[PakG1]

I actually am surprised that services like Steam, the Apple App Store, and Google Play are able to command as high a margin as they do for sales commission. I mean, it's obviously possible because it's reality, but it's nonintuitive. I wonder if it will continue to be that way. For iOS, you don't really have a way to install apps outside the app store without jailbreaking, but you do for macOS, and I've seen a number of high-profile macOS titles decide they're not going to sell on the App Store anymore. That's gotta damage the moat somehow and thereby damage the App Store's ability to maintain its commission margin (eventually?). I wonder what it would take to get that to happen on the iOS side. So long as the iPhone remains a market leader, I guess I don't see anything changing.

[jrockway]

Collecting money is an important part of a business, but also not trivial. It therefore makes sense that people would outsource this. If you get big enough, you probably don't want a middleman in the way; this is why companies like Blizzard have their own store/launcher app. For everyone else, whatever they take is cheaper than having their own army of software engineers, lawyers, billing phone support, etc. In a world with Steam, as a game company, you don't have to worry about collecting money (and the associated customer support) and distribution. You can focus on your game. That is valuable, which is why people pay for it.

I work at an ISP. Billing is a constant influx of "interesting" requests that I would love to outsource so our software engineering team could focus on stuff specific to our business. But we never found a service that could do it better than our homegrown system.

Every week there are several one-off issues like "I overpaid because I didn't see the service credit" or "I would like to pay for the next 3 months in advance" or "my accounts payable department sent the wrong check, can you shred it and we'll pay with credit card". These things have to be handled manually. Not to mention people calling to change their payment method because they don't remember their password to the website, or just want to chat. All that is a drain on actually running the business, but unavoidable. You can't just say "nah we won't shred your check", so someone has to go find it and deal with it. While they're doing that, they're not making our product more innovative or reliable. They're running a check through a shredder. Anyone could do that, but unless you have 8 hours of check shredding to do a day, you are spending CFO salary on the task instead of check shredder salary on it. Therein lies the problem.

If this could all be outsourced, I'd pay a lot of money for it. So would any business. Billing is something you have to do if you want to collect money, but it's a time sink. Game developers don't have to worry about this, and generally seem OK with that. I don't blame them. They are lucky Steam exists.

[reitzensteinm]

I've sold 7 figures worth of game copies over my career, through Steam, the App store and my websites in roughly equal quantities.

This completely misses the value proposition of Steam. Collecting a million dollars of game sales through Stripe or PayPal is not hard, nor is dealing with payment issues a large overhead, even if you're paying the people replying to the emails programmer salaries.

Supporting the game itself is an order of magnitude greater even if it's decently written. Steam doesn't prevent that support, it just obfuscates the customer's connection to you so if you don't care you can mostly get away with ignoring them (at your peril, as it will invite bad reviews).

Steam puts you in touch with an immense audience. That's the value they're bringing to the table, and it's a big one.

[baroffoos]

Essentially steam has created an almost walled garden. You already have all of your games on the steam client so if a game is sold on another store its inconvenient. Another part is steam has a lot of eyes looking at their store. Everyone checks steam for new games so if you are not on that store then people wont see you.

Its an unfortunate system because steam isn't actually providing that much value but they have just managed to centralize everything on their platform.

[nostalgiac]

> Its an unfortunate system because steam isn't actually providing that much value

I have to heavily disagree with that.

Other than as you mentioned, the huge amount of eyeballs on all of their library content which you just won't get anywhere near close to. Along with people already having credit on their steam account so they can instantly buy a product without entering payment info.

There's also the distribution and update mechanisms which are such a huge win for the customer as well as developers.

I can also guarantee you, if Steam didn't exist, there would be other 'central store/repo's' that would absolutely be trying to enter this space. Providing an easy location for gamers looking to find new content. It's a win/win/win for all of Valve, Developers & Customers.

[baroffoos]

>Other than as you mentioned, the huge amount of eyeballs on all of their library content which you just won't get anywhere near close to.

We should have had search engines like google for games.

> Along with people already having credit on their steam account so they can instantly buy a product without entering payment info.

Browsers these days have a payment API and stores the users credit card details which can be used on any website.

>There's also the distribution and update mechanisms which are such a huge win for the customer as well as developers.

This could have been done without centralization similar to how package managers work, the games repo would just be added to your client and downloaded from that.

So I guess I could put it yes valve has added value from what there was before but its totally possible to replicate all the value easily without centralization.

[mindslight]

I don't disagree with your gist, but does Steam actually manually solve the examples you gave? It seems like part of the value add of outsourcing comes from the negativity of a policy not directly reflecting on your own business. If you refuse to hunt down a check (or even stop accepting checks altogether), a customer might switch to another ISP. But if your third party mechanically refuses, it's "nobody's fault". Even if the customer expends the effort to escalate and they're a big enough customer for you to listen, you can still salvage it as a positive CS experience.

[dageshi]

I'm assuming Steam handles the application of regional sales tax/VAT based on country of purchase (that would apply in the EU I think?) that alone might be worth it? Not to mention they have a really good/fast distribution system.

[kbwt]

Worth more than the entirety of the VAT? I think not.

[whatshisface]

Why not hire a customer representative whose main qualification would be diligent attention to detail? You shouldn't have specialized engineers spend their time dealing with issues that are not only one-off, but that also don't require any advanced qualifications. There aren't eight hours a day of check shredding to do, but there is a level of capability between "can only shred checks for eight hours a day," and "spent ten years getting a PhD in computer science."

[JumpCrisscross]

> * a customer representative whose main qualification would be diligent attention to detail?*

Flexible problem solvers with attention to detail and solid communications skills are about as expensive as engineers.

[whatshisface]

What about those rumored thousands who are graduating with "unemployable degrees?" If the market for capable individuals was the same as the market for specialized knowledge then STEM would not be so much more economically attractive to students.

[JumpCrisscross]

> If the market for capable individuals was the same as the market for specialized knowledge then STEM would not be so much more economically attractive to students

Most people, including those with advanced qualifications in STEM, could not be described as flexible problem solvers with attention to detail and solid communication skills. This confluence, essential for quality customer support, is exceedingly rare, and tends to describe those whom our societies remunerate most richly.

[jjeaff]

I don't know many customer service reps making 150-250k a year.

[JumpCrisscross]

They aren’t called customer service reps. They’re account executives, investment bankers and CEOs. That skillset—socially-aware problem solvers—is ridiculously rare.

[dogma1138]

Brick and mortar stores pay about $45 for a $60 dollar game, and have additional bonuses for sales targets.

Some larger publishers operate on a different scheme similar to the large DIY and big box stores in which they “rent” shelf space, pay for promotional services and share a smaller percentage of each sale revenue.

A lot of times there are other restrictions such as game stores need approval for things like unofficial bundles e.g. if they want to bundle a specific game with a console outside of officially branded promotional bundles.

I think the big problem with Steam at least as far as big publishers go isn’t that they charge 30% this is about the same as other channels but that the big publishers have their own distribution platforms atm.

If you buy an EA, Activision or Ubisoft game on Steam atm you don’t download it from Steam you’ll download it from the Publisher via their own client.

Granted they caused this problem to themselves by trying to compete with Steam but they still bare the majority of the cost these days.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

> you’ll download it from the Publisher via their own client.

And the main reason for pushing their own clients is because all of these publishers would love to a) avoid some of the cost of Steam in the future b) have a sufficiently big customer base to be an attractive platform for third parties to sell their games on, so that EA/Activision/Ubisoft/Blizzard can become the next Steam and squeeze others for 30% of their revenue.

Because 30% of everyone's game sales is a lot more (and more easily earned) than 70% of your game's sales, especially since in the latter case you actually have to develop (and market etc.) a game...

[cptskippy]

> If you buy an EA, Activision or Ubisoft game on Steam atm you don’t download it from Steam you’ll download it from the Publisher via their own client.

All of my Ubisoft titles have been downloaded via Steam and not the UPlay client.

[e12e]

> Brick and mortar stores pay about $45 for a $60 dollar game

Really? I thought anything less than a 100% mark-up generally meant retail wasn't profitable? (ie 30 for a 60 dollar game)?

[sbuttgereit]

Back when I was in the retail industry, we saw nowhere near those kinds of gross margins (100% that is) on average (I worked in corporate management with ~4 chains and consulted to a few dozen others of varying size over a little more than a decade).

More typical gross margins were in the ~40% ballpark. Some higher/some lower; the entertainment retailer I worked with was averaging around 35%. That's not to say it couldn't be dramatically higher by business or product line, one of the retailers I worked for had a popular product closer to 95% gross margin (excluding the stupid crazy 50% shrink we were experiencing on that product)... but we were also manufacturing that product and the chain wasn't doing that well across the assortment.

[e12e]

Just to be clear, when you say 35% you mean you bought inventory at 10 dollars and sold at 13.5? And everything covering rent, pay other costs and profit you made off those 35%?

[sbuttgereit]

Actually, I didn't read the message I commented on closely enough.

In retail, we think of gross margin: (retail price - cost of goods)/retail price.

So, in your example we'd be just under 26% gross margin, not 35%. Regarding the original message I commented on, I looked at the percentages, ignored the example amounts, and presumed gross margin. So in reality, the gross margin there is 50%. Still higher than the averages I saw while I was in the industry (and I was mostly with B&M retail) and higher than the break even point for reasonably well run and conceived retail businesses. That's not to say those more common margins are comfortable for the retailer... more often than not they are cutting it pretty close to the edge much of the time.

[dogma1138]

Most retail doesn’t do 100% markup or anything close to that other than maybe parishables and low priced goods that aren’t bought on credit.

Also game stores hope that you’ll buy other items and also sell your older games back to them so they can resell them while giving you back arguable worthless store credit.

[georgeecollins]

Most dedicated game retailers (GameStop) make their profit from selling used games. There is a higher markup for that.

[dogma1138]

Not sure why this is downvoted this is correct, you get store credit and they get another resell at likely a higher markup than the original.

This is why both publishers and console makers have constantly tried to get into this market, which have already been somewhat killed on the PC the moment CD keys were introduced.

[methodover]

> I am surprised that ... are able to command as high a margin as they do for sales commission.

Yep. Me too. I’ve long thought that Steam charges way too much considering the platform. There would seem to be tons of room for a competitor to undercut Steam. I’m excited about Discord’s new store.

Revenue share is a killer for a business, especially as one as volatile as computer games. Any game needs to be 25% better than it otherwise would have been because of Steam’s revenue share. Does it really bring that much to the table? In 2018? Enough to justify their absolutely enormous cost?

[JusticeJuice]

The money games can make on steam is infinitely higher than other platforms - what you're paying for is to get your game on the platform with the most users.

A local game company I knew had a game on the humble bundle, their website, and a few other platform for months - they made a few thousand. Then it got greenlight on steam and they pulled 1m over 4 months.

Steam is not merely a payment processing system, it's an audience.

[on_and_off]

Steam used to be the best way to make your game visible .. but now haha, not really.

Not that I am against Steam opening its doors .. the curation was very subjective which was problematic since it could mean life or death for a studio.

Right now .. I guess it is still better than nothing if you have an unknown game to sell .. but I would not have my game only sold on steam.

[tylerl]

There's a GDC talk about this (up on YouTube, can't remember the title) about the cost/difficulty going alone vs going through steam.

The tldr is that valve apparently knows exactly how much it costs you to run this apparatus yourself, and the rev share reflects that reality. The numbers are apparently really close.

The catch is that as you sell more units, the cost of the apparatus starts to diminish as a percentage of revenue, so running your own marketplace starrs to make sense when you get into the blockbuster territory.

This pricing update apparently takes that fact into account, which means that when companies start running the numbers on their new game launch, the justification for building their own marketplace starts to go away.

[eropple]

I'm pretty sure it's not the talk you're thinking of, but Jeff Vogel (who has been mostly-successfully making indie games consistently since 1995) mentions it in this GDC vault talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs

They were able to stop paying a third employee when they went to Steam. That's a lot of value to the business.

[cheez]

> They were able to stop paying a third employee when they went to Steam. That's a lot of value to the business.

They were able to stop paying? Doesn't that mean they make less money?

[Retric]

Revenue is fairly useless it’s profit that you care about. Having less employees also means less effort managing them.

[cheez]

Ah I see.

[methodover]

For sure, a service like Steam offers tons of value for a game developer. And I’m sure you’re right that the price of Steam matches the cost of an individual developer developing a launcher and hosting service. That’s all true.

But I feel like the margins for Steam are so wide that it’s wide open for undercutting; for others to offer a cheaper, probably better product. I’d hope that game hosting quickly becomes commoditized due to lots of competitors vying for the cheapest possible price.

That’s good for developers, and really good for gamers.

[kbwt]

> Any game needs to be 25% better

Actually, 42.86% better with the 30% cut, and 33.33% better with the 25% cut, and 25% better with the 20% cut.

[methodover]

I appreciate the precision!

[TangoTrotFox]

Then you have the privilege of having not been in independent game development before Steam then! Steam takes about 30% and that comes with little to no stipulations. You can go put your product on other platforms, you can generate steam keys and then sell those keys off platform (and take 100% of the revenue), and from the very first sale you get ~70% of the revenue.

In the age before Steam you had to approach a publisher to get your product out there. And in those days getting a 70% deal would have been amazing. Except back then 70% meant something rather different. The publisher was getting 70% and you received 30% in "royalties" (and generally substantially less than 30%). Oh and you received $0 in "royalties" until the publisher cleared 100% of their costs. And finally of course you had to relinquish nearly every right to your IP as well.

I wouldn't underestimate the value that Steam adds. They take care of all financial related issues including trust, facilitate 'advertising', provide a captive audience upwards of 125 million, take care of data hosting (which can be a very significant issue in large-size products), and more. I'm sure they could get by with a smaller margin, but at the same time I think 30% is a pretty reasonable rate for the value they add.

[vatueil]

> you can generate steam keys and then sell those keys off platform (and take 100% of the revenue)

Which is significant, and missing from most of the discussions about Steam's revenue share. Game creators can generate as many keys to activate their game on Steam as they want at no cost, and sell them however they want. If you buy a game from Humble, Amazon, or any other website and receive a Steam game key, Valve doesn't receive any money from that purchase.

[mbesto]

> are able to command as high a margin as they do for sales commission.

People are surprised that the entity that controls distribution and maintains the relationship with the customer can command whatever premium they want?

I don't know how to say this any in any non-snarky way, but this is business 101. Control distribution = control the market.

[TheForumTroll]

But Valve doesn't charge premium prices..

[user5994461]

>>> I actually am surprised that services like Steam, the Apple App Store, and Google Play are able to command as high a margin as they do for sales commission.

What makes you think that they have high margin? It's not like each game creators could run a worldwide distribution and payment operation with just a few percent more of revenues.

[michaelmrose]

"It's not like each game creators could run a worldwide distribution and payment operation"

You mean like a website? I think it's more fruitful to imagine multiple merchants competing to sell devs wares and lessor commissions as a result of competition.

[adanto6840]

Payment processing is a big part of it, but it's not just that. The deployment framework, testing branches, the workshop/user content/mods support, etc. That stuff could certainly be replicated, but the exposure to the existing user base of active customers is the tough one.

Admittedly it is supposedly lower value now, with Steam Direct replacing Greenlight, but it shouldn't be overlooked -- it's the same reason that tons of products are sold on Amazon even though you can also purchase the same product directly via the brand's website...

FWIW, I'm lead dev of SimAirport[0] which is in Steam's Early Access program. The 30% has been tough to swallow, but without Steam (and given our lack of internal marketing/spend) we probably wouldn't have sold a quarter of what we have thus far. And while we wouldn't qualify for any of these tiers had they been in place previously, it's still a solid upside "just in case" your game blows expectations out of the water.

I'd love to see them add a tier around $2-5M at 27-29%, even if just as a "bone" to indie developers; it'd make developing a 'game as a service' (ie long & consistent feedback-driven dev cycle) more palatable and likely result in demonstrably better games.

Tangentially related at best, but sometimes I wonder what Steam _actually_ optimizes for -- if their algorithms always show the "best" games (ie ones that players spend hundreds++ hours playing) then I'd expect that to actually hurt their revenues short term. In theory they'd be better off marketing/optimizing to push games that satisfy users but that have low play-time/hours on average, so that they can sell the player a different game that much sooner. It's a strange set of incentives & it's hard to tell how aligned they really are (with either players or developers).

[0] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/598330/SimAirport/

[yellowapple]

I probably wouldn't have bought SimAirport if it didn't show up in my Discovery Queue or whatever on Steam, and I'm glad I did because it's filling a void in my soul left behind by Air Mogul. (And by the way: awesome job!)

Valve's rather enthusiastic and concrete support for Linux gaming certainly doesn't hurt, either. Coupled with the discovery features above, it makes it a lot easier to figure out which developers I'd like to keep supporting.

[Dextro]

I just created an account to thank you for making this game. I have been looking for a game just like this after reaching all the limits in Airport Tycoon ages ago.

And I mean literal limits. That game had a bug where flights were limited by an internal variable that was smaller than the capacity you could build so after a while the game would just stop and you would be unable to get any more use out of your airport. You could easily test this by cancelling one contract which would immediately make a new offer pop up.

Anyway your game looks just the thing I've been looking for since that old early 2000s game. I'll be throwing some money your way for sure.

[user5994461]

You realize that it takes a lot of work to make a website to accept payment from a hundred countries in dozens of currencies and handle customer support and chargeback and fight fraud?

You can try to run your own website, to save 10% fees on a minuscule userbase, it simply doesn't cover the costs.

[azhenley]

Serious question: isn’t this what services like PayPal are for? Along with customer service services. Certainly not trivial, but it seems doable.

[richardknop]

What about billing support? You need people on the phone to handle complaints and issues from customers, deal with chargebacks, refunds and thousands of various weird requests from people that will keep coming. Also you need a software engineer team to work on the payment processing system / website. It's not "build it once and leave on autopilot". These things need continuous maintenance, bug fixes and improvements. All of that costs a lot of money and you have to have a really large revenue to be able to handle this yourself.

[mschuster91]

Paypal only handles payment. You still gotta do customer support, CDN infra (with games running at over 60GB each, that's not easy!), fraud detection, client dev and technical support for over three platforms (Win with 3 major versions, OS X with probably the same, and a myriad of Linux distros/kernel versions/GPU drivers), social networking/messaging stuff and a whole lot of small-ish stuff to get at half the functionality Steam offers.

[notSupplied]

What handling refunds? Some are legit, some will be fraudulent. What a out dealing with foreign currency? What if your game becomes popular in a country where PayPal isn't prevalent?

[pnloyd]

Don't companies like stripe aim to make packaged solutions to problems like these?

[user5994461]

Definitely not. It's quite the opposite actually.

Stripe gives you a basic solution to accept payments in some locations and under some circumstances. Once a company reaches in the tens of millions in yearly turnaround or expand internationally, it has to move on and run multiple payment providers.

[scarejunba]

Minecraft did it when it was tiny and it scaled all the way up.

[yellowapple]

Just because one game managed to pull it off a decade or so ago doesn't mean that sort of success is the norm.

[scarejunba]

I just mean it’s possible.

[michaelmrose]

I would be interested in data but logically wouldn't most of revenue at present come from 12-18 countries?

[user5994461]

That's the point. Doing internationalization and payments for 12-18 countries is a pain.

Steam helps you with that. You could try to do better yourself but the effort is not worth saving a few percent of fees (on a lot less sales).

[michaelmrose]

You are making assumptions. 30% is not a few percent. You are also assuming that merely being on steam and having users encounter your game while browsing will be the primary method people encounter your game and decide to buy it thus the "on a lot less sales" People encounter games via many means. If you only sell it via steam or steam is merely the most convenient means of acquisition then the fact that the buyer bought it on steam isn't proof that they found it via steam or further that they wont buy again if you aren't available via steam.

[kbwt]

Steam certainly won't internationalize your game for you.

[kbwt]

Can't something like Stripe + Braintree provide the same at a fraction of the cost?

[user5994461]

Not at all. For starter Stripe is only usable if you are a small US company selling to a US user base. It also restricts your audience to customers with a card and willing to enter it on your website.

It's better than nothing but it's in no way comparable to what steam offers.

[gomox]

That's a dramatic misrepresentation. Source: operated startup selling to LATAM customers, used Stripe.

[rblatz]

Lyft uses stripe, I wouldn’t consider them small.

[redisman]

It's also a major sales channel. Valve has over the decade rounded up a huge chunk of the people who buy PC games into one place.

[MattRix]

uh, see Itch.io or Humble, which do the exact same thing for a fraction of the cost

[ehsankia]

Does itch.io have a world wide CDN delivering high enough speeds to handle 50GB games? Do they provide match making, voice communication, game hub, cloud saves, workshop, achievements, stats, and so on? Steam provides a huge amount of services behind the scenes.

[MattRix]

This is the whole point. Indie devs don't need a CDN that can handle 50gb games, or most of those other services you listed... Yet we're stuck paying the full 30% that those mega studios that actually use those features are paying.

[ehsankia]

Steam still brings a lot more traffic that they would get if they sold directly. Most people who do both Steam and direct report that Steam consists of more than 95% of their revenue.

[akavel]

"So You Want To Compete With Steam": https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-...

[AmVess]

25% is a steal. They handle all the financial transactions and host and distribute the game files on the most popular client on the planet. They also handle the security.

Handling your own billing is expensive and time consuming. Setting up your own distribution and hosting is also expensive and time consuming, and then there's the bandwidth cost.

All this adds up rather quickly. Having someone else do the business end of selling games, and only for 25% is a bargain.

[MattRix]

It's not a steal at all. Those things (especially stuff like hosting and bandwidth) cost a small fraction of the price. You can argue that it's worth it because of how popular Steam is, but it's getting harder and harder for smaller devs to even get seen by that large audience in the first place.

[kkarakk]

As a layman gamer who has only used steam as a consumer - This comment ignores the ground realities of Steam having a seemingly endless amount of trash. i logged on and wanted to play a game with wallrunning and a cyberpunk aesthetic and i only found ONE that was worth playing out of the seemingly thousands of options.

Game developers on steam seem to release what they want to not what the audience wants in the vast majority of cases. Couple that with amateurish quality and it's actually easy to be seen if you choose to cater to the non oversaturated categories imo.

[MattRix]

> it's actually easy to be seen if you choose to cater to the non oversaturated categories imo.

You're wrong, but sure.

[ehsankia]

Steam provides many other things too, past CDN and billing. They provide a game hub, steamworks (match making, voice communication, friends list), workshop, cloud saves, advertising for your game, and much more too.

[mtgx]

The reason Google and Apple are able to command such high commissions, it's because they are monopolies in their own markets. Most people who want iOS can only buy iPhones and use the app store. Most people who want to use Android, tend to buy Android phones and don't switch to iPhones.

As such, Google and Apple's app store's don't really have strong competition against each other. Plus, most developers pretty much have to build apps for both anyway. Their respective markets are huge enough.

Steam, on the other hand, although it had its own monopoly of sorts in terms of "central gaming repository", it's always had high competition from game developers releasing their games outside of Steam, and more recently GOG has become a direct competitor, and EA and a few other huge gaming companies started their own central repositories and keep their games off of Steam.

This is what forced Valve to make this move now. Competition virtually always favors the consumer (the companies, too, in the long term, as they are forced to improve their products, but that's another issue and most companies are too short-sighted to see that by themselves), and we're seeing yet another example of that.

[notSupplied]

This. Indie developers opt-in to Steam's 30% cut because they've done the math and found thay it's better than going at it alone.

If iOS developers had a choice, many would find that Apple simoly does not do enough for them to justify their cut.

The same thing is happening with Google, except you DO have the option to bypass Google play if you have enough muscle, which is exactly what Fortnite did.

One argument I often hear is that "Becsuse they created the platform! They deserve to tax it!". This presumes that platform is doing software a great service. Funnily, just a generation ago, Mac was widely considered the losing horse because "all the software is on Windows." So the question of "who needs who more badly" was reversed.

[55555]

Monopolies often charge around 30%. Google ads, App store, Play store, cell phone billing for subscription numbers, etc

[c3534l]

I tried to look up what Steam's profit margins are, but I can't find any good information on it, just a lot of confused people pretending as if they're an authority on Steam's finances, but who don't even know the difference between revenues, profits, and commissions. Does Steam have a high margin? I don't know. It could cost more than you think to run Steam. Or maybe it costs a lot less - I really don't know.

[sorenjan]

Epic haven't put Fortnite on Play store, they distribute it themselves instead. It's probably easier on Android than iOS.

30% is ok for small to medium developers to not have to deal with payment and distribution, but large companies like Epic, Blizzard, EA, and so on doesn't need that. 30% is way too much, Google and Apple doesn't add 30% of the value to a AAA game.

[muro]

s/easier/possible/ on Android

[ineedasername]

Think of it like having your food brand be in the supermarket. Sure you can open your own stand alone stores but then you have to build and manage that infrastructure yourself, and your audience is a very small fraction of the traffic the supermarket gets. Practically no one sees your product without even more overhead in advertising and marketing.

[pier25]

It's not surprising. Users want convenience, specially on mobile. Even on Android very few users would buy outside the Play Store.

On desktop it's different, at least for a portion of users. I prefer buying outside the Mac App Store, but I know users that were first introduced to the ecosystem in iOS and had never considered you can but software outside the MAS.

[wdr1]

> I actually am surprised that services like Steam, the Apple App Store, and Google Play are able to command as high a margin as they do for sales commission. I mean, it's obviously possible because it's reality, but it's nonintuitive.

Why?

[wging]

For the iPhone monopoly, I think you should keep an eye on Apple Inc. v. Pepper.