Comment by bombcar
2 years ago
The consoles are the most obvious example, but there are other things, too.
Perhaps the "best" counter argument is the Mac App Store and Steam - 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.
People care much more about what is or is not permitted, not where the money goes.
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.
> 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.)
In fairness, from everything I've heard the Mac App Store is really not doing well.