It still is absolute insanity to me that Apple charges 30% for distribution. Real life disti of physical goods is 1-5% in the business I’ve dealt with. Transportation is generally a rounding error on an order of any significance.
30% is considered a healthy margin for the entire product sale.
I think the elephant in the room is that Apple is just doing what other closed platform distributors do, in an area where we aren't quite as used to it.
I make AAA video games, so 30% for me is basically standard.
* Valve: 30%
* Playstation: 30%
* Xbox: 30%
* Nintendo eShop: 30%
It's only the competitors that give better rates in the open-ish platforms, but people *openly* hate them; (I legitimately still have people denigrating uPlay and EPIC to my face, aggressively, when they find out what games I make).
* Microsoft Store: 15% (12% for games)
* EPIC: 12%
I'm sure there's not much sympathy for AAA here, and it's the nature of consoles to sell the hardware at a loss (something not true for iPhones), but for me when I see the outrage I'm always incredulous.. as this already existing and accepted ecosystem is what Apple are modelling.
I find it ironic that Xbox of all people would complain.
Part of what is missing with those raw numbers, is what you get for it as a developer.
I don't know about the others (And Nintendo's in particular is probably ironclad in NDAs and lawyers if their attitude towards their userbase is anything to go by), but for Steam you can read all about the technical, financial and sales/marketing features you get through the platform here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/home
EGS and MS Store compete on a lower %, partly because they offer less of this.
From a consumer perspective, Valve is the only one that comes close to deserving that cut. Between Proton, Steam Input mapping, Remote play, Family Sharing, etc... they are by far the most feature rich platform
Some of these platforms are less closed than others. Steam, for example, will give developers "Steam keys" for free to sell on other platforms or through their own storefront. So a developer can sell on Itch.io which only takes 10% (IIRC), the customer can use their preferred game client, and Valve pays for the bandwidth.
Can you imagine Apple or Nintendo doing such a thing?
To be fair, most users think Steam is much better than any of the alternatives on PC, which is part of why Valve gets away with charging a 30% cut. So "voluntary" isn't the right word, there is significant customer pressure to release on Steam.
Steam isn’t voluntary on PC, since that’s where the users are.
And that’s the same dilemma as with any of the other gatekeepers like MS or Sony or Apple. Right now sure, you can choose not to play ball with any one of them… but if you want to have users you need to play ball with one of them, and they’re all offering the exact same deal.
People have a-priori determined that “only steam is ok” and that itself is anticompetitive and market-distorting. It’s already a monopsony at that point. It’s the Walmart situation where even if there’s notionally a market with millions of end-users… they’re all fronted by a single merchant with monopsony or oligopsony pricing power. Aka what the EU calls a “gatekeeper”. Market fairness isn’t just fairness to consumers after all, or epic wouldn’t be in court.
And from a gamedev perspective it’s the exact same as apple: if you want to access the pc market you don’t have a choice, steam is the pc market and retains a functional ~100% control of this market (in a gatekeeping sense) such that valve should be subject to DMA-style rules and restrictions. Again just like apple, you can go elsewhere, but if you want these users then valve retains a chokehold on your revenue and you don’t really have a choice.
You can decide for yourself whether that’s a reasonable perspective and consideration but that’s the one that’s been applied to apple and their own App Store. Doesn’t matter if people can sideload (altstore/altserver exists) or use a different device, they worked themselves into a gatekeeper position and should be treated as such.
People don’t like that comparison, steam is a mostly benevolent gatekeeper, at least to users… but other people are happy with apple too, and from the gamedev side the deal is equally coercive. If market access is a thing we protect then steam is a absolutely a gatekeee in the apple sense.
This is the tension with apple too: apple being a gatekeeper is largely good for me as a user (or else I’d change away, which I am very free to do). When they slap, it's generally in my interest for them to have slapped whoever was stepping over the line - like when they slapped Facebook for bribing customers to install spyware. It is, however, bad for studios and corporate entities.
Steam is just a more pronounced version of this dichotomy - they are generally a very benevolent gatekeeper, but they control ~100% of the PC market revenue, so if you are a developer who wants to release on PC, you have very little market choice. Some small indie titles do it, but you're leaving money on the table and certainly no major studio wants to do it. Hence all the third-party stores - and that proliferation is what consumers don't like. The thing is, people actually like steam gatekeeping... and others actually like apple gatekeeping.
This sounds more like "steam does amazing marketing, I'm not willing to do it myself, but I don't want to pay 30%".
You are totally allowed to release a website and allow purchase and download of your game through that only. People can still add the game to steam (but no cloud saves!).
You cannot do that on iOS, Sony, Microsoft (xbox) and Nintendo, you are required to pay them to reach those customers.
Now, yes as a customer I prefer if your game is on steam because it gives me some guarantees: no virus, often cloud saves integration, reviews to understand the type and quality of game before purchase. These are things you don't get even if the game was added to steam with "add a non steam game".
"Steam should be punished for delivering far and away the best user experience to the point that users actively eschew other platforms that have unique offerings simply because they are not Steam," sounds to me as a consumer like an argument for doing everything possible to maintain the status quo.
Steam never prevent purchase independent from steam and in fact welcome it. I use paradox store but mostly launch their games from steam for convenience. Adding a new extension/game I haven't bought on steam, on steam is easy. Same for subscription services. If Apple did the same thing I wouldn't care about the app store.
It’s entered the public consciousness that these keys exist but they aren’t nearly as unlimited as you think.
> Default Release (or standard release): This is the most common type of key on Steam, which is usually tied to a Steam store or retail Steam Key package. These keys are appropriate for retail boxes or sales on other digital stores. Customers can activate this type of Steam Key at any time, but the product will unlock only after it has been released on Steam. Games and applications launching on Steam may receive up to 5,000 Default Release Steam Keys to support retail activities and distribution on other stores. After that, all Steam Key requests are reviewed on a case-by-case basis. There is no guarantee that you will be provided additional keys.
Steam is not there to be a free CDN for you; it’s one thing if it’s 5-10% of your sales or for charity like humble bundle, it is NOT unlimited and valve will refuse if you are abusing it.
Moreover this also has to be viewed in the context of valve’s forced “most favored nation” clause - if you undercut steam on the site they will reduce the price on steam accordingly, and if you still are abusing the key system they will stop granting you keys.
Again: steam’s business model wouldn’t work if they were being a cdn for people who don’t even pay for them. That’s not at all how it works, you are misinformed if that’s what you’re suggesting/implying. Sure, they allow some offsite sales… which must be at the same price as on steam, and they can “adjust” your revenue accordingly if you do the thing you are implying.
- You're not producing a good that people need. Gaming entertainment is actually a pretty thin segment of goods.
- You can get free distribution easily (desktop, web, etc.). Other platforms are just increasing your market opportunity and you can charge a thicker margin to get onto them if you want to.
- Physical distribution has costs
- Servers and multiplayer have costs
With mobile:
- Applications do everything from dating, jobs, food, payments, etc. It's anything and everything, and a lot of them are absolutely essential for modern life.
- Apple and Google are the market. There is no alternative. They're a duopoly and embed their talons into everything.
- The app store is artificial. There's nothing stopping web downloads of applications, and any security concerns could be met with signing, risk signal heuristics and reporting, and application sandboxing.
There should be no "App Store Requirement" to deploy a native app. Period.
Furthermore, there should be no requirement to integrate with the duopoly's payment stack, messaging stack, or any other platform choice enforced upon you.
> You're not producing a good that people need. Gaming entertainment is actually a pretty thin segment of goods.
The gaming industry is larger than the film and music industry combined, and is the single largest revenue source for mobile app stores, by far. The worldwide industry was worth roughly ~282B last year [1]
For comparison, the entire US farming industry is 203.5B [2]
You can distribute anything you want; as long as it's a web-app.
Nobody is running random .exe's in 2024; but you have random, arbitrary, untrusted code that runs in heaps and has access to the GPU via websites.
You have the same constraints we do, except it's easier to make a web application for dating, jobs, food, payments - than it is to do high-poly AAA games.
I am conflicted. I love Valve, but 30% seems like a lot. On the other hand, I doubt the developers are being charged for the bandwidth or for Steam platform integration. Which means that long after the developer has walked away with their money for the sale Steam is still providing licensing management, platform integration in the form of user management, and the bandwidth for every time the user redownloads the game at 0 cost to the user.
While that fee may seem high, the developers are in someways subsidizing other developers that could never afford to build and maintain that infrastructure. They're also reducing the friction and on-ramping of new players/users. They are also providing the payment processing and handling billing/chargeback resolution.
Just the merchant fees alone would be would be 2-4% of revenue (not including losses to chargebacks and fraud/risk controls). The raw cost of bandwidth usage would be ~2 cents per 12GB game download (not including infrastructure to host/facilitate the amount of simultaneous downloads). The staff to manage billing issues/refunds. The raw amounts are small, but not insignificant considering that for every $20 they collect on a AAA title there are several indie games getting all the same functionality which only nets Valve $2.
Valve, Epic, Playstation, Xbox. The platforms are providing the ecosystem and platform that has allowed gaming to flourish at incredible rates, outpacing the motion picture industry and the sport industry.
Valve has had a tiered system for a while now, it does still start at 30%, but then it drops to 25% for titles with >$10M in revenue, and again to 20% for titles with >$50M in revenue. They switched to that model after the major publishers started leaving Steam and releasing on their own launchers instead, so Valve structured it to give those AAA juggernauts a discount while still taking 30% from the small fry who basically have no choice but to release on Steam.
So actually widening the moat between the behemoths that can easily step across it, and the startups for whom staying alive long enough to gain a following is a struggle in and of itself.
FWIW, there are large publishers which successfully negotiate with the ilk of Microsoft[1] and Sony[2] to get a better revenue split, as consoles in fact have more functional competition than mobile phone app stores: people who own a gaming console might could reasonably own a second one if they were interested in some game that was only available on one console or the other; this simply doesn't happen with phones, as only a small handful of particularly-crazy power users would ever carry around a second cell phone. If you want to not release on Xbox unless Microsoft gives you a better deal, it doesn't sound anywhere near as ridiculous to tell your potential customers "you'll have to also own a Playstation" as if you tried to explain to people that to use your new social network they have to also own and carry around an Android phone (or, worse, whatever the third option might be... is there even a third option anymore that would make any sense? ;P). You can tell that Apple has some insane amount of fundamentally market-distorting power as they seriously charge large publishers -- the ones you would expect to have the most leverage -- more than smaller ones; and, with maybe a sole exception of WeChat, we have never heard of anyone getting a better deal out of them, ever.
The surprising thing is that PC is an open platform where people could compete with Steam on even terms if they actually did it well. Gamers don't like installing 5 different game launchers and Steam is the oldest one with all their games and is mostly a neutral party.
I recently installed Playnite [1], an open source game library manager and its been incredible. It pulls in games from all launchers/sources and gives you a unified library. I think all it would take to bring down Steam prices is for studios to adopt one such project but they are too blindsided by the ambition to have their own platform. You still have to do all the downloads,licensing etc. but the fact that it's a unified launcher for all stores is enough for me to prefer it over others.
I wonder if what's actually needed is an interoperabiity feature for launchers.
If I'm going to use something like Lutris or Playnite or even Steam to organize my games, a non-zero number of them are going to launch a game-specific launcher. Live-service games seem particularly fond of this, likely so they can show you a teaser while downloading a refreshed client.
But if they could just publish a RSS feed for updates, the launcher could pull the new files and cut out the middleman.
They are not complaining, they have only responded(in June) to a EU watchdog query and saying it not possible for them pay for IAP at 30%[1] to Apple and sell profitably, even though EU made Apple open up the App Store in EU recently.
[1] Apple does not mandate using their IAP per se, but forbids instructing on how to pay outside etc i believe.
I don't really mind, but you can't levy this same criticism against UPlay and it gets the same level of vitriol.
From the gamedev perspective it just looks like people have decided that Valve is the desired monopoly.
A fact that Valve are very content to use against game developers, it seems.
(I say this, owning an OLED steamdeck and being extremely pleased that proton exists; but don't forget that Proton exists because Microsoft was doing to Valve, what Valve does to game developers, and Valve wanted leverage)
But Uplay is trash. It's a totally unnecessary piece of drm with its own login that delays how long it takes to get to playing games. There is nothing positive about it. At the same time I don't think Ubisoft has made a game worth playing since far cry 3, so not buying their games is normal and good.
Yeah, but the problem with that is EPIC isn’t great on Linux, the licenses aren’t portable, and the stores can increase their fees at will once they gain market position.
In fact, if you become market leader for AAA it would arguably be your duty to shareholders to put it up to 30%
Consumers don’t actually want to be in the business of dealing with many different systems to minimise their costs in these sorts of markets.
Steam are predictable and are yet to dick me. Can’t say that about many companies having dealt with them for 20 years after regular consumption.
It's price gouging. When you have a monopoly (your the only source of apps for an iphone and no the existence of android doesnt make apple not a monopoly) and your a hardware company. You've just hit the jackpot and literally charge whatever you want. Fingers crossed ACCC or the euros slap the company with some anti monopoly laws and force the monopoly to be split up. Separate hardware from software. Make hardware software agnostic. Fine the hell out of then for their anticompetitive actions and their just straight up negligent wasteful hardware design.
> the existence of android doesnt make apple not a monopoly
How come? User doesn't have to buy an iPhone. Many buy Androids exactly because Android has some apps that they want, so not only it is a competitive market, but it's also a market where this exact issue (whether certain apps are available) drives (in part) user decisions.
You are looking at the wrong market. Apple effectively sells places in their marketplace to the developers. Because of the market share[1] of that marketplace on B2C, developers don’t have other choice but to buy from Apple (i.e. pay the cut), so it is indeed a monopoly - on the B2B market.
[1] it is not just the number of iPhone users: if you don’t go to iOS marketplace, your sales on Android may also be impacted.
> Because of the market share of that marketplace on B2C, developers don’t have other choice but to buy from Apple (i.e. pay the cut)
I've been making mobile apps and games for a long time, and this is completely untrue. Developers choose a platform, Google play, iOS or both, very consciously. Other, smaller app stores (based on Android, mostly) also exist. If Google Play radically decreased it's fees, it would actually make a lot of developers to choose Android first.
The fact that it's rational for developers to release their apps on iOS doesn't mean they have no alternative or Apple has a monopoly. It just means it's still better for them to release on iOS than not, even with these fees. Microsoft it's not worth it for them is exactly how free market works. If some users want this cloud gaming enough, it will influence their Android/iOS buy decisions.
> If some users want this cloud gaming enough, it will influence their Android/iOS buy decisions.
This would be true if not for bundling.
Lets say users care about A, B, C .. all the way to Z. Apple makes G really suck, but do the others well and bundles everything so you have to purchase all of them together, now a competitor can't just go in and make a batter G they have to make a better A, B, C and everything else. This is typical anti competitive behavior and result in companies just seeking rent rather than working hard to compete and innovate.
Apple stores sucks because of this, it is really really bad compared to competitors on other platforms like PC, steam is a massively better product since users choose steam it isn't forced upon them by the computer creator.
> I've been making mobile apps and games for a long time, and this is completely untrue.
This may not be true for your business model because your product seems to be an app, but it is not „completely untrue“. Many businesses build apps merely as an interface to their product, but the product is something else. They cannot afford losing significant part of their target audience by being picky. They have to eat the costs and terms of all major stores and pretend to be happy about it. The main complaint about Apple is this one: you have to go mobile to support your sales, but you pay incredibly high tax on that.
I think the main issue is: should the iOS app market be considered a "top-level", government-regulatable market by itself (just like the entire standard market for goods and services of all kinds in the world)?
I think it's unreasonable to see iOS apps as a market. It's part of mobile games market. Otherwise, you would have to arrest executives from any car company, because their car company usually has a monopoly grasp of "spare parts for cars of this company" market.
But spare parts and maintenance is something that many regulators pressure suppliers about, and for good reason. I feel like a lot of people (especially on HN) don't understand the role of regulation and how it can help the end user.
Real-life distributors ship your product ONE time. Imagine if they had to ship another every time they were asked forever. Those real-life distributors also don't advertise and sell your product for you either while providing an entire platform for you and your users to interact.
I'm not saying that 30% is where it should be, but expecting higher costs for all the extra services provided isn't unexpected either.
> Imagine if they had to ship another every time they were asked forever.
The bandwidth and storage is an absolute rounding error at apple’s scale. If they want to use that as an excuse, then charge app makers cost for downloads. I can promise you it’ll never come close to 30%.
I don't think that's really terrible. The worse problem is that above distribution apple wants 30% on all transactions for an app on their platform, which is insanity. It's a major problem that just hit Patreon, all the creators are taking a 30% hit for anyone that signed up using apple for the payments.
I get it, they are trying to circumvent a "the app is free, but you activate it by paying us $5" sorts of things... but like it's just pure greed that any and all payments are subject to that sort of fee.
300%. Apple is a particularly obstinate egregious offender. But these other tech fiefs also keep up the same shit: Google's App Store, Valve's Steam.
It's insane and absurd but the market being able to define itself & how it operates is the change. We used to have property law which offered people who owned things rights. But today the world is entirely built by contract law, by mega corps getting to offer only terms of use highly slanted towards them.
The idea of personal computing bespeaks an empowerment, a possibility-ization. I adore the internet, but by far the mass trend of the internet and business has been to subvert control & dominate possibility, to intermediate every step of the way to computational thinking & it's open possibility with restraint, guards, and checks.
I truly believe we are emerging amazing potential to do better, to create much broader scopes of more. But getting past what a single piece of software or single site enables & scoping systems larger, with a pretense of perhaps maybe if we are lucky intertwingularity is the gateway to heaven, that which the dirtiest shittiest scum have bent computing diametrically away from & towards their rotten bought sold & paying for core. It's been hell.
Taking cuts of everyone else’s businesses while also blocking competition to the App Store and side loading is very similar to mafia like extortion. I am not sure there are useful differences between the two actually. Or maybe it is like a government imposed revenue based tax. But if they’re like the government, let’s recognize that and subject Apple to all the regulation that follows.
It’s like if the mafia ran the shopping mall your store was in and wanted a cut of your sales. Oh wait, that’s how all shopping malls work even if they aren’t run by the mafia.
Somewhat related, at Xbox, Valve, PlayStation scale, what are their bandwidth costs? Presumably paying a fraction of a cloud provider charges. When AAA games are weighing in at 100GB, curious how much that costs to distribute.
Soooo.... Microsoft is being a bit disingenuous here; their own cut from purchases in the xbox store is also 30%. I can't find a number right now, but their cut from xbox live is rumored to be even higher.
How is it disingenuous? Are you expecting Microsoft to just give the entirety of their cut to Apple? Stacking 30% cuts on top of 30% cuts does quickly make things "impossible"
It's disingenuous in that they are both platforms doing the same thing.
Apple could argue that it's Microsoft's 30% cut that makes it impossible for developers to get their games published on the App Store. That too, would be disingenuous.
But Microsoft are making a PR maneuver that they can bring to the table to strike a deal with apple.
Well, they certainly shouldn't and this needs to be legislated out of existence, but right now if you're an apple user that is literally what you are agreeing to. Apple's customer base in particular is exceptionally gullible.
> Microsoft's chief complaint is that the App Store rules require subscriptions and features to be made available on iOS devices with in-app purchase, which is "not feasible."
This is nonsense. There's no flat IAP requirement.
How do Microsoft have Microsoft Office apps? How are Adobe apps there? Or Amazon Kindle?
If you aren't selling from within the app, Apple allows you to sell things elsewhere and log into it from apps.
(This does impose an actual problem: they'd have to turn off their store from Xbox dashboard, and IAP from games, if inside that iOS app, or concede another 30%. BUT, they already have this code, given parental controls. Just flip the "no purchases on this device" flag, done.)
Further, if you want the "app", why? Playing Xbox using iOS works beautifully on iPhones and iPads today, just go to https://www.xbox.com/play and save that to your home screen. Supports controllers, and silky smooth. When I play games on an iPad 13" people freak out: "How does that work?" It has for years...
> 3.1.1 - If you want to unlock features or functionality within your app, (by way of example: subscriptions, in-game currencies, game levels, access to premium content, or unlocking a full version), you must use in-app purchase
> [..]
> 3.1.1(a) - Link to Other Purchase Methods: Developers may apply for entitlements to provide a link in their app to a website the developer owns or maintains responsibility for in order to purchase digital content or services
There’s an absolutely massive global audience of mobile gamers across native ios/android and roblox. Though I do think PC/Xbox cloud-streamed games are less likely to have control mechanisms conducive to mobile play.
30% is considered a healthy margin for the entire product sale.