Comment by charcircuit 13 hours ago
>while doing nothing
Designing entire hardware, software, and backend platforms and investing billions of dollars into them every year is not nothing. If what these companies built took no work, try making your own platform to release games on and see how little work it truly needs.
> Designing entire hardware
Designing the hardware does not entitle you to extracting more money from anything. If you don't want to lose money on your hardware, don't sell it at a loss. (Which Apple isn't doing, nor are any of the Android device manufacturers.) I haven't seen Dyson try to extract 30% off of every hairdressing salon that uses their dryers.
> software, and backend platforms
Are made to attract users on the platform. With the intention of making money from it after. Cool. Quick question, do you pay for Chrome, or Firefox ? They invest hundreds of millions of dollars every year into it, how dare you not pay them 30% of every purchase you make online ?
> investing billions of dollars into them every year is not nothing
The billions have been invested initially. The ongoing costs of running the App Store / Play Store are not even close to a billion, especially not for Google that already owns all the network infrastructure necessary to run it.
>If what these companies built took no work, try making your own platform to release games on and see how little work it truly needs.
Sure, that's very simple: take any open publishing store on Android, and ask yourself why noone uses them for games delivery. I'll even add a hint: it's not because they don't offer diff based assets upgrades.
Indeed—try to make a platform where a solo developer can create an app that is then distributed to almost the entire planet, where anyone can find, buy and install it (with a nearly 100% guarantee that it will work) with a click, and get paid for it without having to open branches in every jurisdiction and deliver paperwork for N different, constantly changing tax regimes.