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Comment by sova | Hacker News Reader

If Steam, Apple, Google, any of them made a physical cartridge of a developer's games for them, that would seem a lot more reasonable a fee.

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This is a super literal take. In the 80s/90s the expense-incurring activity was physical cartridge production. Today it’s bandwidth & delivery infrastructure, card processing, any myriad of things.

Yes, but it's hard to imagine that 30 years of technological progress has not changed the underlying cost structures of these businesses. After all, it's changed the cost structure of almost every other business that has some connection to computing and data delivery by orders of magnitude. Yet, strangely the 30% cut has not changed a bit.

NES carts used to cost like fifty bucks. Aren't most apps in the few-dollars range?

Nintendo console games still cost $50, and seem to outsell $1-$5 games despite the fact that the vast majority of users already own a phone, and consoles cost extra (and there are more than two platforms to choose from.) So I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the market does not consider these to be equivalent products.

The still costs $50 is interesting to me, because inflation adjusted this is a pretty steep discount. The 30% stayed the same, but inflation adjusted on something like this the revenue netted is down to what 15% would have previously got you.

All I’m really getting at is that the layers of complication are thick. I feel like one could unwind this with a lot of effort, but I doubt anyone is being utterly fleeced (or is utterly innocent, for that matter).

> This is a super literal take. In the 80s/90s the expense-incurring activity was physical cartridge production. Today it’s bandwidth & delivery infrastructure, card processing, any myriad of things.

Are the current-day costs of those "myriad things" in any way comparable in magnitude to the 80s cost of cartridge production? I highly doubt it. Bandwidth is cheap enough that single webpages are several megabytes each, if you load everything. Card processing fees are 3-4%. My bet the breakdown of Apple's 30% is >25% "licensing" and <5% cost of provided services.

The cartridges are actually kinda a funny story to themselves if memory serves. Nintendo required that they manufacturer the cartridges themselves (and they had minimum orders), which was separate from the licensing side of things. Then you had disk based game systems come along early 90s which were a couple of bucks to manufacturer (on avg). I remember reading about wild deltas depending on your company size & how much you shipped on what you could expect your take to be on a title, which also makes it hard to compare.

What about what the virtual platform Apple provides? The cartridge is the feature rich phone and virtual services Apple provides to get to the device.

For which a customer spends hundreds of dollars, comparable to purchasing a game console that took cartridges. Apple doesn't provide that, buyers provide that. Apple is trying use their leverage to dominate every angle of the action. Surprise, surprise, surpriiiiise.

And millions of developers pay $99/year, which likely more than covers Apple's costs of providing developer tooling, documentation, etc.

I wouldn’t be so sure. How many man hours go into developing ARKit, Foundation, Swift etc.? How many developer accounts would be required to fund all of that plus the R&D for the ideas that didn’t work out?

I think the $99 is more of a filter, like a captcha, for developers that mean business.

The user paid for those when they bought the phone.

Probably a more accurate analog to the cartridge would be the storage and distribution services. That takes some infrastructure in networking and storage.

Developers still have to store application specific data on their own!

Apple actually gives developers 1PB of free storage per app with CloudKit, and it even has some nice privacy features for users. Of course it has limitations, so most developers prefer rolling their own backend.

How's that? I choose apps that store my data locally rather than their servers if I even do download apps.

I was discussing the storage and distribution infrastructure.

Consider a game that holds a leaderboard on steam, or any app that stores user progress on its servers.

Not exactly pertinent to your comment but pertinent to the conversation as a whole: If Apple/Google/Steam stored all app data for developers and also did the marketing for developers, that is closer to what 30% is worth imho. For hosting the platform, yes your grandfather was the first to stab a flag into the digital real-estate, and for that I owe you 30%? Feudalism that manages to shift cost to both consumer and developer at the same time -- impressive, but not very noble.

That's not a good analogue for a cartridge, though. The cartridge or the device itself stored data locally. Modern gaming consoles store their data on HDD's. Anything beyond that is entirely developer's prerogative.

And according to another user, they do offer storage through CloudKit... which it appears they do, included in the dev account/App Store distribution model—1 PB: https://developer.apple.com/icloud/cloudkit/

It's not really the same because the reason Valve built out all of this infrastructure was so they could take the middleman's cut. Basically, GameStop buys games cheaper wholesale and resells them at a higher retail price. Valve gets all of that by being the direct retailer to the end consumer.

Not even having to manufacture a physical good is a separate cherry on top of that.

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