Is it even fair to call it “doing business with a company” when you’re basically just probing an opaque automated system? Sure, if you’re a supplier or say large advertiser, perhaps you are “doing business” but this sounds more like fighting for scraps together with a mix of honest and dishonest players hoping that the anti-fraud gods show you mercy and bless you with rev-share.

Is Play Store or Steam any better?

All these stores are basically little monopolies with zero incentive to not suck. They also suck from a user point of view. Search is terrible, they’re full of shovelware, etc.

Steam has been, and for now continues to be, much better.

IMO this is directly due to Gabe Newell's leadership. Taking an attitude of "piracy is a service problem", and proceeding to offer such a good service that it's preferable to pirating, results in a great service for everyone involved.

Whether this will outlast GabeN's tenure as CEO remains to be seen, but for now my understanding is that both users and developers are overwhelmingly happy with Steam.

> Taking an attitude of "piracy is a service problem", and proceeding to offer such a good service that it's preferable to pirating

My favourite way to phrase this is that "steam is the most anti-piracy store available. With piracy, you play games you didn't buy. On steam, you buy games you never play."

Steam isn't a monopoly, it provides ease of catalog and access. smaller companies can still sell on their own website or any other number of storefronts. The gatekeeper here now is generating MS signed apps.

> The gatekeeper here now is generating MS signed apps.

And Valve saw that coming some time ago, and invested in making both Steam and the games sold through it run on Linux.

Steam will moderate or at least put a notice when a game is being review bombed for things unrelated to the game itself, such as a controversy with the developer.

https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-takes-steps-against-steam-revi...

Though sometimes they do that when the reviews are about the game itself.

Sometimes the reviews are about the game, but they're being left because that's the thing to do according to the internet that day. So a legitimate grievance but blown of proportion due to factors outside the game.

I don't think it's unreasonable to flag that.

Play Store is the same level of crap as Apple App store (experience across multiple projects for like 10+ years).

No experience on Steam but a few indie-game devs I know think it's OK. I've not heard them complain like App-devs on those phone-stores.