But did retail press your disks and prepare your packaging? Did they provide analytics?
Your Steam analogy is flawed due to selection bias - Steam is about games, and games are more similar to movies than apps. People want entertaining content (and a good amount) for that initial price.
Does Steam allow for freemium? What about ad-driven games?
My point was that "distributors" or retailers never took 50% as the original post suggested.
If you believe that the reason desktop software has a higher anchor price point than mobile is the multiple layers, please explain why the price point on the Steam store is so much higher than the app store.