But even though is all about money, a legislation change is still necessary. As long as the result of this benefits the society, who's pushing it shouldn't matter that much.
At the end of the day, antitrust process are frequently started by people with a lot of money and power to catch people with more money and power. That's the game.
What exactly is your point here? If <entity> was in Apple's position, they would protect their interests exactly as Apple is. Thats why we need to regulate companies who are in Apple's position! The fact that its greed vs. greed is immaterial.
I don't see that as much of a win.
And Epic is also competing with Steam by having lower cut (5 % versus 30 % IIRC) leaving more money for the developers. It's good for the developers and consumers both.
It works in a different context ( platform exclusives ) because the lock in / costs to developing for a different platform are far different from that for different stores on a single platform.
But I would refrain from investing much more into the platform since what Im seeing right now isnt going to sustain the platform in the long term.
Its one thing if the store has distinct feature like gog, but theyre not. In the end I(and many others surely) use it just to get free games.
Who cares what their motivations are if they've mandated that the benefits should be distributed?
It's 12%. They also allow selling games made with their competitor technologies (e.g. Unity), and the cut is still the same.
It all comes down to money.
If Epic was running their own platform, and 3rd parties didn’t want to abide by their rules, then Epic would give those 3rd parties the finger and tell them to F-off the same as Apple.
Each is trying to grab as much profit as they can while running into the issue of other hands grabbing from the same basket.
The classic case of one’s greed versus another’s desire to be greedy.