[cm2187]

When is the last time you bought a software in a brick and mortar store? Every software is now downloadable, including video games. There are no cost other than hosting.

I don't think the "it could have been distributed at much greater cost with a horse carriage a century ago" argument is very compelling.

[jasode]

>There are no cost other than hosting.

If one is trying to sell non-free software, it requires a payment processor like PayPal, Stripe, DigitalRiver, or paying a bank a monthly maintenance fee for a full-blown merchant account to accept credit-cards. A cursory google of Steam says they charge 5% fees for video games. They all have fees based on a percentage of the sales price. Even something outside of traditional payments infrastructure such as Bitcoin has fees.

If the cost is truly $0 like a sibling comment mentioned, how are people selling software for money without paying any fees to any intermediaries?

[cm2187]

Agreed. Add hosting and the fair cost is probably in the region of 7%. That's still very far from 30%.

[jsjohnst]

When was the last time I bought software in a brick and mortar store? It's been so long I can't remember. I have bought software on Amazon in the past year though.

That still doesn't negate my point though, Gamestop shelves are covered in video games, electronic stores sell software of all types. Do you legitimately think they would be on the shelves if they didn't sell? My root point was to step outside of your bubble and understand that many folks have different experiences than you. In those less optimal environments for selling software, the markups for the store are far greater than the 30%. Do I think the 30% is warranted? I don't have the financial figures to say one way or another (and neither do you), but the fact many think 30% is exorbitant and it should be 3-8% is a bit absurd and really isn't reflective of reality for the costs involved.

[cm2187]

Well, keeping in mind the reason why video games are still sold in physical format is that they require enormous binaries which downloading is very problematic for people in remote locations (plus it gives a physical object to wrap for a gift). But even that is going away. There are rumors of a disc-less xbox [1]. This binaries size problem isn't really relevant to anything that is meant to run on a smartphone.

https://www.thurrott.com/xbox/192184/microsofts-building-a-d...

[jsjohnst]

There's games in the App Store which are > 2gb in size for initial download. It is very much still a problem for folks not in cities in the US.

[chipotle_coyote]

I think it's worth asking whether Apple's 30% cut is too high, and worth asking whether they would still be able to have that cut if there were official ways to load commercial apps onto iOS devices other than the App Store. (By "commercial" I'm explicitly excluding enterprise software and TestFlight.) But I don't think it's the question that's going to be answered by this court case, whether or not that was the original intent of the plaintiffs.