> Wasn't that a reaction to users who refused to pay for games and just sideloaded them instead?
My impression at the time was that the supply of games in the app store was just too great, with hundreds of casual games being released every day. Thus driving down prices.
And Apple was more than happy to commoditise their complement; if 20 developers decided to clone Flappy Bird that was fine with Apple.
I'm talking about early standouts, not also rans. I think 2010's Infinity Blade pulled in two million dollars the first week, back when the user base of the devices were comparatively tiny.
People were willing to pay up front on iOS, but Android users just sideloaded, leading to Skinner box free-to-play games being the most reliable way to monetize.
Seems like an odd scapegoat. Apple themselves was promoting the iPhone with gachapon games earlier today, it's not like lootbox titles magically disappeared with good DRM. If anything, overly-strong DRM enforcement reinforces the power that lootbox-style games have over the user. It gives the developer more control over the runtime than the end-user, encouraging developers to extort the user however they can.
Sideloading makes piracy a service problem instead of a freedom one, and Apple knows their service can't compete on an unstacked deck.
Only if you expect developers and/or studios to work for no pay.
Why do you think we live in a world where you need an internet connection to play a single player game? Developers need a way to be sure you've paid up.
Valve had no problem porting thousands of games to Steam Deck without paying developers a dime. It is a proven fact that a functional DXVK/Wine runtime can support more AAA video games than whatever Apple is paying for.
You keep bringing this around to revenue, but Apple could solve this problem if they didn't benefit from the status quo. A company 10x smaller than them did it, a company with full control over their hardware stack has no excuse to drag their feet and copy Open Source's homework.
Steam is a DRM platform. Other than that I agree with everything you said.
What you’re missing is that Apple has their own proton that they’re using to help developers port their games like what Valve is doing with proton. Imo most of Apple still hates games if it didn’t bring in so much revenue. Now we have a small team trying to change that at Apple similar to how WSL for Windows came to being. I just hope that the higher ups continue to support and promote Apple’s “proton”
>they’re using to help developers port their games like what Valve is doing with proton.
Well Apple and Valve are doing exact opposite things with their tools. Let me explain.
Valve runs your windows game unmodified. There is no 'porting process' and there is no 'port'. As person working with large publisher I am still in shock and disbelief that it is legal and works well in practice but here we are. The funny part is when developer of windows version of a game is asked 'how well do you support Steam Deck?'. And developer has to do windows version changes and produce new windows version that has tweaks for Steam Deck.
Apple's Proton is just a fork of DXVK with less upstream support and a more restrictive redistribution license. The best "support" money can buy is killing Game Porting Toolkit and supporting Vulkan in-OS. They're already an underdog in the graphics API world, playing hardball with people who don't care will just end up in a lot of unported games.
Because data collection and upselling, and because advertising. Blaming the tiny minority of people who pirate for the enshittification plaguing basically all software right now is a poor excuse. Show me the numbers.
My impression at the time was that the supply of games in the app store was just too great, with hundreds of casual games being released every day. Thus driving down prices.
And Apple was more than happy to commoditise their complement; if 20 developers decided to clone Flappy Bird that was fine with Apple.