Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

by Azeem Azhar

But are Apple’s efforts worth 30 per cent of a developer’s efforts? Many developers don’t think so. Epic Games, which makes Fortnite – a video game beloved of teenagers and loathed by their parents – was one.39 After challenging Apple’s fees and attempting to bypass the 30 per cent cut, they were kicked off the platform. (Apple did eventually back down, sort of – a few weeks after the fracas, they halved fees for some developers, albeit only for those with much lower revenues than Epic.) The problem is that we can’t really know what a fair price is in the absence of a competitive market. Given that Apple has an 80 per cent market share among the young people Epic targets, you can’t just turn to the market to work out the ‘true’ value. In some segments of the economy, Apple is the market.