The conflict between Apple and Epic Games has made many people think about whether the amount of commission in stores is fair? Superdata co-founder Joost van Dreunen has prepared a material about the situation on the marketplace market, where he told where such large deductions came from.

The main thing from the publication:

  • When the Internet was just beginning to enter everyday life and began to penetrate the business environment, the gaming industry reacted to it with prejudice. Big publishers were not interested in mobile and did not want to distribute games online for free;
  • However, creative novice developers, who had much less money in their pockets, took advantage of the chance. They made free-play games en masse and agreed to any terms of distribution;
  • These newcomers have earned well from the lack of strong competitors in mobile, but have become dependent on marketplaces;

  • The problem is that over time, influential marketplaces have stopped being interested in innovation and creativity. All that has become important to them is to strengthen their position as an intermediary between the seller and the buyer;
  • This behavior is natural for any store. This works as follows: first, the platform attracts many different companies with low prices and gets a wide audience, and then it becomes more selective and focuses on niche manufacturers. As a result, the demand for individual games is falling, but at the same time there is a gradual concentration of it;
  • This is reminiscent of the situation with the gaming crisis in the 1980s, when the market was oversaturated: there were so many games that the quality began to suffer. Then Nintendo appeared, which not only released the console hit Super Mario, but also outlined strict rules for content that wants to be released on its platform. The “best of the best” came out on the NES, and this created a favorable reputation for Nintendo;
  • Today, developers have again “lost” their creative freedom and are forced to make content-limited game offers for greater profit.;
  • Investors invest a lot of money in the industry, but money comes and goes. For the creative independence of developers, something more is needed: to convince consumers and regulators that deductions in marketplaces are overstated;

  • But developers are now facing the classic prisoner problem: they cannot support each other and are forced to agree with high-stakes stores;
  • The release of a new generation of consoles, the development of cloud services, the potential launch of a new Amazon marketplace and a possible reduction in deductions in one of the existing stores can globally change the situation on the market.

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