A few years ago, I worked on a video game published by Microsoft. We ran game servers in Azure, and on Windows for obvious reasons. The project had to pay for the windows licenses from MS, despite being entirely funded by them, partially developed by an internal studio, on aMS first party IP.
I don't recall how much it cost exactly, but the cost of the per-core windows server license hourly is not far off the cost of a core on AWS these days.
“Paying” for accounting purposes, and “paying” where the payer loses access to the funds has different consequences.
For example, Apple and Alphabet can account for YouTube and Apple Music paying App Store fees, but leadership can ignore the fees for the purposes of selling a loss leader. Spotify cannot ignore the fees, since it would run out of money to pay other bills (or negatively effect net income).
https://www.protocol.com/amp/amazon-bad-at-games-2646952917
Neither is Disney ignoring transfer cost between Disney Studios and Disney+.
Management accounting takes into account opportunity costs.
>Individuals pay $10 a month for the AI assistant. In the first few months of this year, the company [Microsoft] was losing on average more than $20 a month per user, according to a person familiar with the figures, who said some users were costing the company as much as $80 a month.
Who knows if Apple is earning a profit on its Music + Classical Music apps or whatever else it bundles into its products. Maybe they consider it to be a small enough loss to offset the chance that a customer buys an Apple One bundle, which then makes up for the loss because the margins on cloud storage are much higher.
Streaming music is not like streaming TV.
Also, my experience of working in games is that the developers are exclusively windows. The backend services might use other OS's, but all the game development happens on Windows. When this was going on, I don't think a single developer in our room would have know the first thing about Linux.
> Especially for game servers where Linux is in it's element.
I think you'd be surprised at just how many games use Windows servers :)