Roblox pays 26% of its revenue to Apple/Google for payment processing

Wow, that's crazy.

If I understand correctly, someone can buy 10,000 Robux for $99.99 and spend it all in your game. You'll get 7,000 Robux and you can cash them out for $24.50

Sales tax, ca 20%

Of course, the publishers and distributors and retailers took a lot more risk than the AppStores and actually had to hold inventory. It's probably just a coincidence, but it's interesting we've come full circle.

That's a license fee that you pay once you buy the device. It shouldn't be buying applications for it that fund it. In fact considering how little older phones get supported, it's pretty meaningless to say that it's to keep devices drivers up to date as they aren't ;).

> Maintains the developer tools, compilers, documentation, so that your binary can run on the device's OS.

Again, it's the customer that pay for it once he buy the device.

> A app store offers reliable hosting of the game binaries and provides a versioning and upgrade mechanism on a platform with billions of user accounts.

It doesn't cost 25% to host game binaries. I'm pretty sure Roblox host it all on Windows for example...

By the way, on Android, the license fee isn't for the Android system, it's for the Google Play services specifically. So that 40$ you paid, it's going toward the shop already.

Personally, if I don’t see an obvious co-branding for Stripe or another trusted service I will usually pick PayPal over a naked credit card field. Who knows what the heck is going on in the backend. People are still doing stupid shit like storing untokenized cards in 2020.

Edit: talking about smaller merchants in case it wasn’t clear.

That is not really hard to imagine. Most of what we purchase has markups.

I wish there were more big name apps that would get on F-Droid or one of the alternative app stores on Android. The more competition there is, the better for developers and users.

You can a couple of different ways if you are a power user, but its a bit more work than most are willing to put into it…

In fact Steam kills the whole "Apple store is a gouge" premise stone dead. It literally is just a distribution mechanism on desktop computers, where you absolutely can side load apps and games as much as you like, and they're still considered very much worth 30% by the market.

There's a reasonable discussion to be had about side-loading on iOS, that's a separate issues, but the idea that the App Store cut is unreasonable in the market is clearly bogus.

A more apt point of contention is whether or not you should have the right as a customer to install apps outside the App Store retail experience.

You can actually but it isn’t easy.

Another related issue is whether or not customers acquired outside the Apple store should yield a margin once installing an iPhone app.

Essentially the entire question is if the phone is a general purpose computer owned by the end user, the end user ought to have the right to install apps as they please without having to go through Apple.

Thankfully nobody buys games on Steam to encourage such awful behavior.

I too long for the low markup over wholesale that we used to enjoy on boxed software before the advent of these predatory app stores.

> At least on Google phones you're allowed to jailbreak it and install whatever you want if you're a power user, but you can't do this on Apple's phones.

It is undoubtely very true that you are allowed to jailbreak Google phones but Apple phones are forbidden. Chalk it up to Apple's absolutely unbreakable security and bug-free OS and the DMCA.

It would be very nice if we could get a DMCA exception to explicitly legalize jailbreaking, like this one from 2018:

https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2018/faqs.html

I would argue that prices are already as high as the market can bear so that raising prices would not raise total revenue. Instead you would have to imagine publishers making much less in profit, which would still be bad since less people would be inclined to make commercial software.

Whoever’s running the game servers, moderating the game, providing new content to keep the game relevant, etc. is doing a lot more to earn their cut, right?

I find the graphic even misleading. Roblox takes double that: 50,5%.

If you calculate a share out for hosting and user acquisition you also have to do that for the App Store. And everything Apple does (OS development, new hardware, advertising) could count as “user aquisition”.

That contention simply isn't reasonable. Apple was charging exactly the same right form the start of the store, when a lot of pundits and industry analysts were still saying the iPhone was a dead end. You can't accuse them of abusing their power as an industry whale to charge more, when they are charging exactly the same as they were when they were a minnow, and are still charging pretty much the same as every other comparable business. That just makes no sense at all.

Apple and Google will both argue that it's not a monopoly because they're competing with each other. Not sure if they can in any way argue that it's not a duopoly however.

Specifically, what Judge YGR said on Apple/Epic case seems very relevant:

> “Well plaintiffs always want me to define relevant markets as narrowly as possible. It helps their case. And defendants always want me to define markets as broad as possible, because it helps their case”

Anyway, metaphors fail to help understand this situation in my opinion.

Sorry you can't sell that TV, it can be used to watch pornographie.

Restaurants typically work on 30/30/30/10 for rent/wages/costs/profit.

It wont happen now, but in later stage of the cycle where they fail to find new sources of revenue or profits.

One good thing with the current 45 days terms is that customer can ask for Refund of the past 30 days and Apple generally are pro customers. In the Mobile Gaming, Pay to Win Gaming Industry this gives tremendous power to the players / customers, especially those "whales" ( as they are called, meaning heavy / top spenders ) could threaten for refund. But there are also group of people who abuse this system and Gaming Developers have no way to appeal, it is literally Apple took away their's revenue. ( And it is even worst if those people sold their account before the Refund )

I still see Gaming, being 80% of App Store Revenue should be a separate store with separate set of rules. We cant have one size fit all solution to the App Store. And Apple needs to work better to help both its customers and developers.

Additionally in my industry about 80% of the value chain is taken by the retail outlets. 30% would be pretty awesome for us.

30% is way less than a lot of other industries pay to have their products distributed to a market full of waiting buyers. I’ve read that writers of books only get about 10%.

As you said, there's no competition on iOS, and a slight window of opportunity on Android with sideloading.

They already do, it’s called “rent”.

If they give me free rent and hand me a lot of customers, sure why not?

The game's business model is basically "like these Korean whale-milking RPGs, except we're outsourcing the development to 12-yo kids".

The games themselves are usually ports of popular games (Counter Strike, Day Z, Minecraft, etc) where the quality is... well, frequently amateurish, for obvious reasons. I suspect the reason these ports are so popular is that a huge portion of the audience is made of kids who can't convince their parents to buy them eg Call of Duty, so they play the Roblox version instead.

Which is all fine and good when we're talking about Little Big Planet levels or Minecraft maps, but becomes kind of exploitative when you see that their creators systematically use classic free-to-play tactics to get other players to fork over money. Money which, of course, is wrapped in an in-game currency designed to make players not realize the true value of what they're spending.

And since there's very little curation, almost no dev involvment whatsoever, and the creators are 12-yo kids who are amateur game designers at best, the idea that players get their money's worth is really dubious.

Honestly the whole thing feels like a pyramid scheme of sorts, where kids will be lured by the promise of making money by selling in-game items to other kids, and therefore will try to spread the game to as many people as possible in the hope of making more sales.

(The Unity Asset Store feels similar)

Do you have any data to back up this claim?

edit: I was misled by doing a "25% for everything" in my head, sorry.