Well, as magic and effortless as it may seem for bytes to arrive un-tampered-with on your device in exchange for an electronic transaction that securely sends money from you to the company that produced the content or software ... It is not magic. It is in fact quite astonishingly complicated.
If you add in the ongoing effort to produce and maintain all the software that operates the hardware, as well as the software that enables other companies to develop for the hardware, the cost is clearly not confined to the process of shopping for an app on a store, but spread out before and after that on an ongoing basis. It's a lot more than the "delivery method" they are securing.
If you want a different percentage applied "across the board" and mandated by law, then apparently you believe you know the proper percentage better than the operator of the store and the hardware. Are you prepared for the federal government to nationalize large chunks of virtually every large tech company in the nation, and have the government run and pay for that infrastructure? Because if not ... aren't you just robbing Peter to pay Paul? They'd still need to operate their pipelines but they wouldn't be able to set their cost. A bureaucrat would be coming in to tell it to them.
Epic Games is not gasping for funds. And I don't know if you've noticed this, but over the past 15 years, properly secured software purchasing platforms running on properly secured hardware have created a straight-up renaissance in software development, because piracy used to be ubiquitous, and brick-and-mortar software stores charge humiliating percentages, like 50% at rock bottom, usually 70%. There's a good reason every single gaming platform has moved to internet distribution. Their developers prefer it because they were being fleeced by software store middlemen stocking cartridges on shelves.
It's worth keeping in mind that this collection of marketplaces is, on average, about a decade old. It's rather early to declare that only government intervention can "restore" "fairness", I think.
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Date: 2020-08-28 11:53 pm (UTC)If you add in the ongoing effort to produce and maintain all the software that operates the hardware, as well as the software that enables other companies to develop for the hardware, the cost is clearly not confined to the process of shopping for an app on a store, but spread out before and after that on an ongoing basis. It's a lot more than the "delivery method" they are securing.
If you want a different percentage applied "across the board" and mandated by law, then apparently you believe you know the proper percentage better than the operator of the store and the hardware. Are you prepared for the federal government to nationalize large chunks of virtually every large tech company in the nation, and have the government run and pay for that infrastructure? Because if not ... aren't you just robbing Peter to pay Paul? They'd still need to operate their pipelines but they wouldn't be able to set their cost. A bureaucrat would be coming in to tell it to them.
Epic Games is not gasping for funds. And I don't know if you've noticed this, but over the past 15 years, properly secured software purchasing platforms running on properly secured hardware have created a straight-up renaissance in software development, because piracy used to be ubiquitous, and brick-and-mortar software stores charge humiliating percentages, like 50% at rock bottom, usually 70%. There's a good reason every single gaming platform has moved to internet distribution. Their developers prefer it because they were being fleeced by software store middlemen stocking cartridges on shelves.
It's worth keeping in mind that this collection of marketplaces is, on average, about a decade old. It's rather early to declare that only government intervention can "restore" "fairness", I think.