Speaking in a panel at the Washington Technology Industry Association’s TechNW conference, Valve’s Gabe Newell weighed in with his views on the status quo of the games industry.
While business is growing rapidly, the Seattle times reports, Newell stated that “business has never been better”
But – and there’s always a but – he did have gloomy things to say about Apple.
The logic is pretty simple, according to Newell: Apple runs a very tight ship, being notoriously proprietary and exclusionary with their closed platform distribution on iOS.
But they also make buckets of money.
Naturally, other companies might feel pressured into emulating this model, and that, Newell argues, is bad news for innovation in the industry, as it promotes a “console model” of distribution, which Newell believes is the “wrong philosophical approach”.
“I’m worried that the things that traditionally have been the source of a lot of innovation are going – there’s going to be an attempt to close those off so somebody will say ‘I’m tired of competing with Google, I’m tired of competing with Facebook, I’ll apply a console model and exclude the competitors I don’t like from my world.'”
Basically, Gabe Newell thinks that Apple is cutting out innovation by making it difficult for game developers to do their thing on their platform.
“Let’s say you have a book business and you are charging 5 to 7 percent gross margins. You can’t exist in an Apple world because they want 30 percent and they don’t care that you only have 7 percent to play with.”
And this is going to kill us all in the long run.
Or something.
Are closed platforms bad for business? Will being open set the games industry free? Or is Gabe just sore because Tim Cook has a swimming pool full of money? Share your thoughts on the forum.
Newell: Apple has the “wrong philosophical approach” << Comments and views
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