Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by yuvalr1 2134 days ago
The difference is that if Fortnite abuses its power, it is relatively easy to build another MMORPG competitor. If Apple abuses its power, it's practically impossible to build another mobile platform to compete today. Even Microsoft failed with that.

The bottom line is that Fortnight can have practical competition (that for example offer 3rd party plugins or lower prices), while the iPhone only has Android as competition, which is taking the exact same 30% cut.
1 comments
outworlder 2134 days ago
> it is relatively easy to build another MMORPG competitor.

Oh no it isn't. There are very few successful (and even fewer wildly successful) MMORPGs and countless failed attempts.

Games are not really fungible. It's not like I'm going to go out of Fortnite to buy items in WoW instead and treat them as the same. They are two completely different markets.

> The bottom line is that Fortnight can have practical competition (that for example offer 3rd party plugins or lower prices)

No, unless things change, you need to use the Epic store.

link
dgoldstein0 2134 days ago
Sure, but if the community got sick of Epic's walled fortnite garden, they can play other games. Could be WoW, could be Call of Duty, could be Pubg, could be the latest Mario. It doesn't really matter. Fortnite competes for your time with all other games, and the main thing keeping people there, besides basic enjoyment of the game, is that a lot of people play with their friends. And not many people will say that certain in app purchases are essential item (unlike, say, having an email app on your phone).

iOS on the other hand has a single serious competitor, Android, and if you have an iPhone you can't install Android on it when you get mad at Apple - you need a whole new phone. From a developer's perspective, you would miss out on all the iPhone users if you ship and Android app and not an iOS one. In that sense, Apple has significant monopoly-like power over the app market; solidified by the fact that you can't just install Google play store and start downloading Android apps on your iPhone if you get fed up with Apple' App store. The switching costs are too high for most users to consider it, except when buying a new phone.

A lot of this comes down to what a meaningful market is. E.g. Border's and Barnes and Noble learned the hard way that they were in the same market as online book selling - you couldn't usefully look at their book store models and ignore Amazon in the last ~decade.

link