[ffgjgf1]

> That’s not necessarily reflective of a companies income stream

It is. Anything MS or Apple ever charged for SDKs and development tools was just peanuts compared to their other income streams.

At the end of the day open consumer platforms benefit much, much more from maximizing the amount of 3rd party software that’s available on them than from anything else.

> Then what does steam offer for 30% that isn’t just distribution?

Discoverability, consumer protection, relatively very good UX etc. of course that is much more valuable to smaller/medium developers than to companies like Epic/EA/etc.

Even the App Store and the 30% cut was a great deal for developers and consumers when it came out initially compared to all the alternatives available at the time.

The issue is that at this point Valve/Steam has to actually provide real value to consumers/developers and innovate. Apple can just do nothing and collect free money (consequently the App Store itself sucks immensely as an app/platform) since they don’t have to compete with anyone anymore. What are you going to do? Buy an Android? : D