Comment by galkk 16 hours ago
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.
Why wonder whats fair when we could let the market decide?
E-feudalism isn't capitalism.
The gatekeepers are governments without democratic representation. Wondering what fair exploitation looks like is choosing a warped perspective.
That is exactly what happens if they can enforce payments: "you don't get to be on our store if you're bypassing this"
But it isn't what is happening if they are staying on the platform's marketplaces and also bypassing payments. There is no "market" effect there.
Not saying I agree with the 30%, but third party app stores exist. That is the market avenue (and no one uses them).
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.
"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?
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.
30% on the App Store was an answer to Nokia’s Ovi store some 70%!
Maybe we should be identifying those types of people and preventing them from ever controlling anything?
I mean, if we ever want society to improve at all
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
they probably regret not making it higher, they're making mountains of money
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.