[Tenhundfeld]

Apple takes 30% of app store purchases, in-app purchases, and iAd revenue. Google takes 30% of Google Play purchases and in-app products. 30% is a reasonable share for the maintainer of a network to take.

As for the 25% to the author of the mod, that does seem unfair, but I don't think that was Valve's decision. I think they left that up to the game producer, Bethesda in this case. Bethesda chose how to split the remaining 70%.

As an aside, Valve's income per employee is totally irrelevant. Their 30% fee is set by market forces. If they lost billions of dollars this year or if they hired 10,000 people to handle support calls, the "fairness" of a 30% fee is not affected. It wouldn't become more fair just because their income per employee ratio changed.

That 30% is set by market forces. It's what we've all generally agreed a marketplace can charge for operating the infrastructure. In this case, Valve has a challenge, because there are multiple parties splitting the remaining 70%. So they might need to lower their fee to let the game producers and the modders take larger slices of the pie.

[mxfh]

Apple, Google and Valve all only get away with taking 30% because they managed to establish more or less of a monopoly on stores in each of their respective ecosystems.

Steam is arguably still the most permissive of all of those since it allows redeeming keys purchased directly from the developer or places like Humble Bundle Store which are reported to take a smaller cut.

[madez]

You say a share is fair when it's what the market currently offers.

That's obviously a remarkably stupid definition of fair.

[Tenhundfeld]

Read my comment again. I never said that a share is fair when it's what the market currently offers. You're simply inferring something I didn't say.

I explained why the 30% is a reasonable rate as compared to other marketplaces.

And as an aside, I argued that income per employee is not a good metric of fairness. I never argued that 30% is fair or unfair, as I think that is frankly a pointless debate.

But I did say that, to me, 25% going to the modder feels unfair. So, I get why you might think I was arguing 30% is fair – though that was not my intention.

[madez]

In general reasonable implies fair.

Yes, there might be situation where you can only decide between two unfair solutions and one is less unfair, and one could argue that that one is the reasonable choice. This is because reason-ability and fairness are not binary. Still, the tendency remains: if you say X is reasonable you imply X is fair.

Income per employee is not a good metric, you are right. However, if your profits are very high you must raise salaries if they are not already too high, lower your prices or invest to be fair.

[Tenhundfeld]

I hear what you're saying. People use the words interchangeably, but in this context, I think there's an important distinction between fair and reasonable:

- Fairness is a moral judgment.

- Reasonableness is a logical argument.

That's why I argued that Valve's taking 30% is reasonable but not necessarily fair.

[madez]

Reasonableness usually implies more than just a logicality, including fairness. To then say that the 30% cut is reasonable means that to say that it's fair.

Let's assume reasonableness were equivalent to logicality. Then, for a decision to be reasonable, it must satisfy some logical conditions. I'd argue that is in our case maximizing a fixed metric in relation to all other possible options. One either doesn't value fairness in the decision-evaluation metric, the 30% cut is fair enough or it's unreasonable.

So, putting it all together, we get

(1) 30% is fair (enough),

(2) one doesn't value fairness prominently in decision making metrics or

(3) the 30% cut is unreasonable.

I'd say the 30% is _not_ fair (enough). That leaves one to pick (2) or (3).

[nailer]

Generally on HN we like to say why we think something is bad, rather than merely labelling it as stupid.

Free market value is a common measure of fairness. You might disagree (eg, you could argue Steam has a monopoly on PC gaming, likewise non-official app stores are rare on cell phones, so it's not a free market), but you should state why.

[madez]

And I like HN for demanding explanation. Shout-out to all the skeptics!

I focused the problem with his argument into one sentence that made it intuitively understandable. Then I stated my opinion. I thought that'd be enough explanation.

Free market value is often obviously unfair.

For example, in many companies the highest managers receive a hundred times the average salary in the company. Nobody works for one hundred persons. They just get so much because they can take it.

Prices in the market are heavily distorted by - among many things - incomplete information, time delay, entry barriers, racism, stereotypes and criminality.

That digital distributors agreed on taking 30% doesn't make it necessarily fair. It is fair if it includes so much work such that so much money is necessary. However, I doubt they have so much cost to make their income per employee fair.

Why is it not fair if they earn so much? Because they don't do so much more for the society than for example the average firefighter and therefore shouldn't earn so much more money.

[nailer]

> For example, in many companies the highest managers receive a hundred times the average salary in the company. Nobody works for one hundred persons.

I don't think anyone's actually making that argument. Rather they'd say the highest managers may be providing 100x or more value to the company.

[crdoconnor]

>Free market value is a common measure of fairness.

Free market value is a fantasy. No market is really free. No value is set by a free market.

If what you are saying is that in theory under certain completely fantastical assumptions that market value is fair and otherwise it's not, then yea, I agree.

[nailer]

I certainly agree that freedom isn't absolute: there are more of less degrees of competition in a market. However that doesn't preclude supply/demand setting values for things.