[Cupprum]

Sex workers in Bangkok pay around 10% of their salaries to the bars where people can find the workers.

Apple and other companies take around 30% as a fee for using their marketplace.

I don't see a reason why big tech should get a higher cut.

[thrance]

I don't see why they should get any cut, do you pay Dell whenever you install a game on your laptop?

[tanjtanjtanj]

Did I download the game from Dell’s servers? Was the game made using tools authored by Dell? Did the game go through a quality assurance process run by Dell? I know at one point they ran a digital distribution platform and I’d be highly surprised if they weren’t charging some sort of fee.

[alwayslikethis]

Any claim of fees for hosting a distribution platform is nullified by the lack of alternatives. I don't get to kidnap you can then charge you rent and food costs.

[ben_w]

The main thing that reduces the value of hosting is that it's become cheaper over the years. Back when the App Store was new, privately hosting shareware games on my own domain was a substantial cost, IIRC around 10% of my total income from those games.

But it's somewhat hyperbolic to compare a mandatory cost that you have to pay to someone regardless, to being kidnapped.

[inetknght]

> But it's somewhat hyperbolic to compare a mandatory cost that you have to pay to someone regardless, to being kidnapped.

It's not hyperbolic when you don't have a choice in who you're paying.

[ben_w]

There are many cases where I have no choice in who (or how much) I pay, that are not kidnapping.

Monopolistic practices are their own thing. Bad for very different reasons than kidnapping.

[eloisius]

Are you allowed to download a game from someone else’s servers or forego all the quality assurance that they’ve done?

[permo-w]

did you misread "should" as "shouldn't"? I know I did on first read

[9283409232]

This is a silly argument and I'm sure you know it.

[thrance]

It's silly in that it shows how ridiculous the situation is. No one asked for Apple or Google to be the wardens of what users can or can't install on their devices. Asking for a fee for this "service" is the cherry on top.

We've been able to install whatever we want on our PCs since the dawn of personal computing and it never was an issue. I don't see why we couldn't have a similar system on mobile devices too.

[9283409232]

There are some people who are indeed asking for that and I have no problem with app stores taking a cut for publishing and marketing on their stores as long as there are other paths for people to get apps on devices.

[pessimizer]

Are you an LLM? Because you seem to have advanced an argument that you just called silly.

edit: maybe pull the entire thread into the prompt, rather than just the comment you're replying to? Preprocess to add some context around previous replies so you know they're yours? Not knowing anything about your previous responses is a tell.

[9283409232]

The initial comment I replied to said "why would you pay Dell to install a game?" No one is making that argument. It is a strawman and that is in fact silly. App stores absolutely have the right to charge a cut to be on their platform and I have no problem with that as long as there are other means of getting apps on devices. I'm not sure what isn't clear here.

[ryandrake]

We should also apply the same logic to game consoles. Why should Sony get a cut of every game I buy? It's not like they even have hosting costs associated with it--I'm buying a physical game from a store. Why should I need to get Nintendo's blessing in order to make a game for Switch? Why can't I download games directly from the game developer's web site for any of these console platforms?

[mrguyorama]

In the 90s we DID apply the same logic to game consoles. Sony, Nintendo, and Sega all lost or settled court cases that established a precedent of interoperability.

Sega's trademark rights were literally ignored as a "Fair Use" for a 3rd party to be able to release games for Sega's console, because the alternative was that it would be impossible to legally release a third party game cartridge, which the court did not like as an outcome.

But then we got the DMCA and laws and rules that make it not legal to circumvent DRM in an attempt to do the normal Fair Use things. That's the primary legal limit to running whatever you want on consoles. Companies were given the legal right to make a technical protection of their IP, and if you tried to get around those technical measures to do things that you had a legitimate and legal case to do, you would still fall afoul of the law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention

Basically the DMCA completely obliterated the previous "You can't prevent a third party from touching your stuff after you sell it" that was status quo before. There's all sorts of vagaries in US copyright law about Fair Uses and "legal backups" but the DMCA destroys all of that. All you have to do is encrypt or even just xor your program/movie/whatever with a simple key and suddenly it's completely illegal to use any tool other than one provided or licensed by that company to interact with that data. It's insane.

The courts had given americans fairly strong property rights with digital property, much more closely aligning with rights for physical items and the doctrine of first sale, but the DMCA destroyed all that, because that's what IP companies wanted.

[thrance]

Are you arguing that mobile devices are closer to game consoles than personal computers? Because I really don't think they are.

Also, why even defend the right of megacorps to lock users in their walled garden? What could society or even you possibly win through this?

I am certainly not opposed to gaming companies opening their SDKs and consoles to hobbyists.

[ryandrake]

I think I didn't communicate well: I am all for forcing game consoles to also open up. If one can argue against walled gardens for mobile devices (and I would), the same argument works for game consoles, too. They're both, at their cores, general purpose computers that just have DRM and restrictive licensing slathered all over them.