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.
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."""
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).
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.