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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

> You don't need to defend the trillion dollar company. They are not your friend, they do not care about you, your work or your life.

True.

> All they do is steal 30% from society that could be used for more productive purposes than make a few people who already have everything even richer.

I'm old enough to have developed software before the App Store existed, and remember that everyone was very excited both buy it finally being introduced to iOS, and by the relatively low fees of only 30%.

You're free to argue that 30% is too high, or even that the 15% for small developers is too high, that this is rent-seeking by Apple and only made sense when they were also a small company… but I think this is also true for the businesses trying to convince everyone that it matters, and I think they would like to charge the same sticker price while collecting the difference for themselves.

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The problem is not that 30% is too high or too low, the problem is that it shouldn't be a % but a flat fee structure, like every other services ever.

If you have an app tomorrow that sells for $10 to 10k people you owe Apple $30k, now you manage to up your price to $30, same work same size same everything, but suddenly you now owe Apple $90k ? That's called a tax, not a fee.

Doing so wouldn't stop apple from having a separate, "pay 30% all inclusive" fee, and it wouldn't stop them from "if your app is free you have no fee" (beside the xcode sub fee).

> like every other services ever

Apple didn’t invent a marketplace.

Please have a look how other online and offline marketplaces work and how they monetize access.

You can look at anything from Salesforce, Shopify, to Microsoft, Epic Store, PlayStation and your local Target store.

Hint - it’s not a flat fee structure.

What makes you think I agree any more with any of these ?

But as a user I'm able to buy my pc games, my groceries or my music from another store. Apple prohibits me from doing that.

While true, I think these examples are sufficient to dispute calling it a "tax".

"Excessive" or "monopolistic", if you like, but not really a tax.

Yeah but technically nobody is forcing anyone to use Steam. Yet pretty much all the games are published there and the market has decided that the 30% fee is "fair" (AFAIK they can get away charging even more than Apple on average because there is no 15% tier?)

There is competition for Steam and stores like Epic offer at 12% tier. Developers make substantially more money per sale on Epic than Steam.

And the thing is, 30% cut is pointless for Steam. They have more money than they could ever spend. There is no budget at Valve. They just spend whatever they want and do what they want.

They rob hardworking small developers of real money that they need to support themselves all so billionaire Gabe N can enjoy the extreme excess of his valve palace

And Epic admitted that 12% is unsustainable.

The rest of your comment is baffling to me.

I assume you're neither a shareholder or employee of Steam.

But you count their money, you decide for them that their own money is pointless to them, you somehow know how much money they earn, and based on that make assumption it's more than they could ever spend (even though you admit yourself there is no budget at Valve).

And how long is "ever" in "than they could ever spend"? 1 year? 5 years? 20 years? 100 years?

I very much dislike people who count other people's money, I don't know if it's their own jealousy or greediness. But you on top of that also somehow came to the conclusion that their own money is pointless to them, and then accuse them of robbing people.

And this is about marketplace for PC games, a wild west of side-loading and land of free for all.

But somehow Steam is robbing developers.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Epic has not admitted that 12% is unsustainable, and the suggestion that it has is so detached from reality that it colors the rest of your comment as being extremely unreliable.

You should double check your sources because you fell for low-effort low-intelligence fake journalism. What Sweeney said was that 12% was not viable in developing countries due to high finance costs. https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/109102593910919987...

You dislike people who count private profit margins?

I dislike low-information consumers who simp for corporations based on literal fake news.

Be better, shame on you.

It's ironic for you to call me "low-information consumer" and "shame me" when you don't even look further than the first Google result to Tim Sweeney's tweet.

Epic Game Store is unprofitable and losing money. There were financial documents released in Epic vs Apple about Epic Game Store becoming possibly profitable in a few years and accumulating 1 billion loss before the end of this decade.

> You dislike people who count private profit margins?

I like how you honestly believe that saying "% cut is pointless for Steam", "they have more money than they could ever spend", "they just spend whatever they want and do what they want", "they rob ... so billionaire Gabe N can enjoy the extreme excess of his valve palace" is counting profit margins.

To bring you back to reality, you're not counting profit margins, because you have no access to their financials. You're making stuff up and talking emotional nonsense like you have a personal grudge and accuse other people and companies of robbing people.

edit: can't reply to your comment below. wishing you all the best with your future trap laying for incompetent repliers

> They rob hardworking small developers of real money that they need to support themselves all so billionaire Gabe N can enjoy the extreme excess of his valve palace

Steam's 30% is still a huge improvement on the overhead involved in brick and mortar physical sales. But if a developer doesn't want to pay the 30% they can always sell their game from their own website - and some do[1]. Most developers seem to think that the 30% is worth it though.

[1] https://fractalsoftworks.com/preorder/

Edit: Something I neglected to make explicit is that the PC is an open platform. If you don't want to sell through Steam you have tons of other options, including self-publishing. If you want to get your game on a PS5 or an iPhone, you have to go through Sony or Apple and they take a similar cut of your revenue.

It doesn't matter if you personally agree or not how marketplaces monetize.

It's up to the people who created these marketplaces to charge what they feel is fair and/or financially sustainable for the value they provide.

If it wasn't worth it for the sellers, these marketplaces wouldn't exist today.

But they do, and they thrive.

If you have a secret sauce how to build a sustainable billion people marketplace after spending billions on it without charging sellers access to your customers, please do it and show the world how it should be done.

> Apple prohibits me from doing that

Yes, because that's their product, their philosophy and the experience they want their customers to have.

And they do that for 15 years already.

You knew that and still bought the iPhone. As have hundreds of millions of others.

And it still is one of the most popular, highest rated consumer devices in the world for over a decade.

So it's not a deal breaker for consumers, is it?

Flat fee services are starting to seriously attack percentage based services in the marketplace right now. Sirvoy for hotel bookings, Ticket Tailor for event ticketing, not to mention buy-and-sell marketplaces everywhere. I expect percentage based services to be murdered during this economic recession, as businesses do what they can to survive – including cutting completely useless costs.

> Shopify

Is a flat fee structure?

Basic: $39/mo

Shopify: $105/mo

Advanced: $399/mo

I mean the sellers side of the marketplace, not buyers.

https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/store/revenue-share

B-b-but-

We can take them all down. We should. Doesn't matter if it's Valve or Steam or Google or whoever. It's only better for consumers and clearly we've let it slide to the point where even us usually cynical HN peeps are apparently willing to defend this predatory and anti-consumer behaviour.

Apple can do what they want. I want them to be able to do what they want because I'm from America dammit and companies in non-critical segments of the economy like video games and phones should be able to do what works for them. Ain't called the land of the free for nothing.

Personally I don't like these practices -- it's all cuz of the walled garden, locked down aspect of it all. But luckily I'm also free to continue avoiding the heck out of Apple devices. They make nice hardware so that sucks that I miss out on that, but I'll take the trade off that I get to install whatever apps I want on this here Android phone of mine.

> The problem is not that 30% is too high or too low, the problem is that it shouldn't be a % but a flat fee structure, like every other services ever.

I hate Apple like the next enlightened guy, but then banks and credit card companies should also charge a flat fee for their services. This isn't the case and probably never will be, however. But their fee is much more reasonable than Apple's fee.

There is a lot wrong with banks. In many cases people try to dip in a % when it should be flat. However, with credit the risk is proportional to the loan.

It's a small amount compared to retail; it's a large amount compared to a download; and it's infinitely larger than the 0% platform royalty required by IBM-compatible PCs.

That 0% platform royalty was on top of the $300 flat fee for the Windows operating system (or however much, I never ran Windows myself), whereas iOS is technically free (no fee for major updates). You’re paying for the OS/platform one way or another.

Very few people bought Windows separately, its price was bundled with the hardware sale just like it is with iOS. This is a completely moot point.

You could try to argue that Apple give more value by supporting longer, but then again you would be completely wrong (some hardware manufacturer are not super good at supporting their stuff for the very long term, but windows in itself has a support timeline way beyond anything Apple ever did...)

> and by the relatively low fees of only 30%.

30% is low compared to what? Mafia extortion rates?

When the App Store was new, the web hosting for my indie shareware games was about 30% of their net revenue after the payment processor and marketplace fees.

The payment processor (cheapest PayPal (U.S. Accounts), most expensive American Express/Optima International[0]) and marketplace (Kagi[0]) fees were on top of that hosting fee, and cost anywhere from (1.9 to 5.0)% + $0.30 (payment provider) plus 2.5% + $1 (market place for ≤$25), which makes those two items combined also more than 30% for any item sold for less than $5.08-5.77.

Hosting fees are of course cheaper today, more so when bulk bought (I think more than enough to compensate for games today getting into the 100GB range when my shareware was 10s of MB).

I'd hope that payment providers are also.

But at the time, it looked amazing.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20090903044400/http://www.kagi.c...

I don't understand what hosting fees have to do with apps. The app store seemed to be more or less a ripoff of Facebook's (now long defunct) app store, back when Facebook was a web-based app-of-apps, and AFAIK Facebook apps were free plugins.

> I don't understand what hosting fees have to do with apps.

Apple hosts the apps, doesn't charge devs or customers anything for bandwidth used when downloading them. At the time the store launched, this was a big part of my overall costs, which Apple covered in full from their take.

> The app store seemed to be more or less a ripoff of Facebook's (now long defunct) app store, back when Facebook was a web-based app-of-apps, and AFAIK Facebook apps were free plugins.

I forgot that ever existed, so I searched for it. Looks like FB's was announced about 4 years after Apple's App Store?

> Apple hosts the apps, doesn't charge devs or customers anything for bandwidth used when downloading them.

But it doesn’t allow developers to host the apps themselves, so they are being forced to pay for a service they don’t need.

Need is the wrong word there, developers absolutely need it. They may well be able to do better value for money with their own choices, and I appreciate the argument that everything bundled together isn't great, but unlike e.g. the CloudKid data sync Apple also provides at no extra cost, app download bandwidth is mandatory and unavoidable.

I could also go the other way and say that being tax-like is good for the same reason actual taxes are good: that it gets spent on building up an economic environment from which others can profit (at this point one would then want to retort something about democratic values).

But as I'm not hugely interested in defending a trillion dollar company (just giving a historical perspective that 30% was, when it was first announced, an improvement over the status quo), I say that if anyone feels the world has changed enough this is no longer good, it is good to call for change — companies may not be democracies, but the nations they operate in generally are.

Most developers are already using a platform like GitHub, which allows them to publish releases for free. There is no point in paying for that service other that being forced to.

"""Usage limits

GitHub Pages sites are subject to the following usage limits:

* GitHub Pages source repositories have a recommended limit of 1 GB. For more information, see "About large files on GitHub"

* Published GitHub Pages sites may be no larger than 1 GB.

* GitHub Pages deployments will timeout if they take longer than 10 minutes.

* GitHub Pages sites have a soft bandwidth limit of 100 GB per month.

* GitHub Pages sites have a soft limit of 10 builds per hour. This limit does not apply if you build and publish your site with a custom GitHub Actions workflow

In order to provide consistent quality of service for all GitHub Pages sites, rate limits may apply. These rate limits are not intended to interfere with legitimate uses of GitHub Pages. If your request triggers rate limiting, you will receive an appropriate response with an HTTP status code of 429, along with an informative HTML body.

If your site exceeds these usage quotas, we may not be able to serve your site, or you may receive a polite email from GitHub Support suggesting strategies for reducing your site's impact on our servers, including putting a third-party content distribution network (CDN) in front of your site, making use of other GitHub features such as releases, or moving to a different hosting service that might better fit your needs."""

- https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github...

I managed to use 25 GB in a month for games that were less than 5 MB(!) each (shareware model, so more downloads than sales), and that was for something generating mere hobby-level income, not full time job replacement income.

I was talking about the “Releases” feature of GitHub (which the document you quoted recommends using for large downloads), not GitHub Pages. And specifically for games, there is Itch.

A quick look at the App Store games section suggests about half of the "top" games exceed the default file size limits for both of those.

(But this is rather beside the point, I've been trying to repeatedly make it clear that I was defending the initial value proposition when the App Store was new and shiny and Apple were mere upstarts, not the ongoing one where the corporation's market cap is approximately the same as the net value of the entire country I was born in).

At the time it was low compared to any retail software distribution. If (a big if) a developer could get on a carrier App Store (they existed) it was much more than 30%.

Go back and watch the keynote. Developers cheered because 30% was so much lower than any other stores available at the time.

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