Steam isn't a monopoly like Apple and Google are with their respective marketplaces so it doesn't make sense to compare the two. If I want to publish or play a game there are a lot of different ways to do so that don't involve Steam.
Why should software get a free pass?
The only viable path towards finding a fair price for this service (apparently deemed essential and basically a steal by Apple and Google, but worth less than nothing by many app developers) would seem to be competition.
Why not offer both, explicitly allowing for different prices, special deals only for non-store subscriptions etc.?
In Australia, the Reserve Bank regulates interchange fees and requires the end user to be made aware of card processing fees which can't exceed a percentage/value of the transaction.
Similar regulation applies in the EU.
There's no reason why Google/Apple/etc stores can't be similarly regulated.
Of course it would also be possible to do both, i.e. to mandate either a fixed rate or alternatively allowing out-of-band payments.
Though there is fair-use policy that Steam users shouldn't be given worse deal. E.g you're not allowed to only run 30%-off discount exclusively on your store without offering same discount for Steam store users sometime later.
This isn't an Apple/Google/Spotify thing, it's a service thing.
An app store costs money too - the creation and maintenance of the billing platform/API, bandwidth, human curation, cross-device storage of saved configurations, user acquisition, etc.
What makes musicians so different from software developers that it's perfectly acceptable for Spotify to take such a large share of the revenue their music has earned?
(To make my own position clear, I don't think any of them deserve 30%)
Why not internet provider? Verizon's infrastructure costs money, too - should they also be eligible for a 30% tax?
The data will be transmitted through Cisco routers or Nokia's BTS - it costs a lot of R&D to develop those
What about the phone manufacturer - Xiaomi or Samsung would definitely not reject their fair share
None of this would happen without electricity - power transmission companies deserve a portion
There really isn't a coherent moral argument in favor of the current status quo - it's simply about market power, nothing else
Had Verizon singlehandedly created the internet and had no real competitors they might have been able to tax it’s usage. Thank God that did not happen, though…
Since HN is a lot more familiar with the cuts the stores take out of developers earnings, it makes for a nice point of comparison.
> The data will be transmitted through Cisco routers or Nokia's BTS - it costs a lot of R&D to develop those
This is a novel idea. Verizon and Cisco could charge a price above their cost. They could call this a "profit margin". You might be on to something here.
Access to listener, or even if you limit to Mobile listener, are not bound to Spotify.
If 30% is too much, publish your content as a web app. If you want to play in the walled garden, pay the cover charge.
On the other hand if you want to write an app for a mobile device you're, realistically, either going to write it for Android or iOS. On the Android side you can distribute it as an apk assuming you can handle the cost of writing self-updating code - but on the iOS side you're hooped. Mobile devices are a part of modern life, the fact that one company dominates the market (and another company takes the remainder) leaves the market extremely unhealthy.
Musicians have about the same freedom in this respect as any application developer, practically speaking. AKA, they're just as exploited (if not moreso, see other comments about how musicians are also being screwed over by studios).
With Spotify, however, musicians can't choose how much their music is worth, and the payment of royalties is also not exactly transparent.
These companies created something that grew into a foundational element of modern life in about a decade. That’s amazing and should be awarded with trillions of dollars. The market should reward this corporate behaviour extremely well, and punish the IBMs and GEs and Boeings harshly.
As an aside, Apple et al are also not resting on their laurels, and keep pushing the envelope. My 2 y.o. + iPhone is literally better than on the day I bought it. I’m more than happy to pay more for apps / subs to get this.
Apple makes very popular computers in their iPhones, but other phones, tablets, laptops, gaming consoles, etc all do the same stuff.
Eg. When your phone is broken, you can still call people over your laptop, and you can access an internet browser from basically anything
Both firms leveraged their dominance in the mobile OS market to dominate the mobile app distribution market, and then they leveraged their dominance in the mobile app distribution market to dominate the mobile app payments market.
When talking about monopolies, the working definition is firms that have significant and durable market power such that they can set prices and exclude competitors[2]. Both Apple and Google fit that bill for the mobile OS, app distribution and payments markets. Whether you use the words monopoly, duopoly or cartel to describe them doesn't really matter, because all of those terms are accurate descriptors.
[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/app-revenues/
[2] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
What’s the difference?
I dont think that is the correct way of looking at it. As you stated at the end, you think it is worth it.
The question is value delivery. Not percentage. I could argue in cases where even 90% is acceptable. The question is how much value is delivered and how much of those 90% are used, or was it pure profits, i.e rent seeking. For some categories of Apps, 30% doesn't make sense.
A noble position but it seems to have been going other way unfortunately. Not sure how you would do that … further regulation or introducing artificial competition in the market. I think the most pro-business approach is to quash the monopoly and open up the market.
Likewise would you be equally OK if the dollar figures involved were much larger for example your cable subscription?
You do. I certainly don’t. And you’re just doing that because it’s the status quo, not out of any analysis.
Yes to 0% and any percentage of revenue should be made illegal. Google and Apple can charge whatever fixed values they want or even charge based on a wide variety of vectors but a % of revenue should be explicitly illegal that kind of blatant rent seeking is a quintessential example of something the government needs to stamp out.
To be clear, 30% is too much, but aside from payment handling and taking on fraud risk as a result of that (3-4% is generally the industry standard for card not present transactions), they provide a subscription management/payment API for IAPs, as well as app packaging and distribution, reviews, etc.
That certainly is worth more than 0%.
There is a definite cost to all these so 0% is unreasonable. Epic is trying to be the "good" games distribution store and they reportedly take a 12% cut. Something around there, maybe down to 10% would be a reasonable place for Apple/Google to be.
1. https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-has-sunk-dollar500m-into-the-ep...
Of course they can, but we can acknowledge it's a moving target. I'm at least confident it will be better than Steam.
> loses immense amounts of money
This is the same for any growth business/product where you front-load marketing and business development costs, and is not an indicator of future trends.
I think we can legitimately talk about the costs of maintaining the app-store as a marketplace, and we can talk about the future costs of providing updates free of charge in perpetuity and orchestrating the infrastructure to host those various downloads... but that's about where their service offering ends. App review is a joke, the rating systems on both platforms as absolute trash and often gamed by publishers (remember Uber's in app prompt about how many stars you'd give them that forwarded you to the app-store if you gave them 5 and otherwise just offered you an internal complaint form if you gave them anything else? Everyone does that).
I'd question whether Apple and Google are really providing a service or just exploiting a captive market.
Absolutely not, the bank initiates a chargeback, which the payment processing network directs back to the one who handled the payments. They generally are then tasked with "proving" the purchase is authorized. Enough chargebacks, even fraudulent ones, and the payment provider cuts ties with you (although, at Google scale, I don't see this happening) as you're too great a risk.
> App review is a joke, the rating systems on both platforms as absolute trash and often gamed by publishers (remember Uber's in app prompt about how many stars you'd give them that forwarded you to the app-store if you gave them 5 and otherwise just offered you an internal complaint form if you gave them anything else? Everyone does that).
The implementation being a joke doesn't mean it's not a service with COGS that need to be accounted for.
No – for online/e-commerce payments, the liability is generally with the merchant, not the card issuing bank.
If it was about risk/fraud, debit cards would be an economic non-starter, as their interchange is capped to 0.05% + 0.24$ for almost all issuers.
EU issuers also get by (probably not too comfortably so, but still) with the recently introduced interchange cap of 0.3%/0.2%.
On top of that there's a hefty fee for any fraud or chargeback that's not refundable even if it's resolved in your favor. Usually in the range of $40 per instance.
30% is between 10 and 20 times a reasonable fee.
For example, a smalltime dev isn't going to see hardly any refunds, but a dev on the scale of Epic Games is going to be seeing something on the order of tens or hundreds per minute. Should that not be accounted for?
That said, this could be accomplished with tiered fixed fees. An indie dev would probably land in a low rung where costs are tiny, where a triple-A game studio would get charged substantially more.
The revenue from paid services covers that support.
Would I prefer the cut was lower, but at the same time the 15% (for most)-30% cut seems to match every other platform
However to be clear, that percent is in the same area that game consoles and I believe Steam (someone correct me?) charge. And we accept that. When the 30% rule for the App Store came down, our smart phones were basically the same as a game console. Most people did not expect these devices to become the central part of all of our lives. At least not in this way.
Now that it has, than sure the percent needs to be lowered and I am not arguing that (I said in another comment the 30% is worth it for me personally but doesn't mean I am ok with it).