I see this every day, people take the gross income number to the bank. In software world, the operational costs are less compared to other domains, but there are still costs and taxes.

Apple taking 30% cut is insane.

YESSS.. By itself it's just business right? The price of doing business. Don't like it? Go somewhere else. But that somewhere else is Android and Google ALSO charges 30%? Hmmm..

This duopoly situation isn't really good developers. Apple taking 30% cut and tossing it on their pile of 250b in cash; that's a depressing image.

It's interesting because Android is decidedly not locked in to Google's Play Store, yet it's entirely dominant in the Android app market regardless. Amazon's App Store is still kicking and side-loading is easy enough, but seems like very few users take advantage.

So don’t sell in the App Store. Set up all that distribution, collect correct sales taxes for every country in the world, accept payment from anywhere — deal with a potentially high rate of chargebacks and the fees associated with that, also create a search and discover platform so that people can find your game nobody ever heard of until they visited the App Store. Also, do it in nearly every language on the planet, accepting almost every currency. Also handle actually hosting your content and securing downloads to boot authorized devices.

I’m not sure 30% is expensive enough compared to doing all of that yourself.

Dark Room would not have sold $800,000 anywhere else. The author even said Google Play was an order of magnitude less than Apple.. so is an order of magnitude worth 30%? It seems like a lot of people would trip over a dollar to save a nickel.

You're right; my post was a mistake. I regret that I didn't read the article too carefully before posting. Alarmingly, instead of getting ignored or downvoted, I got a bunch of upvotes. What gives?