[nostrademons]

I think there's always been a rent-seeking middleman service. In the 80s it was retail: you'd go to a physical computer store to buy a game for $50 (note: that's $150 inflation-adjusted, more expensive than most games today), and the retail store, the distributor, and the publisher would all take a cut. In the 2000s it was the developer's ISP, web developer, and credit card payment processor, which were non-trivial in the days before Wix and Stripe.

The shareware/unlock-code economy of the 90s was probably the closest you'd get to cutting out the middlemen, where you could download from some BBS or FTP server without the dev getting involved at all and then send them money to have them email you an unlock code, but it was a lot of manual work on the developer's part, and a lot of trust.

[littlestymaar]

> credit card payment processor, which were non-trivial in the days before Wix and Stripe.

Stripe is way more expensive than regular payment processors. Convenient for sure, but definitely not cheap.

[philipallstar]

None of this is rent-seeking.

[andreybaskov]

Retail store literally had to pay rent to a landlord. How’s that not a rent seeking business?

[philipallstar]

That's not what rent-seeking is. Rent-seeking is charging for something that's free before, generally through seeking legal enforcement. If you think the concept of renting stuff is bad, you've missed somewhat.

[candiddevmike]

You used to be able to resell PC games too