[the_trapper]

That's kind of a narrow view. There's nothing preventing you from continuing to sell your software directly, and just about any other retailer/publisher will take a similar share of your revenue.

The upshot is that by putting your software in the Windows store, there is a chance that you will gain new users that would have never found your product otherwise. It also removes some of your overhead considering that Microsoft hosts the software themselves, handling payment, storage, and bandwidth for you.

[abz10]

Hosting an installer is trivial, basically free, and likely less effort than dealing with the MS store. Their search is terrible (I work in search) and their reach is poor - people have been trained not to trust the store and most ignore it completely.

The biggest benefit would have to be copy protection. Copy protection is hard to do because MS has made it hard intentionally for both technical and privacy reasons. Also the people making these decisions at MS are also on the payroll of the installer companies who benefit from not having a workable and freely available alternative. And there was no insentive internally at MS to fix it because bonuses are tied to the new metro stuff.

If you're doing something mass market then 30% might be worth it. But if you're niche, which is MSs bread and butter, and stickiness, then it will not be worth it. Which is an idiotic position for MS to be putting people in.

I predict continued failure of the App Store which will erode Microsoft's dominance in the long tail. The only thing keeping me on Windows is WPF and legacy customers.

[the_trapper]

I agree with you that right now, Microsoft's implementation of an app store is definitely quite a bit worse than Apple and Google's versions. However, there are people making money there or else people wouldn't continue to put their apps in it.

Personally for me as a developer, I think one of the biggest benefits to app stores is payment handling and updates.

The latter in particular is such a pain to get right traditionally on Windows in particular. You can either ping your server and nag the user to download an installer at startup or run a background process that periodically checks and installs updates silently. Neither is ideal.

As a user I also prefer the Windows store to the status quo because I can cleanly uninstall store apps. Traditional uninstallers almost always leave vomit all over my computer that doesn't completely wash away until I inevitably reinstall Windows.