If you haven't watched Tim Sweeney's appearance on Lex Fridman (which went live two days ago ironically), he discusses this battle against Apple, which he's maintained at a furious pace for years. He goes into detail on how the previous guidelines stifle innovation, how app developers are basically forced to implement anti-consumer practices to maintain the ridiculous costs of achieving success on the app store, etc.
His Crusade for open platforms/services in general is very very respectable.
Fortnite, in my opinion, has been a gold standard for F2P monetization. No gambling, no randomized loot boxes, etc. Compare that with Counter Strike 2, and I can't imagine how much money Epic has left on the table by choosing this path. So I give Tim a lot of credit for maintaining such a principled stance.
> So I give Tim a lot of credit for maintaining such a principled stance.
IMO, someone that drives and capitalizes on addictive spending by an underage audience should never be considered principled. While it may not be considered gambling, it’s not much better when it’s often out of control due to feeding on FOMO.
Ah yes, toy makers, the true problem of our world. 30 years ago I'm sure you'd be complaining about "addicted" spending on keeping up with the most popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys. It's not evil to make things kids want and make money off it. If you don't want your kids to buy things, that's on you and its a problem from time immemorial, not a new issue with video games.
These people are implementing Skinner boxes[1] for children.
There are literally "engagement" engineers actively doing A/B tests on children to see what makes them more addicted or gets them to spend more money or time on their platform.
There are humans literally doing experiments on children to figure out what stimulus results in more addicted behavior.
Who cares? My kids asked me for skins for years. As the one who owned a credit card and would be the one needed to pay for it I laughed them out of the room.
Maybe parents should learn to parent and tell their kids no.
My kid now older and with a job now tells me how he remembers when he used to ask for skins and I would say no damn way. He also says now that he makes his own money and buys things himself there is no way he would spend his own money on clothing for a video game while his own shoes are falling apart. It’s a waste of money and he said it not me.
So parents need to parent. Typically kids until older have no readily access to money so if a parent acts like one they can tell the kid to forget it.
Me and many of my friends were children when Fortnite came out. We still play, and we now have full time jobs. When fun new skins or dances come out, it’s not uncommon for us to get them.
They’re fun and entertaining. I hardly feel addicted or preyed on moreso than when I buy any other entertainment product.
It's fashion, to an extent. Do you only have a single outfit? Would you even if it was always the right weather for them, and was always clean? Kids often spend a lot of time in these environments, which makes them want variety of expression there.
It's not an issue from time immemorial. it's an issue from the late 19th century, if not post WWII. the child consumer class did not before that. Toys hardly existed before that. Even an adult consume class with disposable income had hardly existed. Kids spending hours every day zonked out at screens is a distinctly new phenomenon on top of that
Not sure I follow. The letter is about clothes (not toys)... He talks about people (himself, others) having low single digits outfits (one set, two sets), not sure how this makes him a post industrial capitalism consumer. In 1800 BC, life expectancy was probably 25 and people worked from ages like 6 onwards. This guy was definitely not a commoner, and he only had one set of clothes, and wanted two good sets. I'm not saying that's good and that out kids are spoiled and should be happy with two sets of clothes, I just have no idea what you're trying to say.
I think the persistence of advertising is an issue overall. I think we are worse off today now that you get bombarded with targeted ads and there's usually a seamless buy now button displayed within them.
Preying on whales is exploiting psychological issues. New technology certainly does exist today to aid in this exploitation that didn't exist 30 yrs ago.
Well said. Streaming services are finally getting the kinds of commercial content we did in the 80s and 90s. It's refreshing as I feel those years were the golden era of toys. Many toys of the era didn't even have commercials but we still wanted them. X-Men toys for example. If I was a kid, I'd of loved to have seen weekly commercials of the newest line up of X-Men toys.
With the caveat that shows still have a massive amount product placement within them and ad-free streaming services cost more than double the price of ad-supported, meaning that the poor are far more likely to be viewing ads anyway.
I love me some Gabby’s Dollhouse but the show is literally about a toy dollhouse that you can go buy.
I feel like you're being disingenuous with your choice of franchise. 30 years ago there were much worse toys. There were capsule machines that randomized what toy your quarter would give you. There were toys that you could buy random assortments at the toy store (M.U.S.C.L.E was one if I remember correctly). You could buy trading cards too. It's not that kids are marketed to (which is arguably its own problem), it's that the randomization is really not good for creatures that utilize associative memories (not sure if other intelligence avenues will be as susceptible to near misses, but likely it's a feature of intelligence in general to be stupid about randomness). And this has only been ratcheted up in the last 30 years.
What you may be missing, if you don't have kids, is just how insidious modern arcades are. They really opened my eyes in a lot of ways to the problem in general, since I just avoid a lot of the other modern invasive gambling mechanics. Most of the games are now just thinly veiled gambling machines. There are a few classics, like pacman still, and they eat quarters, but they are not programmed to randomly modify the game itself. Claw machines these days all have their claw strength randomized and is unknowable value that changes from play to play. And almost all the games I see at kids venues have some similar mechanic.
But it's not just the arcade. The rise of skinner boxes have become ever more weaponized (for lack of a better term?) in the last 30 years, as data collection has become cheaper and easier. I can't even imagine gacha mechanics in any of the games I played 30 years ago. Like, here, send Nintendo a dollar, and you can get a code for a better sword in Dragon Warrior? I would have mailed that dollar faster than you can imagine (I then would have shared the code, so of course this wouldn't work, but still, I would have sent the dollar). And for what? so they can make the games even harder?
This is a real problem beyond just teaching kids to ignore marketing. I don't have a solution other than trying to shield them until they're old enough that they're less likely to develop real addictions.
In Fortnite, skins are available to buy only sometimes. At a given time, you can buy like, 6-7 of them. If you want something that is not up, well, tough luck, it may never come back.
Isn't this true with collectable toys? My adult friends sure seem to be addicted to purchasing Pokemon cards. They talk about thousands of dollars spent when I am curious about numbers.
I've said this before and I'll say it a hundred times more - choice isn't binary. There isn't no choice and then free choice. There's infinite levels of choice. Some things are very choosy. Like me cutting off my arm right now - very choosy, I get a lot of control in that. Some things are not very choosy. Like a heroine addict deciding to shoot up or not today.
I won't make any claims on the addictiveness of fortnite in particular. However, we should all be aware it is certainly engineered in some ways to capture as much attention and time as possible, and this is intentional. Not unlike in nature to the engineering behind cigarettes, although again no claims on efficacy.
The point being, we really need to be doing analysis further than "well they chose to do it". It's not that simple, and it's really never been that simple. Companies are dedicating billions of dollars on solving this problem. We should, in response, at least try to analyze it deeper than that.
I agree. While I do think the skin issue is a parenting thing and a good time to teach a lesson about advertising and fomo*, there's more too it.
We protect people(arguably not enough) from gambling and alcohol which are basically banking on a portion of the population becoming addicted.(tho I also do not make any claims on the addictiveness of fortnite or say, gacha games)
At what point is the level of manipulation from these companies messing with psychology too much? It's an open secret they are researching how to farm attention. Don't people that are susceptible to this stuff deserve some warnings like booze and slots? I'm all for personal responsibility but we've created lines with other things where people lose control. Idk why this should be treated different.
No idea if anything needs regulated or what exactly needs to change, but as you said, at least more analysis.
To be clear, the definition of "exploit" I'm using in this case is like: "use (a situation or person) in an unfair or selfish way." The point is game companies are exploiting people who can't control themselves.
I don't know what autozone has to do with this particular discussion, but I'm not familiar with their business practices, so I'm not going to venture a guess.
I heard they make whole cartoons to feature a specific toy character and put them in kids happy meals and have limited collectors editions. Will the manipulative horrors of marketing to children ever cease or will we all be coerced into a life time sentence at Disney land by a clever cereal tie in.
That’s the same for the Tomica Blackhawk X3 Transformable Robot. Unless you find it somewhere on ebay second hand, after it leaves store shelves you will never see it again.
They give a lot of characters/vbucks away for free. I have a whole list of skins (including the 3 you mentioned) and have never spent any actual money on fortnite.
I can't deny they've made a crazy amount of money from convincing teenage boys that it's cool to buy outfits and play virtual dress-up. But compared to the must-have items of my youth at least you aren't excluded if you have no money.
Yes it is evil, considering how the advertisements are made in ways that makes it difficult for parents to escape them.
The only way to escape kids TV shows that have advertisements between shows and advertisements within the shows themselves as product placements is to only watch public television (which is generally funded way less and has way fewer programs than commercial television).
Hell, shows like Transfomers have the toys as the stars of the show.
So now all your kids have the peer pressure of all their friends consuming popular media and owning toys and now you have to be the bad guy saying no to literally everything to escape.
You go to any store and the toys and sugary cereals are right here at eye height of your kids with cartoon characters and promises of prizes, toys, and sweepstakes.
So you’re basically between a rock and a hard place, either you are the “weird kid with the weird parents” or you buy into at least some of that consumerism, trying to approach it with some level of moderation.
What about a company that controls exclusive access to this "addictive spending by an underage audience" on the computers they sell, _after purchase_, for a 24% cut of the spoils.
Apple is currently profiting quite handsomely off gambling games marketed to children. They deliberately limit the App Store to encourage games like Clash of Clans and shitty Farmville clones because letting you emulate Yoshi's Cookie wouldn't make them money.
They're both unprincipled. Sweeney just happens to be correct.
Fortnite started as a P2W coop game where legendary weapons were all inside loot boxes. It was very predatory. Then an internal team at Epic made an experimental battle royale mode and that's what became modern Fortnite. The old one is still available as Fortnite: Save the World.
Epic is largely owned by Tencent anyway, who makes a lot of their money from gambling games.
Good enough is how everything went to shit (enshitification). "It's an MVP? Good enough, ship it and bolt on features no one wants." Personally, I am very tired of "good enough." I wish we built great things.
"Enshitification" is probably the most self-sabotaging term we could think of; in terms of how it makes us look like whining teenagers. I will never use it in polite conversation; which would ironically be a tech company's greatest goal for if we had a word.
But optics aside, this also ignores the problem that many of these businesses were not sustainable and were never sustainable. They are heading downhill, partially because they never had any ground to stand on. If we want to see less of this behavior, we should stop allowing the blitzscale strategy of running a loss to gain marketshare.
This is also why the claim of "greed" or "enshitification" falls on deaf ears for them. They could easily say: "No, we lit billions on fire as an investment to keep it free and grow market share; we're now asking for some returns on that investment. We're not adding a Pro plan, we were paying for the Pro plan previously. Be thankful for how long it lasted, and how much money you saved."
You bring up some good points. I guess I was too absolute in my statement as I didn't intend to imply it was the only problem. Given that, Windows gaining ads (nevermind the number of settings panels/windows, etc), games being released broken or loot box driven, google search once being good and now being ad driven, and a myriad of other problems have caused the downfall as well. So the big players are part of the problem too.
No doubt; Windows gaining ads is the most egregious form; because it combines advertising with an upfront payment.
I think many of the worst offenders, and so much of the problem, would go away if we combined a payment with a mandatory ad-free experience, for any bundled software. Buy a TV, no ads allowed on the TV itself. Buy a computer, no ads allowed on Windows itself. Buy a Mac, no ads allowed in Apple News, should it be bundled. If it's truly free software that the customer did not directly or indirectly pay for, then ads are permitted; but the moment there's a payment, it's over. You can have Free with Ads, you can have Paid with No Ads, but never both.
That would not stop Discord from getting worse, or other services like them; but not allowing a paid + ad combo would solve most of the painful problems.
> No, we lit billions on fire as an investment to keep it free and grow market share
This is a form of price dumping and it should be illegal. Actually I'm confused as to why this isn't considered to be illegal already becuase I thought we had laws against this.
It's not just newer unsustainable companies. There are plenty of businesses that have been around for decades that are now engaging in these enshittifying practices (for dearth of a better term). Big box appliances like washers/dryers, fridges. Vehicle manufacturers (BMW and their subscription service bullshit), we're fast approaching a world where even doing an oil change will have to be done by the dealership/authorized 3rd party.
These Ivy League MBAs have been getting taught how much money companies have been leaving on the table and they are infecting every industry.
I often say you have to judge people based on their time and the environment around them and you need to encourage whatever good moves you see. In other words, I'll take a greedy bloodsucker over an evil greedy bloodsucker any day.
And those companies don't have the kind of time and money to take on one of the richest companies in the world. Sometimes you need a Goliath to take on another Goliath.
Before anyone tries to defend this, remember that consoles are not necessarily sold at a loss. Nintendo ensures their consoles are profitable on day one, even if others might be okay with year five.
In which case, yes, they are just iPhones in a big box with HDMI ports plugged into your TV. The only reason you can't do productivity tasks, is because of the restrictions, so the legally-nonexistent claim of "general purpose computing" doesn't do anything here.
Why would different business practices shield console makers in the first place, legally speaking? As in, even if all consoles were always sold at a loss, how would that help someone's legal case that they should be excluded here? Does the law state that, "if your business practices are incompatible with antitrust legislation, and you'd end up having to raise prices, shut down, or decrease your CEO's paycheck, if we enforced it on you, then we won't do it" or something along those lines?
Except there are indeed productivity tools for consoles as well, e.g. anything done with UWP on Windows Store can also be targeted to XBox UWP ERA environment.
I can appreciate this argument comes from folks who frequent this forum, who can discern scams from legitimate things.
But I'm sad for this decision for myself and for the lay man and woman out there. In recent years I've gone out of my way to sign up for subscriptions with App Store if I have the option, because of the true boon it offered in a world of dark patterns: managing a subscription in one place where I have scope of everything, with the expectation that I won't have to jump through barriers or puzzles to cancel, clear-as-day information of when a subscription renews, how much it costs, etc. This was what Apple was good at. I hate that my friends and family will now probably unwittingly get had as a result of this.
The only reason he is fighting Apple's monopoly on IAP is because he wants to ship the Epic store on mobile devices so he can make his 12% cut off exclusive titles.
Now is that better than the Apple store? Sure! But the real problem is that users can't install their own games without going through an arbiter like Epic or Apple.
Tim's a selfish businessman, whose interests just happen to align with the public interest in this instance.
He makes excuses about Linux market share when asked why Fortnite isn't on the Steam Deck, then ships a build for Windows ARM.
Fortnite Festival, their Rock Band recreation in the Fortnite ecosystem, recently started limiting when you can purchase songs in an effort to get people to impulse buy them when available. Players call it FOMO mode.
Epic is still pretty scummy and dishonest, even if in this insurance it appears to be on the good side.
He tweeted one time that Apple's Find My network is "super creepy surveillance tech and shouldn't exist" because years prior someone stole his Mac and then he was able to see the location of the home where the thief lived.
> He makes excuses about Linux market share when asked why Fortnite isn't on the Steam Deck, then ships a build for Windows ARM.
What's the implication here, that he has some personal vendetta against Linux? A sibling comment seems to imply this as well.
It seems like Hanlon's Razor would suggest there was just some engineering complication that they never dealt with. I can imagine a bunch of explanations for why Windows ARM might have happened first. Maybe there were fewer complications, maybe some competent engineer personally cared about Windows ARM, maybe they have Windows based testing infrastructure, etc.
>His Crusade for open platforms/services in general is very very respectable
You can't say that with a straight face when he's so vehemently anti-Linux. To this day, you still can't download Fortnite or the Epic Games Store on Linux. At the end of the day, all Tim actually cares about is his corporation having to pay rent to another corporation.
"App distribution costs" is laughable as an incentive. Any business that makes an app where you can and will spend dollars would gladly let you download it directly from their website in exchange for not giving up 30% of the in-app payments. App distribution costs nothing.
These apps are streaming massive amounts of data from epic's servers constantly. The incremental cost of downloading the actual app code is the tiniest of considerations. The app is a couple static files that would be served from a CDN. Now compare this minuscule cost to giving away 30% of their in app purchases. There is simply no comparison.
And it is also rarely if ever measured in petabytes. Commercially percentile based (in terms of speed) billing is the norm, but that only applies to businesses that act as downstream customers of ISPs
Apple has global IX presences and generally maintains open peering policies, which means it only costs a few bucks monthly to maintain any given PNI (e.g. 10Gbit), and they are also available on those open routing server ports. IX presence is dirt cheap.
As far as I am aware what gets downloaded from the app store is little more than the launcher, which then downloads the actual game files from epics server.
Why shouldn't Apple compete on pricing against others then? Drop the arbitrary %, charge for actual usage. If they're so good and cheap then everyone will stay with Apple distribution.
I have never bought anything in rocket league and I have played for 600 hours. I am no where near to being bored with it because it has a near infinite skill ceiling.
>He goes into detail on how [...] how app developers are basically forced to implement anti-consumer practices to maintain the ridiculous costs of achieving success on the app store, etc.
This sounds absurd. What was his argument for this?
His Crusade for open platforms/services in general is very very respectable.
Fortnite, in my opinion, has been a gold standard for F2P monetization. No gambling, no randomized loot boxes, etc. Compare that with Counter Strike 2, and I can't imagine how much money Epic has left on the table by choosing this path. So I give Tim a lot of credit for maintaining such a principled stance.