> 30% became the industry standard not just for video games for a reason.

Yeah, it became the industry standard because it rakes in mind-blowingly huge revenue for the app store owner, e.g. https://www.cultofmac.com/601492/app-store-google-play-reven.... From the article: "It’s no wonder Services — which includes App Store revenue — has become an increasingly important business for Apple as hardware sales have slowed.".

While you're correct that it costs money to run Steam, it's not _that_ much money.

There are probably economies of scale, sure, which is part of why Epic can get away with a lower fee for now. But it's also just business. They know how much it costs without economies of scale, and that sets a floor.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs Here's a talk from a very old indie company, there's one section talking about how they existed pre-Steam (and other stores they use since Steam's not exclusive) and appreciate what it's enabled.

With the right time : https://youtu.be/stxVBJem3Rs?t=1564

The only reason 30% is the industry standard is because network effects and walled gardens make competition very difficult. The cost to valve, Apple, and Google aren't anywhere close to that, which in an efficient market means that the price should go down as competitors enter the space.

Steam isn't so much better than the competition that no one can compete with them--they just got into the market at the right time and network effects have taken over.

What are the costs close to, and what are the costs of distribution if you did it yourself? Feel free to break it down into cost of business across n countries, cost of storage and bandwidth, some bare-minimum listing fee somewhere to at least enable theoretical discovery, and ignore all the other services the platforms provide.

I mentioned probable economies of scale in a cousin comment, but I don't think they offer all that much. Do you have a % in mind that you intuitively think could be knocked off from the stores of Valve, GOG, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Salesforce App Exchange, and Amazon Appstore, all taking around 30% before you get into the fine print?

The costs aren't 30%.

Assume a $50 game. 100,000 sales. 5 gigs.

Storage and bandwidth = $28,000 (per Amazon's calculator) Cost of doing business in N countries = use paypal = 2.9%+0.30/sale = approximately $1.75/sale = $175,000

Costs = $203,000 Revenue = $5,000,000 Ratio = 4.1%

So yeah, Valve is not the shining knight here and that 30% fee is unjustifiable. Even Epic's 12% share is still very much profitable for Epic.

The 30% fee is also nowhere comparable to wholesale pricing schema of the retail model (effectively a 40-60% fee), since that involved the sale of physical copies of goods, and the retailers had to deal with issues like shrinkage and the risk of unsold inventory.

I don't have any numbers, but I would not expect the median sale price to be anywhere near $50. I'd expect there to be more sales of <$30 games, as a percentage of revenue, than >$30 games. And the cost of distribution goes up relative to the cost of the game as the sale price goes down.

Assuming the sale price of the game in the OP's example was $10, distribution still cost less than 3%, and paypal goes up very slightly because of the $0.30 base charge, but the main fee is percentage based so it doesn't change. So even for a $10 game we're looking at less than 9% in total.

This example is also using s3 retail pricing and paypal retail pricing, which already factors in profits for Amazon and Paypal.

None of the big marketplace's costs are anywhere near 30%.

It became and Industry standard because Apple is Greedy as fuck, not because it is hard to make a store

I hate Epic for their Exclusivity, but lets not pretend that 30% Fee is nothing more than a money grab by Apple, Google, Valve and the rest of these platforms