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Subject: Australia wants money for iPhone apps
This is outrageous:
$500-2000 for apps that are given away or sold for as litle as a dollar (minimum iTunes price is $1.19 in AUD) makes no sense at all. The classification scheme for movies and games is already a thinly veiled censorship and local-business-boosting mechanism - games that are refused classification cannot be sold, meaning no imports and no media the government dislikes. You can't get Xbox Live Indie games in Australia for this reason, and soon we might have a gutted app store as well.
I'm against this, obviously. If it goes through as-is, I'll probably stop using my iphone. Even if they cut the pricing down, it'll mean an immediate end to free apps in Australia - what developer is going to pay big money to release apps they don't profit from?
This whole pay-to-be-rated thing is shockingly old-fashioned. It's pre-internet rubbish, where a few gatekeepers (media companies and government) could conceivably control all media releases. Now that every single person alive can record a video or write a game and release it to every other person alive this sort of control-freakism is doomed to failure.
The Australian government announced plans to impose classification fees on game apps in the iTunes marketplace, [...]
The government plans to require developers to submit their games to the Australian Classification Board before they hit the iTunes store, which would cost developers between $470 and $2040 per game.
[...]
App developers have lambasted the government’s plans, saying the classification fees will discourage small teams from releasing their games in Australia altogether.
$500-2000 for apps that are given away or sold for as litle as a dollar (minimum iTunes price is $1.19 in AUD) makes no sense at all. The classification scheme for movies and games is already a thinly veiled censorship and local-business-boosting mechanism - games that are refused classification cannot be sold, meaning no imports and no media the government dislikes. You can't get Xbox Live Indie games in Australia for this reason, and soon we might have a gutted app store as well.
I'm against this, obviously. If it goes through as-is, I'll probably stop using my iphone. Even if they cut the pricing down, it'll mean an immediate end to free apps in Australia - what developer is going to pay big money to release apps they don't profit from?
This whole pay-to-be-rated thing is shockingly old-fashioned. It's pre-internet rubbish, where a few gatekeepers (media companies and government) could conceivably control all media releases. Now that every single person alive can record a video or write a game and release it to every other person alive this sort of control-freakism is doomed to failure.
BLEARGH
