Google is ‘crooked’ and a bully, CEO of Fortnite-maker Epic Games testifies in Play Store trial::Epic alleges that Google has been engaged in illegal price-gouging by collecting commissions ranging from 15% to 30% on in-app digital transactions.
I mean, he’s not incorrect, but there’s that saying about rocks and glass houses.
That’s right.
“Don’t decorate your glass house with polished rocks” or something.
Oh no! One terrible corporation is saying the other terrible corporation is terrible!
Let me play a very sad tune on this really tiny violin I found.
You might think Epic is a terrible corporation. But their ability to affect meaningful change on your daily life is effectively non-existent. Unless you are making a living being a Steam evangelist or something.
But Google has a massive amount of control over the internet. Between search, Android, Maps, ads, Gmail, etc. The level of “terribleness” they can approach vastly overshadows even the most evil stances Epic could take.
So, this “both sides are bad” take is a bit ridiculous.
The magnitude may be different, but that just makes this a “kettle meet pot” situation instead of the reverse. It’s still hypocrisy.
Pot calls kettle black.
Pot calls fellow pot black. 😝
the thing about that is, the kettle is black.
I’m against epic. Fuck them, hope they lose the lawsuit.
You know a company sucks when the public decides to side with fucking Google instead of them.
Actually Google wasn’t that bad in the past. They did a lot of good, open sourced a lot of projects, made a lot of Linux contributions, gave us AOSP, Kubernetes, Golang, Tensor Flow, etc.
They even had a moonshot program, working on a lot of emerging technologies, and were in general pretty cool. I think things started to go downhill when they announced Alphabet, back then they started to optimize their operations by minimising the costs and maximizing their profits. In general this made their shareholders pretty happy and the rest pretty sour.
So… When the name Google started only referring to the actual web services instead of everything the parent company was doing. Those types of things are still there, they’re just part of Alphabet (literally the old Google), which the media doesn’t really talk about anymore because the average person has no idea what that means, but they know Google.
Why? What did they do?
Yeah, I’m confused about the price gouging too. Not sure what they did exactly. I remember fondly that Apple had an issue with then and how they advertised app purchases, but not with Google Play Store.
They dared shake the cage to take some market shares from Gaben and some people are angry.
Based on some other responses, I doubt it’s as simple as you put it.
These days it pretty much is, they are angry about the state the program released in, never checked it again and argue based on the features it lacked at the beginning and that have been part of it for years now.
You know what’s funny? I’m old enough to remember the same kind of people arguing they would forever boycott Steam because it forced them to install a program and download games instead of just installing them from a CD and it meant the death of physical releases.
I mean, I agree with your point as well… Change isn’t appreciated.
But at the same time, the Rocket League and Bandcamp stories kind of rubbed me the wrong way.
As I mentioned elsewhere the Rocket League thing is logical from a business perspective. The original devs might not have minded losing money on the Linux version (time spent on maintenance vs number of players paying for it) but once a big business buys it they have numbers to meet and it makes no sense to use resources for less than 1% of users, especially when you can estimate that the bigger players will simply switch to another platform and you’ll lose the casual players that don’t bring in much profit.
As for Bandcamp I would have to look into it but I seem to remember that they had financial troubles before, I might be mistaken though! If they did maybe once they got bought Epic realised that salvaging that ship wasn’t worth it or they wanted to acquire some of their tech and weren’t interested in the product itself, hard to tell and hard to tell if it would be in better shape even if they hadn’t bought it…
Worth noting that harvesting organs from non-consenting people would also be logical from a business perspective, provided it were legal. Free high value produce!
Not to put words in the mouth of the previous commenter, but logic is an extremely different argument compared to their argument of ethics- I don’t think they were confused about why it happened but rather concerned that it happened despite the ethical issues around (potentially, Im not familiar with the Rocket League situation) removing a game from a platform that many people bought it solely for :)
Regardless, I think it makes sense for people to be upset as, to your point, the most logical business decisions often run counter to the ethical or emotional considerations of the customers.
Projection is a thing Epic. Be less Republican.
Takes one to know one? Or something silly.
Their crooked bullies.
Our strategic entrepreneurs.
I wholeheartedly believe google is breaking the law to maximize profits, but I also feel like this headline is designed to make it seem as though the people suing are just butthurt and that their primary complaint is that they don’t like google personally and feel that their opinion as to whether google is kind and nice should be legally actionable.
No, seriously. Fuck google. Go FOSS or take your shitty closed source fucking scam and go to fucking hell. To everyone else, Take the pennies you pay and support the writers and the REAL hosters and not the infamous title stealing hedgemon scamper spies.
Discard closed source anything or you deserve the inevitable end of the world happening TO-FUCKING-DAY
Sure Timmy. Timmmmmmeeeeeyyyyyyy.
No shit Sherlock. Every company is. How they make stupid cash monies.
“Don’t be evil.”
I believe they removed this from their company policy a couple of years ago.
Yes they did. I wonder why…
It is still in their code of conduct.
Google Removes ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Clause From Its Code of Conduct - Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393
But it’s still there.
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Unlike on iOS, nobody forces them to use Google Play to distribute their app. Just don’t use it. On iOS that’s not an option, but here what’s the problem?
The problem is that they crushed the competition with a fairly good free product for years. Setting all alternatives back, then they started prioritizing revenue, slowly, over time. Now Google free to use products are part of our routine, part of our lives, and the alternatives are either paid, poorly developed or have a low user base. Do you have an alternative to YouTube that has the same amount of content? It was the same issue when we left Teddit, but at a much lower scale and that was still painful (and it still is)
And that has to do with being able to sideload how, exactly?
How did they crush f-droid? What did they do to set alternative app stores on Android back? We aren’t talking about YouTube here, your entire comment is just making shit up about Android stores because you are bad about other parts of Google.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney on Monday portrayed Google as a ruthless bully that resorts to shady tactics to protect a predatory payment system.
Sweeney’s more than two-hour stint on the witness stand in San Francisco came less than a week after Google CEO Sundar Pichai defended before the 10-member jury the way his company runs its Play Store for Android apps.
Much of Kravis’ his cross-examination appeared design to cast Sweeney as an executive primarily interested in bypassing a long-standing commission system to boost his video game company’s profits.
He attributed the disappointing response to Google machinations that made it a cumbersome process to do outside the Play Store and the use of pop-up “scare screens” warning of potential problems with the software.
Epic then filed antitrust lawsuits as part of what Sweeney framed as a crusade on behalf of all game makers as more play occurs on smartphones instead of consoles and PCs.
During his questioning of Sweeney, Google lawyer Kravis laid out the 30% commissions that Epic pays to Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo for transactions on the PlayStation, Xbox and Switch consoles without complaint while still raking in billions of dollars in profit from those platforms.
The original article contains 780 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
