No, this was exactly retaliation. Phil Schiller explicitly said in emails that they were removing Epic’s Switzerland’s account because they couldn’t trust them because of how critical their recent comments about the DMA plan were.

“I like my iPhone so any criticism of Apple has to be unjustified”

Your reasoning is weak, do better.

So? That doesn’t change how stupid it was to publicly retaliate against them, and explicitly write out that you were punishing them for their criticism. The point is that Apple execs are as dumb as your average person, just greedier.

What are you talking about? They very clearly presented a concrete solution of banning problematic behaviour rather than arbitrary categories of applications.

Because we all do, because someone is finally trying to do something about Apple’s decades long walled garden anti-competitive bullshit.

What, are you upset that your favourite trillion dollar mega corp feels picked on?

Apple would have to pretty fucking stupid to openly retaliate against Epic for criticizing their DMA plan but here we are.

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Its fundamentally weirder and more problematic to build your news feed around people rather than topics.

Biden appointed a bunch of pretty vehemently anti-monopoly people to power, this is just how long it actually takes them to conduct an investigation thorough enough to bring suit.

More than any other games company.

It wasn’t their money to spend. Devs lost their jobs because Valve kept taking more than they needed.

Again, 1 Million dollars. Per Year. Per Employee. That means per every single Linux dev they employed, they still made a million dollars per employee.

That’s indefensible and it’s really weird to see lemmy get their dicks hard about excess greedy capitalism just cause this time it’s behind a service that they like. Facebook gave back a huge amount of open source projects but that doesn’t make up for the harm they’ve caused, even just the harm caused by them sucking up an inordinate amount of societal resources, and Facebook “only” makes ~$750k per employee per year.

“… employing Linux developers and finally making actual cracks in the true monopoly of Windows.”

Again, Valve has made close to a million dollars per employee per year. No they have not spent anywhere remotely close to that on Linux developers. You’re equating a trinket they tossed you in the last couple of years with the giant horde they robbed from developers.

Funny, it’s not the indies with the huge layoffs

It is, independent studios lay people off and have to close up shop all the time, on top of just not making that much money to begin with, they just don’t make headline news the way that big companies do.

But on that matter, Valve charges much less for their engine, and is often free for indie devs.

If you’re talking about the Source Engine, they’re really, really not comparable. The Source Engine hasn’t even been updated since 2013.

EGS would be grossly profitable if they had a good service, but they don’t because their platform is shit.   What are they supposed to do?

How would you convince gamers to use your store instead of Steam? There are reasons that anti-monopoly laws don’t care how you got your monopoly, once you have one it’s problematic because it makes nearly impossible for competition to form against you.

And how’s that going for them?

Excellently, Unreal Engine makes a huge amount of money for them.

Have they stopped running at a loss yet?

You’re probably thinking of the Epic Games Store, not Unreal Engine, and it would be grossly profitable at 12% commission if it had the established infrastructure and sales numbers that Steam does, it’s only not profitable because they are still developing and building infrastructure and they basically just sell Fortnite and Rocket League.

No it doesn’t. It leads to Valve wasting money enriching themselves to the tune of millions of dollars per employee per year while independent game developers making normal salaries continue to have to lay people off and be underfunded.

What about our economy makes you think that multiple industries can’t be corporate controlled monopolies / oligopolies?

Epic charges you 5% of revenue after a million dollars to use the entirety of Unreal engine. 30% for a store with an add on market is not reasonable.

EGS would be profitable if they had the sales numbers that Steam does. Theyre not profitable because they’re basically just a fortnite and rocket league store.

Valve also allowed most of their employees to work on whatever they wanted for a decade, an initiative that produced almost nothing, and during that time they still made close to a million dollars per year per employee.

I’m not saying I’m unhappy with Valve being private or with Valve making enough money to give itself a nice cushion, but the scale of the money they’re making is absurd when independent game devs often still struggle to make money.

On PC, Microsoft takes a 0% cut of apps distributed through it’s store and 12% of games, so EGS isn’t really the outlier there, but regardless 30% being average in an existing anti-competitive industry doesn’t really prove anything about whether or not it’s a fair cost. That can easily be oligopoly collusion / price signalling which happens all the time.

Console makers like Microsoft and Sony are also funding building the hardware and maintaining the platforms since they lose money on up front hardware sales. I’m not saying I agree that this should be a legal business model, but they have more of an argument for charging 30%.

And regardless of all of that, when I’m talking about a fair price, I’m talking about a fair price in an economic sense, as in, does Valve provide more back to the economy then money they take out of it, or are they rent seeking? Given that Valve made more revenue per employee than literally any other tech company (pushing $1million/employee/year), all during a period where their employees literally were allowed to work on whatever personal projects they wanted (virtually none of which went anywhere or made Valve any money). In that context, I can’t see their fees as anything other than rent seeking. Yes make a profit, yes pay your employees well, keep a nice cushion, and invest in R&D, but Valve has been able to afford to do all of that and just burn / hoard cash at a ridiculous rate, all money that would be going to the actual game designers and developers if we had competitive markets.

Lmfao “for free”. Did you read the article? Did you not see the part where Valve takes 30% of every single game in existience’s revenue? The part where Valve makes more money per game then the studios actually developing them?

Yes, steam was great and rose to its monopoly through its greatness, but they have been flat out abusing that monopoly by not lowering prices when they can. The occasional free return is a trinket they throw back at you after overcharging you by at least 15% on every single other game you’ve ever purchased.