You think Steam puts in more effort than providing graphics APIs, system frameworks for everything from networking to controller handling, UI libraries, educational sessions and security critical updates?
Like, one may argue that the 30% isn’t valid (and it’s 15% for the majority of devs) but to say Steam does more is absurd.
I’m curious if people who hold this opinion have actually been involved in the process of releasing apps on either platform.
And to be clear, I know valve does contribute to gaming on Linux but that’s single digit market share, so is definitely a far cry from the 30%.
Those APIs are paid for by the owner of the phone. Charging developers (and the consumer) 30% to allow someone to distribute an app is utterly ridiculous. Framing it like Apple built these things and you are only paying 30% is in deep sycophant territory.
1. You assume they’re paid for by the owner of the phone. That’s not necessarily reflective of a companies income stream. Microsoft also charge for commercial access to their SDKs for example, and every company has different business models.
2. Then what does steam offer for 30% that isn’t just distribution? The majority of steam games do not use Valves tooling for matchmaking or their engine.
3. Can you go without name calling? Or are you that childish that it’s the only way you can feel like you have the upper hand in a conversation?
4. I’m not defending a 30% cut and already mentioned that. I’m saying that saying steam offers more for the 30% is absurd.
> That’s not necessarily reflective of a companies income stream
It is. Anything MS or Apple ever charged for SDKs and development tools was just peanuts compared to their other income streams.
At the end of the day open consumer platforms benefit much, much more from maximizing the amount of 3rd party software that’s available on them than from anything else.
> Then what does steam offer for 30% that isn’t just distribution?
Discoverability, consumer protection, relatively very good UX etc. of course that is much more valuable to smaller/medium developers than to companies like Epic/EA/etc.
Even the App Store and the 30% cut was a great deal for developers and consumers when it came out initially compared to all the alternatives available at the time.
The issue is that at this point Valve/Steam has to actually provide real value to consumers/developers and innovate. Apple can just do nothing and collect free money (consequently the App Store itself sucks immensely as an app/platform) since they don’t have to compete with anyone anymore. What are you going to do? Buy an Android? : D
> Microsoft also charge for commercial access to their SDKs ...
Is that a new thing, or just for specific products? Asking because I've previously used some of their Azure SDK stuff before and that didn't seem to have a charge for SDK access.
Microsoft have charged for non-individual use for longer than they’ve had the free version. I should have perhaps used commercial non-individual use rather than just commercial.
Meanwhile Xcode is free and has been since the Project Builder days on Next.
I’m not personally saying one is better value or not. Just that the companies have put different values on different parts of their developer flow for many decades now, and one can’t simply say that the money comes from a single source.
The SDK's for modern MS products generally seem to be freely available. Maybe it's only their legacy offerings that have some charge to it?
If that's actually the distinction, then my guess is that it's simply "no cost access means higher numbers of developers using them" for the new stuff.
Whereas the legacy stuff probably would cause internal bun-fight's to happen if they changed their licensing model. ;)
Hmm maybe you’re only familiar with their azure SDKs ;)
What makes Windows not modern? The whole point of my comments is that different business eases have different funding.
Azure is a separate business for Microsoft than windows development.
I’m going to guess based on your range of comments that you’re primarily a devops and web developer and not a native app or game developer?
Which leads back to my first response to you: I don’t think you’re actually familiar with developing things for distribution on either steam or an App Store.
Xcode is free if you don't consider the platform cost of needing to have only apple hardware to use it, however (generally) the hardware is cheaper than what MS charges for MSDN/VSE.
Different companies fund things differently and put up different barriers.
Again, for the umpteenth time, I am not making a VALUE judgement. I am just saying they all do things differently and without knowledge of their books, nobody here can say what funds what internally
Did MS ever make any significant amounts of money from selling VS/MSDN compared to how much the availability f 3rd part software benefited Windows sales/increasing market share?
Also you didn’t actually necessarily need it to publish software on Windows.
While if you want to develop for iOS (and even macOS these days) you still need to pay the $100/300 yearly fee (which is there entirely for gatekeeping and not an actual income stream).
To your question, that’s exactly my point. Without access to a companies books, you don’t know how they fund things. Take this as my response to your other reply as well.
You don’t know if Microsoft chose to fund certain parts of their development with the profits from VS enterprise or not. None of us do.
Even, for arguments sake, if we say that they could make it all free and still afford it, it would still affect priorities of what gets developed.
Again, I’m not saying one is right or wrong. I’m just arguing that it’s a lot more nuanced than any of the comments here suggest. Nobody has enough facts outside the companies bookkeeping and leadership to make these hardline claims.
> Without access to a companies books, you don’t know how they fund things
I’m highly certain about that. Regardless also I don’t think most companies work like that. More or less all revenue at least from the in specific divisions like Windows or Azure is going to the same pot.
> Nobody has enough facts outside the companies
Well.. same argument applies to > 90% of all stuff people say on online forums like HN and makes most online discussions entirely meaningless.
Regardless we can still reason about a lot of things with a fairly high degree of confidence without complete certainty.
> we say that they could make it all free and still afford it, it would still affect priorities of what gets developed.
Yet it’s the direction MS has been taking over the last 10-15+ years. They have invested massive amounts of money into products which are either effectively free for most users or don’t really generate enough direct revenue to fund them like GitHub.
> You think Steam puts in more effort than providing graphics APIs, system frameworks for everything from networking to controller handling, UI libraries, educational sessions and security critical updates?
Sure. But this has absolutely nothing to do with fairness.
They charge 30% because they can and because developers have no other options.
Anyway consumers paying for HW/OS are the ones that are funding the development of those tools/apis etc. Apple, MS, etc. provided all of that stuff for free (or a nominal fee) for decades because they always needed software developers more than the other way around. Any platform without third party apps would be mostly worthless.
Apple is in an interesting spot because when they released the app store initially 30% was a very good deal compared to how much it cost to publish apps on other phones.
Without an insight into how a company pays for its RnD internally, one cannot conclusively say that the consumers are the ones who pay for the HW/OS.
I’ll also reiterate that the majority of devs pay 15% now on the App Store. Not 30%.
And then this gets into every other market choice as well if we’re saying all the stuff is paid for up front by the consumer.
What does Steam offer for its 30%? The majority of games on steam don’t use any steam services unlike apps on the AppStore. Valve doesn’t do educational sessions for developers or provide support for system issues. So is Steam not a terrible deal at double the cost?
But then we get to consoles, where the consumer not only pays for the device but also pays a subscription for online play. If we say that Sony/Microsoft are funded up front by the consumer and then recurring for online fees, then what the value to developers for the 30% (in addition to devkit costs)?
I’m not defending apples cut here. That’s a subjective argument that goes nowhere, but I am saying: if we say Apple’s cut is unfair, why are we okay with the others that are arguably more? And why do people defend the other marketplaces ?
> I’ll also reiterate that the majority of devs pay 15% now on the App Store. Not 30%.
Probably not relative to total revenue. But it doesn’t really change much. To be fair I don’t have a problem at all with 15% or even 30% but with the fact that Apple is running a lite extortion racket by not allowing any competition.
> how a company pays for its RnD internally, one cannot conclusively say that the consumers are the ones who pay for the HW/OS
I don’t think the exact nuances of internal accounting (even if they do it this way instead of just putting all revenue into a single “pot”) really changes anything.
It’s pretty clear (based on all evidence from the last 30+ years) that platforms can generate significantly higher revenue by maximizing the amount of third party software and by giving away development tools/etc. for free or significantly below cost than by trying to extract as much money as feasible possible from 3rd part developers (and it wasn’t a huge concern anyway since all major desktop platforms have always been mostly open)
> why are we okay with the others that are arguably more? And why do people defend the other marketplaces ?
IMHO mainly because Apple has a very large market share and is effectively a monopoly in certain ways.
If you want to develop a mobile app/game you can’t not make it available on iOS. It’s just not an option. This gives Apple a huge amount of pricing power and effectively allows them to exploit developers and consumers by generating a surplus they don’t have to work for.
It a scale of course but no other company is quite in the same position. Steam can lose most of their customers if they stop providing value. Even Google is in a much weaker position (consequently they don’t have such strict controls on iAPs) since phone makers can (and have) make their own app stores, side loading etc. I think consoles are closers but they are purely an entertainment product with a lot of alternatives and substitutes.
Overall I personally believe consumer surplus should most dwarf everything else to an extent. Therefore I don’t see any reason why can’t we apply “arbitrary” rules/standards to corporations based on their size and influence on the market.
What do you mean by “only”? You can really expect companies to behave irrationally. Pretty much every company funding Linux development do it because they expect this to benefit them somehow.
"I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we’ll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. If that’s true, then it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality." - Gabe Newell
Yeah, the existence of SteamOS, Steam Machines and eventually Proton were a hedge against Microsoft’s perceived shift into locked down distribution .
I think a lot of folk have a hard time reconciling that there may have been non-altruistic intentions behind something that is enjoyed today.
Similarly, Steam itself was a hedge against physical distribution to cut out the middleman. It wasn’t originally envisioned as a store for anyone but Valve.
But here we are today, and both have positive side effects that actually have outlived the original design.
Steam Deck is mostly standard Linux (although most stuff Valve does is gets merged into the kernel/free packages etc. so it’s hard to disentangle the these, but not exactly comparable to building a platform almost from scratch)
> the problem is that facebook, a very rich company, get charged 0.
Just like every other company using the same business model (i.e. ads instead of IAP)?
What I’m suggesting more than asking is, when you say that open source has lifted their development burden, it makes it sound like it’s a unidirectional taking.
And sure, some might be freeloading. But they also do contribute quite a bit to open source. https://opensource.apple.com/
I know your response was more to correct the “developed from scratch” but I still think it’s important to note that it’s not unidirectional. Even in the development of their own platforms, you can find old Usenet discussions of how they were feeding things back. I think they could have gone their own route but Unix compatibility was important.
The history of Next, Apple, and the open source community is very intertwined and unfortunately cannot be reduced so easily.
Webkit (and subsequently Blink/Chromium) and LLVM especially did have a significant impact though.
> didn't build their platform "almost from scratch".
Well, no, it’s of course relative I meant that compared to Valve/Steam they did. And it’s not like iOS/macOS is just a collection of open source components slapped together with some small proprietary layer on top. At this point it’s mostly proprietary stuff they had to build effectively from scratch over the years with some open source components here and there.
Literally the last section of my comment addressed that. It’s a single digit market share. How does that play into windows/mac sales then? And what about the decade+ of sales before the SteamDeck?
And in that case, no, Valve didn’t provide all of that. They provided some of it, but AMD did the graphics driver, arch did the OS. Valve still offer less for the 30%. I’m not trying to diminish the effort they put in, but just pointing out the totality of what each store offers behind it is very different.
To your last point, that’s not really relevant to my point. I’m just pushing back on the other person about whether Apple or valve offer more for the 30%. You’re interjecting a completely different argument.
Small/medium developers of course benefit much more from the increased reach/discoverability and PC games have a very different business model than mobile ones of course.
But even for iAP, yes 30% is very step but as a consumer I’m significantly more likely to spend money on an app published by a non-major company if I can use Apple as an intermediary (refunds, subscription management, no cc hassle etc.) I don’t think I’m unique in that way so there is some values we’ll just never know what % it’s actually worth until Apple stop restricting third part stores.
Large companies with a “sticky” user-base of course gain absolutely nothing from it.
Not that I’m trying to defend Apple, on the whole they hardly offer anything useful in return for the 30% to the developers at least because they don’t need to. The App Store as an app/platform is a complete pile of worthless garbage compared to Steam..
> But even for iAP, yes 30% is very step but as a consumer I’m significantly more likely to spend money on an app published by a non-major company if I can use Apple as an intermediary
Such an odd take.
I begrudgingly use a Macbook for work - that is the laptop my employer issued for me. I pay for IntelliJ, because I think it is an excellent IDE.
Following your logic, Apple should somehow bite 30% of that yearly subscription, when in truth, I am a customer of JetBrains, not of Apple.
Your logic would be fine if, and only if, there was the option to buy the game outside of the AppStore, and you still chose to buy it through the AppStore. That proves you prefer going through Apple's channel and are their customer after all.
In the Steam case, especially for small/medium developers, there are multiple options to buy their games - I generally prefer GoG.
