And they will leave money on the table because of it. That ship has sailed, and people don't want "appointment TV" anymore.

I will stop short of saying they will "fail" because we all know they won't, they have too much money, but I think they will certainly discourage people from giving them money if they try to enforce some drip-feed delivery model just to squeeze more money out of their customers.

Expanding on this, I wonder how much money all these supposedly "struggling" companies are burning building data centers and the required backbone to support all these stupid streaming services for the various walled gardens of content?

I mean they could just host their stuff on Netflix/iTunes/Amazon but no let's build an entire new server farm doing the exact same work, likely on the exact same hardware and the exact same software, because some executive somewhere got a bug in his ass about Apple taking 30% for providing merely a marketplace, userbase, advertising, delivery model, customer support...

Idk. From a non-industry person this seems like common sense, but I also don't understand how VC backed companies burning billions of dollars to schedule McDonalds deliveries is a long-term business model so maybe this is just some galaxy brain business head stuff.

If all use Amazon or Google to stream then there is not that much extra expense.

IMO I prefer to buy a game from the developer and get it cheaper or give the money to the creator but this days most games are on stores and not on the dev website, a good example is Minecraft ,it would probably be more expensive if it would have been on Steam and I would have to install the Steam client to play the game, and I could not play game A on my PC and my son to play game B on his PC, I am forced to use the trick of getting into offline mode.

Steam has sales all of the time, it's the Amazon of games, and it will always be cheaper on a Steam sale than the developers website.

Developers could have discounts when the game gets older.

My point is that in some cases Steam or Apple taking 30% is too much, now that Steam has some competition they made some deals with big publisher but this big percentage are to large for some products.

In this debate though many people ignore the creators and feel entitled that the app,game or movie be on his preferred store and using his preferred payment method.

I am sure there are cases where the store works great too.

Well Minecraft always had it's own launcher since it left beta. I think they've mostly just kept the same system for the Java version because it's what people are used to, and there's a huge community around modding it.

There is a version of Minecraft on the Microsoft Store but it's not nearly as popular.

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