The Apple 30% fee is unfair on Microsoft and Sony doing it on Xbox and PlayStation platforms

The dispute between the well-known game developer Epic and Apple has been brought to court. The company hopes that Apple can open its ecosystem to allow developers to bypass in-app purchases.

After the dispute arose, Microsoft issued a statement stating that the Windows 10 Store will not impose restrictions on developers, such as extremely low commissions and not forcing developers to list.

However, as we all know, the Microsoft Store is not used by many users at all, and its size is completely incomparable to the App Store or Play Store.

The funny thing is that Microsoft has now also been involved in the case. The Windows 10 store is not restricted but Microsoft’s Xbox restrictions are the same as Apple’s.

Both Microsoft and Sony game consoles have corresponding game stores. Developers who want to publish games on these devices must abide by the rules of Microsoft and Sony.

Take Microsoft as an example, developers must not bypass the store to provide users with games, developers must pay a certain percentage to Microsoft, and must use the in-app purchase mechanism.

Therefore, Microsoft’s strategy on Xbox game consoles is essentially no different from Apple. If developers try to bypass the restrictions, they will be punished and blocked by Microsoft.

So although Microsoft says that its own app store will not restrict developers, it treats the Xbox store differently and is completely contrary to the app store policy.

The policies implemented by Sony and Microsoft are basically the same, and therefore the policies of the Apple App Store are basically the same. Now Microsoft and Sony have also been targeted by the District Court for the Northern District of California.

Indeed, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all operate closed platform models similar to Apple, so hardware, systems, and markets are proprietary to the platform owners.

As far as the end consumer is concerned, whether it is a laptop or a tablet or a Nintendo handheld, it has considerable overlap with Apple’s iOS platform.

After discovering that he was also implicated, the head of Microsoft’s Xbox released a message to refute the judge’s view. Of course, the refuted view seemed a little weak.

Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft Xbox, said that:

I don’t.

If I can put Game Pass on iOS … if you just look at the scale, there are a billion mobile phones on the planet. Those are general compute platforms. A game console does one thing really; it plays video games. It’s sold, for us, at a loss. Then you make money back by selling content and services on top. The model is just very, very different from something [on] the scale of Windows, or iOS, or Android.

I think there are 200 million game consoles that are sold in a generation across all of our platforms. That’s less than a year of phone sales. It’s just not even close. People say, well, the scale shouldn’t matter. It actually does. When you start looking at how we look at open platforms and access, those things do matter. From a legal perspective, they matter. We know that at Microsoft. We had our DOJ time. I think as platforms get to scale, there’s a responsibility there, absolutely.

Via: theverge