For Steam and Mobile, you need to create your own playerbase. Merely launching onto the platform will get you nowhere. If you are putting a huge effort into advertising and PR to generate an audience - you must think, why not direct them to a platform that charges me less than 30%? Android and iOS are effectively closed shops, but for PC I think its simply that no decent competitor has ever come along.
I base part of my reasoning on this article, where the author points out there are already cheaper options with good tooling such as itch.io, yet they do not attract a lot of titles: https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-...
What about the Humble Store? Those are mostly Steam keys.
Itch.io has even less curation than Steam. It has less of a feature that people want.
Aren't they?
> Belarus still relies on state-run manufacturers and Soviet-era collective farms. The European Union prefers not to buy food from those farms because one-fifth of Belarus was contaminated by fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine. Video games, however, are another matter, as are mobile phone apps and software products. All these are being produced in a drab industrial park on the northeastern outskirts of Minsk, an unlikely but booming high-tech hub.
http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-belarus-tech-boom-...
If a decent PC store game through which mimicked Steams' featureset and charged only 12%, I think you'd see a renaissance in the industry. Hopefully Epic can deliver this on the back of Fortnite's success.
The good thing about software development is that there are basically no capital costs, mostly labour and rent. I'm surprised there aren't more games studios in Asia and Eastern Europe, where those things are cheap.