30% is extremely high by any reasonable standard for any marketplace
And that’s a big fraction of their services. https://www.thestreet.com/investing/google-pays-apple-billio... estimates that at $9.48 billion over 2018.
Downloadable is nominal outside of store. I had millions of downloads back in 2005 timeframe and we never even looked at file hosting cost.
retailers pay suppliers some wholesale cost for their goods. doesn’t seem like an analogous situation to a marketplace that takes a fixed cut of every sale.
It's now 30% for the first $10 million, 25% for $10-$50 million, and 20% thereafter.
Also relevant here would be Epic Games Store, which is 12%. Also relevant here, is payment processors are way, way less than 30%, which is all that's used/needed for in-app purchases.
Given publicly reported financials for Apples services gross margins imply a break even around 10%, I doubt any successful App Store offering similar services could survive on less than 15%.
Not for in-app purchases they don't, which is why I specifically called that one out. The game provides all the UX there to find & purchase the items, the game "delivers" the resulting purchased goods, etc... All the app store does in that case is facilitate payment. No different than, say, Square.
One of the biggest developer benefits is Apples app reviews process. While not perfect for devs, it helps ensure customers feel safe buying my apps free of the risk of viruses, malware, and fraud ware. That sells more of my apps.
If you don’t understand these things, you don’t understand your customers.