I just don’t understand - where the 30% take away by store number is coming from and why giants are fighting tooth and nail to keep it.
Obviously I don’t know economics and costs behind it, but from very uninformed point of view it feels that even 10% would still give quite a profit to stores, even after processor fees.
IIRC Epic Games internally calculated that for their store the break-even point was around 9%. (They mostly run it as a loss leader at a default 12%, but with tons of giveaways and deals, so that percent can go as low as 0%.) So I think somewhere around 15-18% might feel “fair” to me, trying to take into account the value of the platform.
When two entities control essentially the whole "market" for mobile OSes and associated app stores, and use their position to force their app stores on everyone, you no longer have a market. If we just forcibly split Google and Apple into smaller companies with separate app stores then maybe we could see what markets would do.
But the problem is that when everyone has gravitated to the two biggest app stores, there's no scope for market competition. The point is not just to have third-party app stores, it's to not have huge app stores that capture the whole user base.
"There is no market effect"? Why do the market effects disappear if some of the players don't play completely according to the desires of other players? Why couldn't it be that the optimum includes some amount of fee dodging?
You didn't answer my question. Why can't the optimum include some fee dodging? I agree that the app stores provide value to the developers, but it's also true that apps provide value to Google and Apple. If no one developed any apps, no one would use iOS or Android. Therefore it's possible that Google and Apple benefit more from an app that dodges fees but brings in users than from neither having the app nor those users.
They created a market and they are charging to be on the market. If you're saying "I want to be on the market but by my own rules" that's not a free market effect, it's breaking a contract.
If you say "fine, I'll go on another app store" then that is a free market in action - but good luck getting anyone to download your game.
Retail stores have always charged 30-40% so that's where the number comes from. You can see the exact breakdown in Europe: it's x% for payment processing, y% for app review/downloads/updates, and z% for recommendations etc. They're fighting to hold on to it because it's billions of dollars of profit. Obviously the app stores do not need or deserve 30% but that argument could apply to any profitable company.
One of their last Symbian phones, the N8 (and if you ask me, one of the most beautiful ever designed), sold very well, some 4 million units! But the ground was shifting so much, that even that couldn’t save them.
The fact you're thinking 10% is good enough is why you're not part of the cohort which is driven to be 100+ billionaires, more powerful than states, people
Maybe we need to limit them a bit more, but there's an evolutionary factor or purpose or something at play. I remember a psychology lecture where they talked about it and how in hunter and gather societies most people would be content for a while when they found a good gathering area, they would hang out and gather the food and eat. But they had certain people that didn't want to stay they just wanted to move on to find the next better gathering area and would practically be forced to eat and carry enough food before they could keep searching. Those people were important too, and I feel that's the psychology of billionaires today. There is never enough they don't even actually care about the bounty it's just the idea of getting more and more.
I also remember an experiment found that something like 8% of people swerve over to purposely hit turtles on the shoulder of the road. I would be much more interested in identifying and containing those people.
I don't think most billionaires are the people seeking new berry patches. At best they once found a great berry patch, now they mostly are paying other people to find berries for them
All I'm saying is that if there aren't enough berries to go around, maybe we should be taking a long look at the people hoarding enough berries to feed thousands of other people
If you want absolute freedom for people to exploit society for their personal gain, then I want absolute freedom to use a brick to cave in the skulls of anyone who behaves that way
The fact is that any decent society has restrictions on absolute freedom for good reasons
There's a long gap between "absolute freedom" and "you have personally been deemed too greedy to operate a business" (by whom is the most dangerous factor)
Obviously I don’t know economics and costs behind it, but from very uninformed point of view it feels that even 10% would still give quite a profit to stores, even after processor fees.