The Fee War (8)
The trial in the Legend Games-ENPLE lawsuit had begun.
From the very start, attorney Fiona Harrison pressed ENPLE hard, laying bare every contradiction in their conduct and driving the defense team back step by step.
“ENPLE has been exploiting developers with unfair fees by maintaining the monopoly structure of Enstore. It also controlled every stage from review to payment, granting benefits to apps from developers who followed ENPLE’s policies while discriminating against apps from rival companies and developers who did not.”
The defense answered point by point.
“Enstore reviews all apps under the same guidelines to protect consumers and ensure fair competition among developers. There has been no favoritism and no discrimination of any kind.”
“Enstore and PlayMarket are giant platforms that divide the mobile market between them. And astonishingly, their fees are identical at 30 percent. That is only because competition doesn’t exist under the duopoly created by these two companies.”
“A 30 percent fee is standard across not just mobile, but nearly every digital platform. The fact that Sonyu, Nintendo, and NS’s ESD also take 30 percent is not the result of collusion among the three companies, but simply the most rational rate. And ENPLE is not a monopolist—it is only a smartphone maker, like Yuseong, Xiaomi, Obos, and Vivo.”
“Guble allows other app markets. ENPLE, on the other hand, blocks the installation of any app market besides Enstore. That is blatant abuse of monopoly power.”
“The value of Enphone is sustained by NOS, and NOS is sustained by Enstore. Enstore exists to provide NOS users with the best possible experience, and that is something essential to Enphone.”
“Forcing users to use only apps approved by ENPLE violates the interests not only of developers, but of users as well.”
“Even if they don’t use apps, users can always access services through a web browser.”
Neither side gave an inch. The courtroom rang with sharp, relentless exchanges.
The image of a young female lawyer of mixed Black and white heritage taking on ENPLE’s all-white defense team left a deep impression on the spectators.
After seven hours of listening to both sides, Judge Larry Boris asked ENPLE’s lawyer a question.
“Can you disclose the contract with AMZ? The plaintiff says that if it can prove ENPLE charged AMZ the same 30 percent fee, it will drop the suit and pay damages. What do you say?”
Attorney Gibson deftly dodged the question.
“I don’t think that has anything to do with this case.”
Judge Boris nodded.
“Understood. Both sides, please submit additional concrete materials that can support your claims by the next hearing.”
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The two legal teams requested documents and witnesses, and under the court’s order, the industry records that had long piqued public curiosity were finally opened.
Reporters covering IT and gaming were suddenly swamped, rushing to write article after article.
The war grew larger outside the courtroom than inside it.
CEO Tom Scott kept up his media offensive, and ENPLE, which had initially not bothered to respond, finally seemed to decide it could no longer stay silent and began firing back.
Because the outcome of the trial would effectively affect the entire IT industry, attention also focused on the opinions of other companies.
NS, which had always shown a favorable attitude toward game companies, sided with Legend Games.
In an interview, Jim Spencer, president of NS’s gaming division, said:
“Consoles, unlike smartphones, are a closed and limited market. NS has made zero profit from selling Z Boxes so far, while ENPLE earns hundreds of billions of dollars every year from Enphone. And yet they want to compare themselves to consoles? That makes no sense. Many game companies are suffering because of Enstore’s high fees, and the same is true for studios under NS. For the sake of countless developers, I’m willing to testify in court.”
Facenote, which had clashed with us over its data-collection practices, also criticized ENPLE’s double standard in giving preferential treatment to the Chinese market.
That didn’t mean it sided with Legend Games, though. Its old grudge with Continue Capital over short selling still lingered.
And AMZ made it clear it intended to stay out of the matter altogether, stepping back a pace.
Since the lawsuit had drawn the attention of the entire world, Nightlight and Block Valley naturally received a tremendous amount of publicity.
Even people with no interest in games were paying attention.
- What are those games, anyway, that this is such a huge deal?
- Is Nightlight really that fun?
- I want to play Block Valley so bad T_T
- I’ve used ENPLE products my whole life, but I bought a CosmicTab just to play Nightlight. Gonna download it on this.
- Is CosmicStore only on Cosmic devices?
- It comes preinstalled on Cosmic phones and tablets, and if you’ve got another Andromeda phone, you can install CosmicStore with the APK file~
Thanks to that, CosmicStore exploded into a massive hit.
Users flooded in, and traffic spiked tens of thousands of times over.
In the past, the store would never have been able to withstand that load and would have gone down.
But Yuseong Electronics was already pushing ahead with its data-center business alongside Snow Crash, so it had secured ample server resources in advance.
As a result, even with users connecting from all over the world, the store kept running smoothly.
Legend Games went a step further and placed the Legend Games Store inside CosmicStore. Naturally, every mobile game in the store was also listed on CosmicStore.
Unlike Nightlight and Block Valley, which had been shut out, most of those games were already live on Enstore and PlayMarket.
Even while watching Guble carefully, the game companies agreed to list their titles on CosmicStore.
The reason was brutally simple: the fees were incredibly low.
The commission was 12 percent, the same as the Legend Games Store. For games built with Surreal Engine, the engine usage fee was waived.
That 12 percent was split between Legend Store and CosmicStore.
And of course, external payments were allowed instead of in-app purchases. If a user paid externally, there was no fee at all.
Even so, none of the game companies bothered to create external payment links.
Card processing fees alone typically ate up another 2 to 3 percent, and building country-specific systems for payments, settlement, and accounting took both money and manpower, so at 12 percent it was simply more profitable to use in-app purchases.
The game companies priced their titles 10 to 15 percent lower than the versions sold on Enstore and PlayMarket.
For Android users, that meant the same game on the same device cost different amounts depending on which app market they downloaded it from.
Once that became known, users rushed en masse to CosmicStore to download the games, and CosmicStore shattered its own record revenue day after day.
Because CosmicStore was installed by default on Cosmic phones, it had technically ranked second after PlayMarket in terms of app-market installation rate.
But actual usage had been miserable, and plenty of people hadn’t even known it existed.
Now, that had changed.
CosmicStore had surged to the front as a major app market poised to replace PlayMarket.
Seeing the sales figures, Gu Dongjin, president of Yuseong Electronics’ IM division, was overcome with emotion and nearly broke into tears.
“I never imagined Yuseong Electronics would make money from an app market instead of smartphones……”
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I thought back to my first life.
It took a full year for the first-instance ruling in the Legend Games-ENPLE case to come down.
So what happened?
First, Legend Games was found to have violated the contract. It had to pay ENPLE 30 percent of the revenue earned through external payments, and Nightlight’s request to return to Enstore was denied.
At first glance, that made it look like ENPLE had won. But on the issue of in-app payments, Legend Games had actually come out ahead.
The judge ruled that Enstore was not a monopoly, but that its operating method of controlling in-app payments was anti-competitive. The ruling explicitly stated that developers must be allowed to redirect users to their own payment pages through external links.
It also pointed out, regardless of the verdict, that a 30 percent fee was far too high.
After that, courts in the UK, Germany, France, Korea, and elsewhere began issuing rulings that forced in-app purchase requirements to be illegal, and in the end ENPLE and Guble had no choice but to change their policies.
But that was still years away.
Thanks to Legend Games’ lawsuit, countless game companies benefited, but Legend Games itself had to absorb enormous losses in revenue.
Well, maybe CEO Tom Scott would have been satisfied with that…… but I wasn’t.
The lawsuit would continue as a lawsuit, and in the meantime, money still had to be made.
Andromeda phones could be serviced through CosmicStore, but Enphones could not be touched unless the apps went through Enstore.
Still, that didn’t mean there was no way.
I called Syd.
“Is everything going smoothly?”
“Yes, hyung. I’ve tested it several times, and we’re fine up to ten million concurrent users. If it grows beyond that, we can just scale the servers accordingly.”
“You’re busy, so I appreciate the work.”
“It’s nothing. And honestly, I’ve never liked what ENPLE and Guble do.”
“Why not?”
Syd answered with quiet contempt.
“It’s obvious they’re just trying to squeeze fees out of developers. They put up a slogan about not being evil, and then act more maliciously than anyone else.”
“That’s true.”
The people who insist they hate money are usually the ones most obsessed with it.
Cloud gaming.
It referred to a method of playing games remotely by using cloud-computing technology. The game runs in the data center, while the device’s role is limited to receiving the video and audio or sending user inputs.
Whether it was a smartphone, PC, or console, as long as there was an internet connection, anyone could access it, and high-end games could be enjoyed regardless of the device’s specifications.
The company most advanced in this field at the moment was NS.
It had built out its system so well that even triple-A games could run through cloud gaming.
But the system Syd had built was no worse; if anything, it was better.
Charles and Ken, who had tested it themselves, were stunned.
They had already been told that cloud gaming was in the works, but the performance exceeded expectations.
“At this level, it’s far better than NS.”
“The input lag is almost nonexistent. If you didn’t tell me, I wouldn’t know it was a cloud game.”
The difference between video streaming and game streaming was that the player’s input was involved.
Since packets had to be exchanged back and forth, input lag was unavoidable.
Fortunately, Snow Crash had succeeded in lowering it to a point where it was no longer bothersome during play.
Another drawback was the enormous amount of data it consumed, but…… well, these days everyone has unlimited plans anyway, right? Or they can just use it in a Wi-Fi zone.
Legend Games had been preparing cloud gaming services not only for Nightlight and Block Valley, but for every game built with Surreal Engine.
All that was left now was to launch it.
“CEO Lucas said it himself. Cloud can go beyond any platform.”
The answer lay in the cloud.
CEO Tom Scott’s eyes gleamed.
“Then this is enough to land a real blow on ENPLE and Guble.”
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In an interview with WST, CEO Tom Scott said:
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