[leppr]

Their point still stands by your analogy. There is no plot of land over which a chain has been put by Steam, users can still acquire videogames outside of proprietary platforms as easily on desktop PCs as they could before Steam was created. The only thing they are extracting rent from is their own brand and infrastructure.

Smartphone OS vendors make it hard to venture outside their walled gardens, not Steam. There are no exclusivity deals (afaik), no all-encompassing SDK developers are incentivized to integrate with (Google Play services), even SteamOS doesn't lock users down.

[zaroth]

It’s a wonderful point, and the fact that even Steam can monetize an App Store under those conditions just goes to show that these delivery channels are actually incredibly valuable and worth a significant percentage cut due to the difficult real-world problems that they solve, and the access to a customer base ready to pay money for your product (versus pirate it).

[brylie]

They are perfectly capable of operating at a flat-rate service cost.

[zaroth]

I'm not sure what you mean by this? Anyone is perfectly capable of operating their business at a flat-rate pricing structure versus a commission structure. That's the beauty of our economy; that companies can make these decisions for themselves and their customers can then vote with their wallets which solution they like better.

Steam is the perfect example because it started from nothing, did not leverage any existing device-base to shoe-horn it's solution, and they exist in a marketplace littered with a long list of failed competitors who couldn't beat them in a fair fight.

And yet still people will hate on them for nothing more than being successful apparently, and offering a service that game studios throw fist-fulls of money at.