This isn't a gotcha; consoles should be required to support homebrew games as well.

Interesting question - since they charge a flat fee and revenue sharing model based on sales it is not like Google who had a secret deal with Spotify and Netflix.

Honest questions: I thought Playstation and Xbox had "secret" deals? They have their own studios, they buy exclusives, timed exclusives, special promotions, games optimized for platform A but not for B etc?

Also Nintendo is a player - funny how Epic did not take Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo to court over their closed ecosystems.

>funny how Epic did not take Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo to court over their closed ecosystems.

they can, but they don't. Part of their argument seems to be that mobile is now a general purpose computer like Windows so it should open up. The big 3 consoles don't try to pretend that you can make host much more than games and movies on their devices, and the consoles operate on much thinner margins than the mobile market.

You can say it's cynically about money and that Google/Apple are the biggest targets. You can optimistically say it's that Epic knows consoles do more to deserve their 30% and aren't just gatekeepers (there is a LOT more support for AAA devs from the big 3 consoles than anything Google/Apple offers. Including direct help in porting if you strike deals).

"secret" deals, sure. They have well known, lesser know, and not known at all to the public practives. The main caveat is that none of them are dominating the console industry, nor necessarily preventing others from competing in the console market. It's just that no one wants to try and compete because it's a vicious market.

We're seeing more handheld PC's, but the days of the Vita or 3DS as dedicated handheld consoles seem to be past us. There's a non-zero chance PC far in the future does the same to regular consoles too.

I mean...I agree, but as things stand, they aren't.

It's one thing to say "this is how the law should be, so that Apple should have to open their platform"; it's quite another to say "as the law is right now, Apple should have to open their platform."

US antitrust laws are nominally extremely broad and are basically down to the courts to interpret, so what the law is right now is whatever you can convince the judge, which largely a matter of making a convincing argument that what they're doing is bad.

If the courts get it wrong then you have to go to Congress, sure. But then you're in the same place -- convince Congress that it's bad.

Either way we're having a debate about whether it should be allowed. And the answer is no -- this business model is anti-competitive, for any business, and if existing interpretations of the anti-trust laws don't currently prohibit it, they should.

You could say that the three major console manufacturers have even stricter requirements for applications than Apple has.

And still Apple is the one being sued.

Seeing as Apple is the largest market, yes it makes sense why the larger monopoly would be breaking the law more.

The way that anti-trust law works is that if you have more market power, like Apple clearly does, then you are even more subject to the law and required to do certain things.

But also, if you disagree, then feel free to sue those other groups.

I don't think they should be allowed to lock things down either, but if given the constraight of what is instead what ought to be, then Apple should market the iPhone then as a specialized console, not as a general purpose device