business, or the content business, but NOT a combination. (E.g. you can sell a widget, but you can't collect any money when content is viewed with it. Or you can sell content, but you're not allowed to also sell a content player, or the software that connects them.) Because if Sony, or Microsoft, or Nintendo, refused to publish a game on their platform that made them no money but enriched the developer through an alternate transaction system, they could be sued.
Then there's storefronts like "Steam" and "Battle.net". No one - as far as I know - has argued that those are not allowed to dictate how the games they host make money from player. But a few years back, Valve (makers of the "Steam" storefront) started selling "Steam Boxes", which were basically commodity PCs with Linux installed on them, and "Steam" installed on top of that. Did being in the hardware business immediately challenge their right to decide what was hosted on "Steam"? (The product cratered so no one really had time to ask that question.)
It might be best to let the market handle this.