In fairness, from everything I've heard the Mac App Store is really not doing well.

> both of which take a big cut, both of which can be "easily" bypassed for many apps, and both of which customers don't really seem to care about from a monetary point of view.

This isn't true. You cannot bypass the stream 30% fee from the consumer side.

Because of practices that stream does, which are arguably anti-competitive, I cannot buy the same exact game, from the game developer's website, and receive a 30% discount.

If such discounts were possible, and it was clearly advertised that I could just get the game for cheaper from a different location, customers would absolutely take that option almost always.

You can bypass the Steam fee as the publisher. Steam's rule is that you can't sell a Steam key for your game somewhere else consistently cheaper than it's sold on Steam. You're free to go wild with pricing, so long as it's on a completely separate distribution platform.

See: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

(At the very least, if they're trying to do a most-favored-nation rule, they're not listing it in their policies and are enforcing it through back-channels.)

Plenty of people complain vocally if you don't release your game on Steam, same deal when a musician doesn't release their music on Spotify.

I think a lot of developers will be surprised how many customers actually side with the convenience of the platform over the actual person creating the value.

Steam value to customer is huge - and it's understandable why people just go to Steam and "don't have to think about it" even when you can get the same item elsewhere, perhaps even cheaper.