This is a beautiful quote because it is an example of one industry's bad behavior leading to another industry's bad behavior, upon which the first industry then users the second's similarity to justify themselves. Cars only started doing this because phones made it normal. It's wrong in both cases.
It's similar to when Apple defended it's 30% store cut by claiming it's an "industry standard"... specifically, an industry standard that Apple established.
A sibling comment notes that Steam charged 30% at the time (though some had better deals) but it's worth noting that Steam was not an open platform that anyone could publish on. Much like for consoles, to put a game on Steam you had to have a preexisting relationship with Valve, or try to develop one with no certainty of success. This was also considered a very generous cut because getting on Steam was almost a guarantee of financial success.
When I was authoring software (over two decades ago) and a company acted as publisher they took 85% of gross.
For author/publisher relationships at that time, this was pretty typical (book authors/publishers being the closest analog).
Needless to say there was, in addition to the cost of creating and shipping floppies, advertising that the publisher had to cover.
Apple's 30% cut seemed fair to me when the App Store arrived.
I'm not sure if I would try to ship an iOS app these days though. Not because of Apple's cut but because of the race to the bottom that was unleashed shortly after the App Store gold rush: where now you don't appear to even be able to sell a $0.99 app.