Comment by ohdeargodno

> Designing entire hardware

Designing the hardware does not entitle you to extracting more money from anything. If you don't want to lose money on your hardware, don't sell it at a loss. (Which Apple isn't doing, nor are any of the Android device manufacturers.) I haven't seen Dyson try to extract 30% off of every hairdressing salon that uses their dryers.

> software, and backend platforms

Are made to attract users on the platform. With the intention of making money from it after. Cool. Quick question, do you pay for Chrome, or Firefox ? They invest hundreds of millions of dollars every year into it, how dare you not pay them 30% of every purchase you make online ?

> investing billions of dollars into them every year is not nothing

The billions have been invested initially. The ongoing costs of running the App Store / Play Store are not even close to a billion, especially not for Google that already owns all the network infrastructure necessary to run it.

>If what these companies built took no work, try making your own platform to release games on and see how little work it truly needs.

Sure, that's very simple: take any open publishing store on Android, and ask yourself why noone uses them for games delivery. I'll even add a hint: it's not because they don't offer diff based assets upgrades.