> They're handling [...] payment processing.
That has a tone-deaf shade. This piece of news is particularly volatile because Epic and Apple are now going to court over Apple expressly forbidding a developer doing their own payment processing. These are mafia-like tactics.
I've said it before: 30% is way, way too much. A very good agent gets 15%, and they actually arrange their clients with profitable opportunities. The app stores have set themselves up as gilted gatekeepers, demanding a commission twice as high.
> 30% of recurring revenue
During feudalism 1.0 the peasants were raked for 10%.[0] In this brave new world of 2.0, that would apparently give the monarch an insufficient profit margin.
> 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithe
Since tithes are paid to the church and not the state, this immediately implies the peasants were paying more than that.
Historical tax rates are low, and so is historical productivity. For example, you can read old instructions to tax collectors saying "take everything they don't need to survive -- but no more than that".
So this becomes a question of whether today we're measuring up from the tax rate, or down from the rate of confiscation of surplus.
However, I think you bring up a much more important point, which deserves highlighting - the confiscation of surplus. The feudal lords at least understood that a starving peasant is not going to produce much surplus. Whereas we live in our respective modern societies and see concepts such as "working poor" as perfectly normal.
IMO the world is seriously bent when people who work their arses off still have to rely on charities to sustain themselves at all. Something is being confiscated but it sure isn't surplus.