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The situation on Android shows us that consumers like consolidation and they like walled gardens and simple choices. These things benefit them. Plenty of Android phones come with 2 or 3 app stores. One for the carrier, one for the vendor and Google Play Store. There plenty are others as well, but the market has spoken. Even Epic had to fold and move to Play Store. Maybe Google played dirty, but I think it's perfectly clear users benefit from consolidation. They like the simplicity of having everything in one store and when they change devices they just set up their Play Store account and there everything is. That's a massive advantage to them. Fragmentation is a nightmare.

Developers have come to the same conclusion, it's to their benefit for the customers to all be on one store with one set of policies and features so that's where the majority of the apps go.

So what are you going to do, force Apple to become a fragmented Android copy with multiple stores and side loading that a tiny fraction of techies actually use? Those people already have that on Android if they want it. Honestly you'd just screw over Apple and a few other people over a principle hardly anybody actually cares about or benefits from. It certainly wouldn't make any significant commercial difference. We ran that experiment and the results are in.

The idea that users would all be side loading apps and developers would be making far more money having their apps spread across 5+ different stores that would compete down to lower prices is delusional. If that were the case, why has this not happened on Windows or MacOS where side loading is actually the default yet Steam, GOG, etc still charge 30%? It's crystal clear that's just the split the market has converged on through a competitive process. After all Steam has competed from day one with a default split of nothing for direct downloads from the software publisher but has thrived charging 30%. If that's not direct market validation I don't know what is.

Fragmentation and walled gardens are a false dichotomy. Steam is actually a great example of this, there are many other stores (Humble Bundle, Fanatical, GMG, whatever) that sell you Steam keys so you can keep your game library in one comfortable place.

Yes Steam are still perfectly comfortable staying at 30% as I said it's clearly a market driven level.

Steam keys sold off steam do not give valve a cut.

Valve is definitely getting some kind of money out of the deal.

They are not

"Steam keys are meant to be a convenient tool for game developers to sell their game on other stores and at retail. Steam keys are free and can be activated by customers on Steam to grant a license to a product."

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

I'm a developer who uses Steamworks. Keys are free for us to generate and sell at will. Valve reserve the right to say no, but from what I can tell, their only policy is to not take the piss (selling millions of keys), and not to charge more to customers who buy directly from Steam.

I didn’t mean to say they are getting a direct cut as sibling commenters indicated, but Valve definitely is getting at least some kind of money indirectly out of them offering this.

I wonder what a user is worth to Steam?

They didn’t have to acquire the user themselves and now they have more eyeballs on their service. How many of these users buy a few things later and make waiving the fee worth it?

Steams not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.

nobody claimed otherwise, only that its trivial to sidestep the 30% fee, even if you wish to remain distributed by steam.

Right, they believe their store value is enough for them to compete with 0%.

Are people buying software through steam because they like the consolidated experience? Or because they trust it more than an exe from a random website? Or because steam already has their credit card info stored? Or because it's the only place to obtain certain games?

It's some combination of these things (and some others I haven't considered), and the value all of this added up, minus steam's downsides, is apparently worth an extra 30% if this cost is sufficiently hidden from the consumer.

Would people still pay a 30% fee if the store were forced to actually show the fee, and there were alternatives? I'm not so sure.

You're right that there's some value there, but it's probably closer to 3% than 30%.

There are alternatives, you can sell the software directly from your own website. Publishers have decided that the reach the store gives them is worth the 30%.

> The idea that users would all be side loading apps and developers would be making far more money having their apps spread across 5+ different stores that would compete down to lower prices is delusional. If that were the case, why has this not happened on Windows or MacOS where side loading is actually the default yet Steam, GOG, etc still charge 30%?

That has happened. The majority of my 20,000 Steam games were acquired from outside of Steam.

For you. You don’t speak for the rest of the market though, and Steam comfortable holds its lead for good reason.

> You don’t speak for the rest of the market though

Do you?

> Steam comfortable holds its lead for good reason

Yes. One of those good reasons is that it allows people to purchase Steam games without buying them on Steam, thus avoiding having to subsidise Valve's 30% cut.

There's an absolutely gigantic ecosystem around buying Steam games from first-party (developer) and third-party (marketplace/bundle) sellers. I don't think you realise that it's a perfect example against the point you're making. There's enough competition from the ability to "side-load" games into Steam that it's very common to get some of the greatest games ever made for under a dollar, when their MSRP is up to two orders of magnitude higher.

You are in a teeny tiny minority. I made it clear I'm talking about the mass market. These arguments are made under the false presence (or delusion) that they are in the interests of the broad base of users who would get lower prices. They would not, we can see that clearly from the Android and PC games markets.

These arguments are being made by a tiny minority for the benefit of a small community of techies who already have platforms available to them that work they way you want and take advantage of it, like you do. It's like coupon clippers insisting on a law that all products sold must some with discount coupons.

> You are in a teeny tiny minority

Minority? Probably. Tiny? Absolutely not.

Here [0] is a breakdown of 70 popular Steam games by the source of purchase for their reviewers as of a year ago. About 28% of all Steam purchases happen outside of Steam itself, with Valve getting a 0% cut. Note that for many games a majority of reviewers did not purchase it on Steam itself.

0: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1ICv-UE4i651yMkpD...

Reviewers are a tiny minority of users and there's no reason to suspect they are typical.

Do you have better data sources that you're not sharing or are you just making things up and asserting it as fact?

Side note but what does one do with 20,000 games? Do you actually play this many?

Genuine curiosity, not trying to troll or anything.

I've 100% completed about 2500 of them, so I don't have a great completion rate but it's not like they're just there for show. I've probably played around 6000 total.

A very large number of them I would not have bought individually, but they came in a bundle with other games I wanted.

Maybe not a great completion rate respective to the amount of games you've got but probably (surely?) with respect to other gamers! If someone asked you to pick your favourite three...?

> If someone asked you to pick your favourite three...?

HyperRogue, Hollow Knight, and LOGistICAL.

Thanks!

I think the point is that Steam manages to do just fine while charging 30%, on a platform where developers could easily choose to self-publish. For small developers, that 30% is worth it because the value Steam brings to them is worth more than the revenue it takes. The only ones choosing to go elsewhere are massive publishers that can market their own storefronts, and indie devs taking large up front payments from Epic to leave Steam.

I can see both sides of the argument here. It sucks having no choice as a developer, and feeling forced pay Apple a tax just to get paid for your work. It's especially egregious with subscriptions, where Apple doesn't even do any of the content delivery. However, as a user, I think it would also suck if a huge player like Facebook or Google decided to open up their own iOS App Stores, and developers started flocking to them as a means to escape Apples increasingly strict app privacy rules.

It’s weird to compare Steam’s market power over PCs to Apple’s market power over the iPhone. The obvious difference is that the iPhone is a product created by and sold exclusively by Apple. Why would we expect Steam to have comparable market power over the entire PC industry? A much better comparison would be Apple’s market power over smartphones, which is probably comparable to Steam’s market power (as a video game store) over PCs!

Are you implying that you feel entitled to sell software on Apple's tightly controlled consumer devices?

I am stating, very clearly, that Apple have massive market power that they are abusing. This is known in economics circles as "market failure" and across the spectrum from Keynsians to Neo-classical economists is seen as a compelling case for regulation.

Why are you implying I am saying something different to what I /said/.

I don't know much about "Neo-classical economist" circles, but you seemed to be saying something about comparisons to Valve's Steam product. Beyond that, it only seemed like you might be implying the entitlement to sell software on Apple's devices. You certainly didn't /said/ that "Apple have massive market power that they are abusing".

I thought my question was pretty straight forward, and it seems like your answer is full of deflection and vitriol. Fair enough- we're on an internet message board after all.

But I sure wish you'd draw the line somewhere. Do you feel entitled to sell software on Apple's platform or not? Do you feel equally entitled to sell software on my cable box? my car's dashboard? my thermostat?

They are entitled to sell software on Apple customer's devices.

Why shouldn't he? When did we decide to let Nintendo, pardon me, Apple, dictate our digital lives?

- - - - -

https://www.filfre.net/2016/04/generation-nintendo/

> In a landmark ruling against Tengen in March of 1991, Judge Fern Smith stated that Nintendo had the right to “exclude others” from the NES if they so chose, thus providing the legal soil on which many more walled gardens would be tilled in the years to come.

- - - - -

The simple fact that Apple feels they have to enforce this proves they're afraid. If they <<knew>> that their model is absolutely superior, they'd just let people choose.

But if they do that, they'll lose tens of billions of dollars in revenue. So it's not about "security" or whatever, it's just about money.

This is the same company that nickels and dimes every Lightning cable maker to the tune of several billions of dollars, when USB C has been around for many years.

The same company that removed the headphone jack for bogus reasons just to create a market for wireless headphones, worth several billion dollars.

I could go on and on and on about their anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices.