[dijit]

Those are borne of competition with the App Store (none proceed it) - and competition often undercuts by a lot.

Valve, Microsoft online, PSN are proper contemporaries.

When you think about it the Apple ecosystem is very similar to console ecosystems in general.

Heaven knows how many Xboxs and Playstations I had to buy as a game developer.

[a1o]

- Valve you pay 100 USD once per game

- Xbox depends on how you manage to sell your thing to them, it can even be free

- Nintendo you also don't pay to be in, but the dev kit is 400 USD (unless this changed recently), you can dev in any machine

In the end math is still showing the Apple as the most expensive platform to develop for - I don't have information on PSN as I never did anything for it.

[dijit]

> - Valve you pay 100 USD once per game

The Steam Direct Product Submission Fee (while refundable after you get $1,000 in sales, of which Valve will charge 30%); is only one of the fees you must pay. For example I have had to pay for additional beta codes and if you do not charge anything for your game but you get a lot of downloads then you risk getting into bad terms with Valve. (who, while darlings to gamers are pretty aggressive bullies to game developers).

> - Nintendo you also don't pay to be in, but the dev kit is 400 USD (unless this changed recently), you can dev in any machine

Nintendo is actually a little bit of an outlier, as they really want to promote indy games (not even requiring a business address!). One caveat though is that they really want you to show your project before granting you permission to buy a dev kit, so you need to make a PC game before you make a switch game.. which is weird.

> - Xbox depends on how you manage to sell your thing to them, it can even be free

My €70,000 p.a recurring fee for XBox dev kits in Ubisoft begs to differ.

Regardless; the economics are the same. If it's too much money then nobody would pay it, so there's clearly a value.

Apple aren't forcing you to use their devices, people want to because there's a large pool of people to sell to.

[Kipters]

Maybe, just maybe, the economics for publishing an AAA game are just a bit different than for small indie developers who wish to publish their apps?

[pastage]

There are historical reasons for needing a dev machine on those stores. Apple really do not need it, you are probably right that they copied the bad stuff. The Android and Apple stores are contemporary though, they have different philosophy it is not all about competition.