(Photo credit @jamesponddotco)
I have a confession: gaming is probably the one area of tech that I pay the least attention to. I have this sense that if I start playing, I may *never* stop - so it’s easier to just avoid it entirely. That said, you would have to be living under a rather large rock to have not heard about the “epic” battle between Apple and Epic Games.
#techtopic
The global mobile gaming industry is set to hit $76.7billion this year (up 12% from last year and 10% from the year before). There are 1.36billion users who play mobile games, and mobile games account for 33% of all app downloads, 74% of consumer spend and 10% of all time spent in-app.
What do all these stats tell us? This fight between Epic Games and Apple/Google is a war of control over who receives the dollars: those who create the content vs those who own the access portal for getting to the content to consumers. And it’s a big chunk of change they are fighting over if 74% of mobile consumer spend is on gaming -- and Apple/Google get a 30% cut of all those transactions. The 30% helps A/G build the rails and maintain some semblance of order & rules to help consumers have better, safer experiences with apps. It makes sense for A/G to charge a % fee to Epic and any other app-maker who would like to appear in their app portals -- the big questions are whether 30% is too high and whether charging that much is stifling competition/business growth for app-makers.
This is a very uncomfortable place for the Apple brand and its employees -- Apple is known for its legendary 1984 ad which pitted them as the ‘David’ to IBM’s Goliath. Epic smartly poked at that recently, placing themselves as the ‘David’ to Apple’s Goliath in a parody ad.
And now Apple seems to be forced to decide between being the upstart who “thinks differently” and the trusted “keeper of privacy” -- two brand identities which are unlikely to co-exist for too much longer.
#neverforget
I was living in New York City in the fall of 2001. I was at my desk in midtown, right across from Grand Central, when the first plane hit the towers. It was an awful day. Working at a company that helped laid-off workers find new jobs, we had multiple clients who became stranded when all transport stopped and were unable to call anyone as phone lines were overloaded. That day, AOL IM became a lifeline to connect with friends & family as it was one of the few communication tools that kept working. That day was a defining moment for so many, and in a similar way to the pandemic now, it helped accelerate the evolution of tech communication tools and the bifurcation of our society. I have hope that new tools & approaches are coming to help us mend this rift. I appreciated this article on the topic of how primitive our communication tools were in 2001: Pagers, Pay Phones, and Dialup: How We Communicated on 9/11
