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.
