[frognumber]

The size of the market generally scales with your marketing and distribution capacity.

To the point of the original article, smaller companies have a hard time competing due to less reach. That's missing. If I run Disney and can reach 4 billion people, and your 5-person shop can reach 50,000 people, I can either price my product 5 orders of magnitude lower than you, or invest an extra 5 orders of magnitude into development.

That's expensive. If I want to comply with Khazak tax laws, provide support there, and reach distribution channels there, I probably want to pay for an office there. That office might have four people, regardless of whether we sell 1 product or 100 products.

A lot of what app stores do is provide that kind of reach to all businesses, driving pricing down.

Personally, I'm a big fan of government grant funding for free software. It seems like the OS, office suite, video editor, and similar tools ought to have a baseline versions available to anyone for free.