alt Hacker NewsI'm hardly a fan of Epic, but considering inflation and rising supply chain costs, a price that remains flat may be a price that would have otherwise risen.
They might also direct the money towards funding more exclusives. Epic's funding has enabled some games to be made that wouldn't have been otherwise, or that wouldn't have been as full featured without that up-front cash.
They sell gambling to children via lootboxes; I'm not saying they're the good guy corp. But removing Apple and Google's monopoly over phone apps and app stores would only be a good thing, in my opinion.
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> considering inflation and rising supply chain costs
I just can't for the life of me figure out where this money goes. People bought the same type of things 10 years ago, and the cost now isn't proportional to the cost 10 years ago.
Where is the money ending up??
Sure but it's not just Epic. I've seen other services, ranging from Netflix to Spotify increase subscription prices.
I don't disagree with your point about inflation, but we also can't really run the counterfactual, and I'm personally not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt here. As an aside we generally have some level of inflation and so while this argument may have been more convincing during a period of rapid inflation, it becomes less convincing over time.
I think the reality is these services have massive margins and so there was never any intent on the part of Epic at least, to lower prices. It was always to just capture more value for their company. I don't blame them for doing that, I just find the "we're the good guys" approach to be suspicious at best.
Apple's monopoly (because I have an iPhone) has been of incredible value to me so I prefer that the monopoly continue to exist. As we remove that monopoly I see more consumer harm done than good.