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- cross-posted to:
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Google is ‘crooked’ and a bully, CEO of Fortnite-maker Epic Games testifies in Play Store trial::Epic alleges that Google has been engaged in illegal price-gouging by collecting commissions ranging from 15% to 30% on in-app digital transactions.
They dared shake the cage to take some market shares from Gaben and some people are angry.
Based on some other responses, I doubt it’s as simple as you put it.
These days it pretty much is, they are angry about the state the program released in, never checked it again and argue based on the features it lacked at the beginning and that have been part of it for years now.
You know what’s funny? I’m old enough to remember the same kind of people arguing they would forever boycott Steam because it forced them to install a program and download games instead of just installing them from a CD and it meant the death of physical releases.
I mean, I agree with your point as well… Change isn’t appreciated.
But at the same time, the Rocket League and Bandcamp stories kind of rubbed me the wrong way.
As I mentioned elsewhere the Rocket League thing is logical from a business perspective. The original devs might not have minded losing money on the Linux version (time spent on maintenance vs number of players paying for it) but once a big business buys it they have numbers to meet and it makes no sense to use resources for less than 1% of users, especially when you can estimate that the bigger players will simply switch to another platform and you’ll lose the casual players that don’t bring in much profit.
As for Bandcamp I would have to look into it but I seem to remember that they had financial troubles before, I might be mistaken though! If they did maybe once they got bought Epic realised that salvaging that ship wasn’t worth it or they wanted to acquire some of their tech and weren’t interested in the product itself, hard to tell and hard to tell if it would be in better shape even if they hadn’t bought it…
Worth noting that harvesting organs from non-consenting people would also be logical from a business perspective, provided it were legal. Free high value produce!
Not to put words in the mouth of the previous commenter, but logic is an extremely different argument compared to their argument of ethics- I don’t think they were confused about why it happened but rather concerned that it happened despite the ethical issues around (potentially, Im not familiar with the Rocket League situation) removing a game from a platform that many people bought it solely for :)
Regardless, I think it makes sense for people to be upset as, to your point, the most logical business decisions often run counter to the ethical or emotional considerations of the customers.