It isn't overcharging on Mobile either IMO but the difference is pretty obvious: there is only one way to get your app onto an iPhone or an Android and that's through those stores.
PCs are an open platform. It is very different.
>its a for-profit company that has tons of profit. I am not saying 15% is OK or X% is OK, but 30% is too much in 2025.
And you base this on what? Nothing. It is a privately held company and you don't have access to its books.
It's pretty close to one. Having all your games in a single digital library along with cloud saves and achievements for those games in a single place is a real benefit that would lead to a monopoly.
>Amazon sold products at a loss for years in order to capture market share
Selling at a loss on a cost of goods sold basis, or the entire business as a whole? I'm aware of the latter but not the former. The latter also isn't obvious "abuse", because it would include all sorts of market entrants, including eg. intel trying to enter the GPU space and making a loss because of R&D.
"Monopoly" is a distraction. The issue is abuse of market power. Having market power is fine. You can't punish people for being successful.
Steam doesn't abuse being successful to lock out competitors. You can sell products sold through Steam via other platforms too. You can sell outside of Steam and give your customers Steam keys for the game. You can install Steam on different platforms alongside other stores and programs.
Nothing Steam does makes it harder for consumers to buy games from Valve's competitors. That's what matters, not whether Steam is very successful.
To be clear, I don't think Valve has abused their position at all. I was merely musing on how they could. Which would operate on a similar concept as Apple did: "my users will stay in my ecosystem almost regardless of what I do."
Indie game development largely owes its existence to Steam. I know I would spend a lot less on indie games if I had to buy them from their own websites or, god forbid, through an awful laggy "app store" run by Ubisoft or Microsoft.
If competitors offer passable services for selling indie game developers, then indie game developers would be able to earn more money (due to competition).
This is why developers are hopeful for alternative services.
And why exactly should free software prioritise someone's first five minutes (or first 100 hours, even) over the rest of the thousands of hours they might spend with it?
I see people using DAWs, even "pro" ones made by companies presumably interested in their bottom lines. In all cases I have no idea how to use it.
Do I complain about intuitiveness etc? Of course not. I don't know how to do something. That's my problem. Not theirs.
> And why exactly should free software prioritise someone's first five minutes (or first 100 hours, even) over the rest of the thousands of hours they might spend with it?
Well, if people fail at that first five minutes, the subsequent thousand hours most often never happens.
Clearly this is not true. Photoshop is difficult to use. I have opened it and tried to use it many times. Its UI is super complicated. There are endless buttons and I have no idea how to do anything.
There are heaps of Photoshop tutorials on YouTube, which wouldn't be necessary if what you said were true.
I used GIMP to do MS paint stuff years ago when I used it fairly regularly.
GIMP is always a whipping boy for UI design on forums like this and I think it is pretty unfair. It is a pretty good program comparatively. If you want to see bad UI design a much better example is something like Visual Studio. What a mess.
> Photoshop is good UI design. A normie can use photoshop the same way they use MS paint.
This is just straight up not true. You're only saying this because you, presumably, have used Photoshop.
It has a million buttons, layers are a thing, there's a million tools, etc. No, they can't just pick it up because it's complex software for a complex problem domain.
Maybe you disagree. Okay. Pick a different example. 3D Max? Why aren't studios using Microsoft Paint 3D instead of 3D max?
"It has a million buttons, layers are a thing, there's a million tools, etc. No, they can't just pick it up because it's complex software for a complex problem domain."
See this is the thing that software devs don't "get" about UI design.
It's the exact thing the original author is trying to communicate.
You CAN have a powerful tool. And still have it be user friendly for normies!
You hide away it's complexities. So it's not INDTIMIDATING for new users.
You know what. I'm going to reinstall gimp. Just to prove my point.
Let's compare photoshop with gimp.
Before I begin, let me preface. Modern photoshop is an enshitified piece of garbage. I would never use it.
But this is nothing to do with enshitification. That's a whole different thing.
Ok let's start:
- I grab a random image from imgur. Copy paste. Ctrl-V. Both apps passed the test. I was a little worried gimp couldn't even do this.
- GIMP is ugly as fuck. It looks outdated. There's information overload on the left side. Too much shit happening. Too much text squashed together. INTIMIDATING.
- In contrast, photoshop has a more minimalist look. There is a "Layers" window on the right. New users don't need to touch it.
- There is a "Size & Position" window. This is key. Notice how there's only 3 things inside that window. Notice how it's not squashed with all the other shit on the left. Think about that. Why did the designer do this? Because those 3 things are what 90% of normies are looking to do.
- This is exactly what the original author was talking about, with the TV remote. The most common operations should be sectioned off at the top of the remote. Similarly, the most common operations in photo editing should be sectioned off, in clear view.
Ok, Step 2. Let's try and crop this image. A common operation:
- Photoshop. Click the crop button. Shows you a bit more complexity in it's settings. You don't have to touch it. It gives you a helpful grid UI: https://imgur.com/a/tLjL6en
- And then it has a blue "Done" button at the bottom. Finished easy.
- GIMP. We start with a brush by default??? Whoops I accidentally drew on the picture. I didn't want to do that. Thank god I know ctrl-Z.
- So it's that cross thing right? That's the move button. Nope that's not what I want to do :(
- It must be the one next to it. The rectangle. Ok, some random corner thingies appear in the corners. I click on one of the corners. The image gets split into two. But now what? WTF do I do now: https://imgur.com/a/f7TTHJs
I can go on and on and on and on, criticizing gimp's terrible UI design. I hope, the little I have demonstrated, is a tease into what UI design is really about.
Why should they work for pay on free software? Nobody expects to be paid to work on the software itself. Yet artists expect to be treated differently.
If it is your job, then go do it as a job. But we all have jobs. Free software is what we do in our free time. Artists don't seem to have this distinction. They expect to be paid to do a hobby.
Doing a pro graphic design treatment is lot more than just "drawing a few pictures," and picking a color palette.
It usually involves developing a design language for the app, or sometimes, for the whole organization (if, like the one I do a lot of work for, it's really all about one app). That's a big deal.
Logo design is also a much more difficult task than people think. A good logo can be insanely valuable. The one we use for the app I've done a lot of work on, was a quick "one-off," by a guy who ended up running design for a major software house. It was a princely gift.
You'd be surprised, then, to know that a lot of programmers think graphic design is easy (see the other comment, in this thread), and can often be quite dismissive of the vocation.
As a programmer, working with a good graphic designer can be very frustrating, as they can demand that I make changes that seem ridiculous, to me, but, after the product ships, makes all the difference. I've never actually gotten used to it.
That's also why it's so difficult to get a "full monty" treatment, from a designer, donating their time.
"can be" makes it a very different statement. Either one "can be" a lot harder than the other, depending on the task. The statement above is about typical difficulty.
And even if they're wrong about which one is typically harder, they weren't saying it was easy, and weren't saying it was significantly easier than programming.
Exactly. It's amazing how we, as programmers, can demand that others recognize that, for us, but we, ourselves, refuse to give the same respect, in regards to other fields.
The same can be said for any vocation that generates a product. An expertly-crafted duck decoy can have the same level of experience and skill, as a database abstraction.
I have had the privilege to work with some of the top creatives, as well as scientists and engineers, in the world, and have seen the difference.
> It usually involves developing a design language for the app, or sometimes, for the whole organization (if, like the one I do a lot of work for, it's really all about one app). That's a big deal.
> Logo design is also a much more difficult task than people think. A good logo can be insanely valuable. The one we use for the app I've done a lot of work on, was a quick "one-off," by a guy who ended up running design for a major software house. It was a princely gift.
A lot of developers also tend to invest quite an insane amount of work into their preferred open-source project and they do know how complicated their work is, and also how insane the value is that they provide for free.
It's just more common for artists to do small commission work on the side of a real job. 30 dollars for something is basically a donation or tip in my view, and the community can crowd fund for it the same way bug bounties work I think?
I suspect some of this is due to the fact that the programmers consenting to do free work already have well-paying jobs, so they have the freedom and time to pursue coding as a hobby for fun as well. Graphic designers and UX designers are already having a hard time getting hired for their specific skills and getting paid well for it, so I imagine it's insulting to be asked to do it for free on top of that.
That said, I don't think it's as simple as that. Coding is a kind of puzzle-solving that's very self-reinforcing and addictive for a certain type of person. Coders can't help plugging away at a problem even if they're not at the computer. Drawing, on the other hand, requires a lot more drudgery to get good, for most people anyway, and likely isn't as addictive.
I believe it's more nuanced than that. Artists, like programmers, aren't uniformly trained or skilled. An enterprise CRUD developer asks different questions and proposes different answers compared to an embedded systems dev or a compiler engineer.
Visual art is millennia older and has found many more niches, so, besides there being a very clear history and sensibility for what is actually fundamental vs industry smoke and mirrors, for every artist you encounter, the likelihood that their goals and interests happen to coincide with "improve the experience of this software" is proportionately lower than in development roles. Calling it drudgery isn't accurate because artists do get the bug for solving repetitive drawing problems and sinking hours into rendering out little details, but the basic motive for it is also likely to be "draw my OCs kissing", with no context of collaboration with anyone else or building a particular career path. The intersection between personal motives and commerce filters a lot of people out of the art pool, and the particular motives of software filters them a second time. The artists with leftover free time may use it for personal indulgences.
Conversely, it's implicit that if you're employed as a developer, that there is someone else that you are talking to who depends on your code and its precise operation, and the job itself is collaborative, with many hands potentially touching the same code and every aspect of it discussed to death. You want to solve a certain issue that hasn't yet been tackled, so you write the first attempt. Then someone else comes along and tries to improve on it. And because of that, the shape of the work and how you approach it remains similar across many kinds of roles, even as the technical details shift. As a result, you end up with a healthy amount of free-time software that is made to a professional standard simply because someone wanted a thing solved so they picked up a hammer.
Open source/Free software communities are comprised of programmers. People love to help their communities. Sometimes a community contains some artists, but this condition is rare. e.g., Inkscape have some good picture when user open it.
I dispute that claim but it doesn't answer the question. When you have multiple people involved in the community of an open source project, what makes them decide where to contribute, and what makes them decide if they'll use marketable skills for free or not? I think it's an interesting thing to look into.
This seems like a self selection problem. It’s not about forcing people to work for free. It’s about finding designers willing to work for free (just like everyone else on the project).
We have a lot of pages, books, novels, notes, story from the last 10 years or so that would make it physically impossible to bring with me. Bringing just my iPad and a notepad is way better for me.
PCs are an open platform. It is very different.
>its a for-profit company that has tons of profit. I am not saying 15% is OK or X% is OK, but 30% is too much in 2025.
And you base this on what? Nothing. It is a privately held company and you don't have access to its books.
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