https://9to5mac.com/2019/03/06/microsoft-store-revenue-share...
As far as physical stores, the publisher gets $27 out of the $60 for a typical game. The console maker gets $7 out of the $60. I’ve seen this sane chart other places.
https://www.quora.com/How-much-do-game-companies-make-from-e...
The rest of those seem reasonable to me.
The publisher is basically your marketing budget, right?
Retailers' shelf space has a cost and is limited physically. They could be using the same space to sell literally anything, so I think whatever the price of that ends up being it's probably a result of competition across a ton of industries.
The licensing fee is ok too IMO since the console makers take a huge risk producing and selling the consoles as cheaply as possible. It also sounds like a well known, flat fee, not a cut of ongoing revenue.
The problem for me is when digital stores with a tiny marginal cost of distribution think it's reasonable for them to capture a huge portion of lifetime revenue. They're not doing that much. It's bad value and the only reason they can make it work is because they're in a position that lets them act like an extortionist.
It's the cut of every single transaction for the lifetime of a customer that people think is unfair. Ex: $27 to a publisher is fine if it's a one time fee and they're providing $27 of value by advertising etc.. They could never ask for 40% of revenue for all future transactions like DLC and microtransactions because there's enough competition that no one would use them and they'd go out of business.
And then the publishers also have to pay MS for DLC. I think MS still charges for delivering patches through MS Live. They might have dropped it.
You can grow your customer base dramatically with a smallish team of engineers/recurring engineering costs, but many of the costs surrounding them still grow in a linear way.