> And retail doesn't charge "0%" on boxed products

Yes, they do, unless it's consignment model, which wasn't usually the case for boxed software. The retail sale happens after retail has made the purchase. It’s obviously usually at a higher price than the retailer paid, but they don't take a cut of what the vendor is asking for the software. They pay whatever the vendor (or, often in real retail, a distributor that sits in between) is offering to sell the product for, in advance, and takes a risk that they will be able to sell the units they have purchased at a higher price.

It's structurally not at all the same as what an app store does, where it pays no one, anything (indeed, often charges an access fee up front to the seller) before a sale is made, and then pockets a share of the sale at no risk.

You seem to be getting stuck on the word "retail" referring to point-of-sale-to-end-user, where other people are using it to refer to the cost of the entire retail model, which is the comparable thing in this discussion.

This seems like splitting hairs. At the end of the day, if the consumer buys an app for $10, the developer gets some portion of that, and the retail store gets the other.

Whether that happens in one simultaneous transaction or two different ones doesn't really make a difference to how much the developer gets paid in the end, which is less with the retail store model compared to the current digital storefront model.

Let's also not forget that Steam launched with a 30% cut a full 5 years before the App Store ever existed, so it's not like Apple dictated this price, they were following industry norms at the time.

Stores buy products wholesale and sell them on, and accept the risk of the products not selling.

Apple act as a middleman and and add on their fees, with absolutely no risk to themselves.

They're very different business models.

Right, but stores buy from distributors who take 50%+ of the amount they make. So the developer is still getting less than the App Store.

That's not how IP publishing works.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remaindered_book

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-out_(recording_industry)

The idea that you can return unsold product to the supplier is a relatively new idea for most industries. When retail boxed software was at its peak (in the 90's), it wasn't very common at all.

I can't find anything current for boxed software (for obvious reasons), but boxed video and board games cannot be returned unless the retailer has a special deal with the publisher (rare).

https://www.polygon.com/2017/7/17/15974096/what-it-costs-to-...

https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/05/inside-the-secret-wo...

https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/6asinu/can_reta...

It's not how the mass market book and (I assumw from your other link title) at least popular recording industries work, but it's how lots of the rest of the physical retail industries, including IP-based ones, work and have worked, and a big part of why (for instance), TSR (the original publishers of D&D), who sold IP-based products (including books) outside of the mass book trade was completely unprepared for the “success” of getting it's books into the mass book trade, where failing to adequately account for costs of remaindering almost drove them out of business before Wizards of the Coast bought them for the IP.