I think you misread: In the beginning, we’ll only allow companies to add paid extensions. There’s still some work to be done when it comes to automation of the publishing process and the financial process. Our goal is to make the necessary enhancements by the end of next year so that we can start onboarding paid content also from individuals. We will inform you about this later.
The next paragraph has We, of course, promote the individual developers and companies to use standard “copy-lefts” ranging from GPL to MIT especially for free extensions.
TLDR: For now, individuals can _only_ publish free extensions. Companies can publish either free or commercial extensions.
> I think platform companies, like Apple and Qt, should not be able to impose such a high percentage as gatekeepers.
I don't understand your complain. So there was no service available to the public, and people at Qt decided to invest their time and resources to provide a service where there was zero. Do they deserve criticism for doing something?
I think pointing out that virtually all the (near-) monopolies we see in the IT market place are (naturally) used to extract significant rent, that this is a canonical case of market failure and demands some sort of corrective is a valid point to make when yet another market sees a player trying to establish themselves as such a monopoly.
I can totally point out that in similar situations, the result was a market failure, and that it might be good to do something about that before it happens again.
Now, to put up a straw-man against that, why not wait to see, usually these platforms fail pretty quickly anyhow?
Well, if the outcome is either failure of the platform, or success of the platform by capturing (nearly) all of the market, then why no regulate it?
I don't find 30% outrageous at all. They do what I suck at as a developer, to market my products. They handle credit card transactions, recurring payments, marketing and distribution. Meanwhile I can focus on what I like, to develop cool shit. It's a win-win in principle.
Can you recommend an objectively more fair alternative? It costs money to run things, and it’s fair for any vendor to charge what they will for a vig, participation in the marketplace should keep them “fair” in the sense that an unfair market wouldn’t have any participants...
Also, if limiting the high percentage does end up being the plan of attack, who exactly is in charge of that?
>Also, if limiting the high percentage does end up being the plan of attack, who exactly is in charge of that?
a regulatory agency. Credit Card transactions in the EU, for example, are capped at a fraction of a per cent and they still make plenty of cash. Infrastructure providers are essentially just glorified landlords and should not be allowed to extract economic rents from market participants.
This is becoming a very blatant and obvious problem on a largely privatized internet. Enforcing low margin incentivises the correct behaviour which is openness and continued innovation. If steam would be forced to build new products rather than sitting on their platform we'd probably have had Half Life 3 a bunch of years ago.
> If steam would be forced to build new products rather than sitting on their platform we'd probably have had Half Life 3 a bunch of years ago.
Steam is a terrible example for this.
First of all, Steam isn't a company, it's a product. Valve is the company. Second of all, unlike the App Store or other similar infrastructure, it's not like you're locked into Steam, so they're not really rent-seeking. Steam has had plenty of competitors over the years(Direct2Drive, Games for Windows Live, that garbage GameStop store), they all sucked, and as far as I know there's nothing stopping me from publishing on multiple stores & ignoring Steam. Third, Valve hasn't exactly been doing nothing - they've done more than any other company to the gaming experience under Linux & have pioneered VR. Odds are good they wouldn't have taken those risks had it not been subsidized with comfortable margins they got from Steam.
If you had cited, say, the App Store, or something that has actual monopoly power in terms of infrastructure (like our good friends at Comcast) it would have been a much stronger argument.
>it's not like you're locked into Steam, so they're not really rent-seeking
rent-seeking and monopolistic behaviour aren't the same things. Rent-seeking is the extraction of economic rent without providing new wealth with one prominent example being someone putting a chain across a private plot of land and charging you every time you want to cross over. Whether you've five guys doing that or one isn't particularly relevant.
So while competition ameliorates the negative effects of these private platforms slightly the more fundamental broken part is really that they should not be allowed to exist in the first place. What is economically desirable is competition between developers and service providers on a common and open infrastructure with ideally all reimbursements beyond maintaining the platform going to the content creators.
In fact, competition among platform owners in many ways makes the system worse because it incentivises walled gardens. This is starting to become obvious in the streaming world with Netflix gaining competition and as a result, platform-exclusive content becoming more important, or companies like Spotify or Stitcher enclosing the podcast ecosystem which used to be a prime example of openness.
Their point still stands by your analogy. There is no plot of land over which a chain has been put by Steam, users can still acquire videogames outside of proprietary platforms as easily on desktop PCs as they could before Steam was created. The only thing they are extracting rent from is their own brand and infrastructure.
Smartphone OS vendors make it hard to venture outside their walled gardens, not Steam. There are no exclusivity deals (afaik), no all-encompassing SDK developers are incentivized to integrate with (Google Play services), even SteamOS doesn't lock users down.
It’s a wonderful point, and the fact that even Steam can monetize an App Store under those conditions just goes to show that these delivery channels are actually incredibly valuable and worth a significant percentage cut due to the difficult real-world problems that they solve, and the access to a customer base ready to pay money for your product (versus pirate it).
I'm not sure what you mean by this? Anyone is perfectly capable of operating their business at a flat-rate pricing structure versus a commission structure. That's the beauty of our economy; that companies can make these decisions for themselves and their customers can then vote with their wallets which solution they like better.
Steam is the perfect example because it started from nothing, did not leverage any existing device-base to shoe-horn it's solution, and they exist in a marketplace littered with a long list of failed competitors who couldn't beat them in a fair fight.
And yet still people will hate on them for nothing more than being successful apparently, and offering a service that game studios throw fist-fulls of money at.
> Rent-seeking is the extraction of economic rent without providing new wealth
I assume what you mean is "providing new value"? Regardless, Steam doesn't fit this description at all:
- Valve doesn't own the vast majority of games on Steam (i.e. they aren't just buying IP and "rent-seeking" using it)
- Steam adds value that consumers want, which is why it is so popular (friends, achievements, marketplace, workshop, etc)
- Even ignoring the previous point, the basic premise of a game store isn't rent-seeking, because download bandwidth and easy installation are added value by themselves
- Steam isn't a walled garden: they do not prevent you from selling on other stores or pay for exclusives or other similar behavior - Steam wins by out-competing the competition, it doesn't create artificial advantages for itself
The choice is in you wanting to reach iPhone users in the first place. If you don’t want to support Apple and their App Store, don’t make apps for iPhone. Maybe spend your time developing for a platform you feel more ideologically-aligned with. If you can’t make a living doing that, accept the hobby status of that endeavor and live your life. There are plenty of projects I’d love to get paid to work on but can’t yet, because I don’t care to sell to the speculative software development market.
> I think platform companies, like Apple and Qt, should not be able to impose such a high percentage as gatekeepers.
I don't think Qt really can... Feels like they're charging way too much, there's not much content and Qt itself is not exactly "hot stuff" right now. (Compared to, say, Apple as the % is same)
They tried that a couple of years ago, only to find out most weren't willing to pay jumping into Xamarin, while their license was even cheaper vs the Xamarin one.
They now care about enterprise and specialized embedded markets.
They seem to be continuing to support Android and iOS. Their platform works great and they've continued to add features over the last year and in years prior.
I think platform companies, like Apple and Qt, should not be able to impose such a high percentage as gatekeepers.