>> In the absence of fair competition, the best comparison I can think of is credit card processing which is about 3%
Sure 3%, + a flat fee of .02 to .10 per transaction. that flat portion is going to be HUGE if your charing under $5 for something. You get none of that money back for chargebacks, or refunds. And if your charge backs are high your going to pay more as a % or get dropped so your going to have to hire CS people to answer emails or phones, and say nice things to angry people. You're going to pay someone to pay cc compaines to give money back.
Meanwhile you're small, you have no clue if the person on the other end is a refund scammer. Apple (and Steam) have this habit of telling people to "fuck off" if they refund scam. They have the weight with CC processors to do that. you will not. They also have customer trust, because if your product (game/app) is shitty they give customers money back (See Epic 1/2 billion settlement for being bad about this, and kids).
Is 30 percent high. It is. Is it unreasonable... meh maybe not?
The thing with Steam that makes it different to me is the access control and gatekeeping. For example Steam hardware is so open that you can immediately install a different OS on it without even booting it. Steam hardware will happily run any third-party app store you want, including Epic Games their main rival. Steam also (AFAIK) don't do exclusivity BS like the consoles often do. So when it comes to Steam they are clearly competing fairly and evenly in a free market. If Apple were the same (iPhone could run 3rd party app stores, or you could install Android on you Apple hardware) I would have absolutely no problem with 30%. Hell I wouldn't even have a problem with 90%, because if they weren't providing that much value then a competitor would come in and take it from them.
>> So when it comes to Steam they are clearly competing fairly and evenly in a free market. If Apple were the same (iPhone could run 3rd party app stores, or you could install Android on you Apple hardware)
I can buy android devices that are as good as the iPhone or better in their own way and have all those features (side loading other app stores). Is that not the free market in action?
That would be an interesting way for Apple to side-step the whole question: unlock the bootloaders and make it clear how you could do whatever you wanted with it (except run hacked iOS).
The number of people buying iPhones to run even a slick version of Android would probably be quite small.
Why is this number so bad? Steam: 30% https://medium.com/@koneteo.stories/how-much-money-does-stea...
>> In the absence of fair competition, the best comparison I can think of is credit card processing which is about 3%
Sure 3%, + a flat fee of .02 to .10 per transaction. that flat portion is going to be HUGE if your charing under $5 for something. You get none of that money back for chargebacks, or refunds. And if your charge backs are high your going to pay more as a % or get dropped so your going to have to hire CS people to answer emails or phones, and say nice things to angry people. You're going to pay someone to pay cc compaines to give money back.
Meanwhile you're small, you have no clue if the person on the other end is a refund scammer. Apple (and Steam) have this habit of telling people to "fuck off" if they refund scam. They have the weight with CC processors to do that. you will not. They also have customer trust, because if your product (game/app) is shitty they give customers money back (See Epic 1/2 billion settlement for being bad about this, and kids).
Is 30 percent high. It is. Is it unreasonable... meh maybe not?