[Arainach]

You as the Shareware author were paying for the creation of those discs and their distribution. If you had an FTP server, you paid for the bandwidth.

Epic isn't doing that. Epic wants access to Google's customers, with Google paying all the bills, without paying Google anything. Despite the fact that Android allows them to run their own app store or sideload apps.

[IIsi50MHz]

Shareware disks _could_ be written and paid for by the shareware author, but user-to-user distribution, at the _user's_ cost was [seemingly] more common.

[hakfoo]

I recall my local independent PC shop in the mid-90s had a big assortment of shareware on 5.25" floppies, priced per disc. Similar offerings existed in mail-order catalogs. The disc provider made a small margin per disc, presumably, and it created a different distribution network for the shareware copies, in an era pre-ubiquitous Internet.

A few years later, there were shops that specialized in burned or pressed CDs of Linux/BSD distributions back when dialup was the standard and fetching a few gigs of Debian was out of reach.