You want to sell software you wrote to run on an iphone. You have zero choice. Apple tax your revenue.
You want to sell software you wrote to run on a pc. Steam is not your only choice. I am not defending steam or valve here, I've never sold anything using their stuff, nor am I suggesting anything other than that their market power over pc compared to apple's store over the iphone is not remotely comparable.
It actually works against you to suggest apple's iphone software store and steam are comparable at all because it's so incredibly bogus.
You want to make the case that steam suck too but with loads less market power. Go right ahead. We're listening. You don't need absolute and total market power to be abusive of it. Apple will immediately attempt redefine the market to include android or people spending money on coca cola instead of apple product to suggest that customers have real choice so there is no market power abuse here.
Why are you implying I am saying something different to what I /said/.
I can see both sides of the argument here. It sucks having no choice as a developer, and feeling forced pay Apple a tax just to get paid for your work. It's especially egregious with subscriptions, where Apple doesn't even do any of the content delivery. However, as a user, I think it would also suck if a huge player like Facebook or Google decided to open up their own iOS App Stores, and developers started flocking to them as a means to escape Apples increasingly strict app privacy rules.
Developers have come to the same conclusion, it's to their benefit for the customers to all be on one store with one set of policies and features so that's where the majority of the apps go.
So what are you going to do, force Apple to become a fragmented Android copy with multiple stores and side loading that a tiny fraction of techies actually use? Those people already have that on Android if they want it. Honestly you'd just screw over Apple and a few other people over a principle hardly anybody actually cares about or benefits from. It certainly wouldn't make any significant commercial difference. We ran that experiment and the results are in.
The idea that users would all be side loading apps and developers would be making far more money having their apps spread across 5+ different stores that would compete down to lower prices is delusional. If that were the case, why has this not happened on Windows or MacOS where side loading is actually the default yet Steam, GOG, etc still charge 30%? It's crystal clear that's just the split the market has converged on through a competitive process. After all Steam has competed from day one with a default split of nothing for direct downloads from the software publisher but has thrived charging 30%. If that's not direct market validation I don't know what is.
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https://www.filfre.net/2016/04/generation-nintendo/
> In a landmark ruling against Tengen in March of 1991, Judge Fern Smith stated that Nintendo had the right to “exclude others” from the NES if they so chose, thus providing the legal soil on which many more walled gardens would be tilled in the years to come.
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The simple fact that Apple feels they have to enforce this proves they're afraid. If they <<knew>> that their model is absolutely superior, they'd just let people choose.
But if they do that, they'll lose tens of billions of dollars in revenue. So it's not about "security" or whatever, it's just about money.
This is the same company that nickels and dimes every Lightning cable maker to the tune of several billions of dollars, when USB C has been around for many years.
The same company that removed the headphone jack for bogus reasons just to create a market for wireless headphones, worth several billion dollars.
I could go on and on and on about their anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices.
It's some combination of these things (and some others I haven't considered), and the value all of this added up, minus steam's downsides, is apparently worth an extra 30% if this cost is sufficiently hidden from the consumer.
Would people still pay a 30% fee if the store were forced to actually show the fee, and there were alternatives? I'm not so sure.
You're right that there's some value there, but it's probably closer to 3% than 30%.
That has happened. The majority of my 20,000 Steam games were acquired from outside of Steam.
"Steam keys are meant to be a convenient tool for game developers to sell their game on other stores and at retail. Steam keys are free and can be activated by customers on Steam to grant a license to a product."
They didn’t have to acquire the user themselves and now they have more eyeballs on their service. How many of these users buy a few things later and make waiving the fee worth it?
Steams not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.
Do you?
> Steam comfortable holds its lead for good reason
Yes. One of those good reasons is that it allows people to purchase Steam games without buying them on Steam, thus avoiding having to subsidise Valve's 30% cut.
There's an absolutely gigantic ecosystem around buying Steam games from first-party (developer) and third-party (marketplace/bundle) sellers. I don't think you realise that it's a perfect example against the point you're making. There's enough competition from the ability to "side-load" games into Steam that it's very common to get some of the greatest games ever made for under a dollar, when their MSRP is up to two orders of magnitude higher.
I thought my question was pretty straight forward, and it seems like your answer is full of deflection and vitriol. Fair enough- we're on an internet message board after all.
But I sure wish you'd draw the line somewhere. Do you feel entitled to sell software on Apple's platform or not? Do you feel equally entitled to sell software on my cable box? my car's dashboard? my thermostat?
These arguments are being made by a tiny minority for the benefit of a small community of techies who already have platforms available to them that work they way you want and take advantage of it, like you do. It's like coupon clippers insisting on a law that all products sold must some with discount coupons.
Minority? Probably. Tiny? Absolutely not.
Here [0] is a breakdown of 70 popular Steam games by the source of purchase for their reviewers as of a year ago. About 28% of all Steam purchases happen outside of Steam itself, with Valve getting a 0% cut. Note that for many games a majority of reviewers did not purchase it on Steam itself.
0: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1ICv-UE4i651yMkpD...
Genuine curiosity, not trying to troll or anything.
A very large number of them I would not have bought individually, but they came in a bundle with other games I wanted.
HyperRogue, Hollow Knight, and LOGistICAL.