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Comment by mentos | Hacker News Reader

As an indie dev this is great news for me. Hoping Valve may come around and just drop the share to 20% for everyone eventually and then I won't have to forgo a salary to keep my 4 person studio alive.

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FWIW you may also be interested in selling directly from your site[0] since you can give away as low as 5%.

[0] https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2018/11/23/selling-gam...

I'd like to see stats, but historically, a game being on Steam brings enough extra sales to make up the steam cut. Now that Steam is overloaded with small games, that may no longer be true, but it's still worth doing a fair comparison.

Valve have shown that they will do nothing unless their hand is forced.

Your best bet is an Epic Store, which will hopefully charge commissions of 8-12%.

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/tim-sweeney-not-sure-why-stea...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/29/app_store_duopoly_3...

Valve and the other large platform holders know that if they abandon 30%, there is no going back. Over time that 'platform tax' will get pushed lower and lower, until it basically reaches the marginal cost of transacting the sale and bandwidth. They are trying to hold that off as long, long as possible. At this rate it could be 100 years though.

1 decade down and iTunes hasn't budged. I suspect your 100yr timeframe is close

Maybe not 100 years but substantial time. More likely, we need a platform transition as an inflection point that creates oppty for new market entrants. Part of new entrant's disruptive value prop may be better rev share terms.

If we stick to software and not tangent to movies/tv (itunes), Apple have absolutely moved some on this issue, since 2016 the App Store now offers 15-85 revenue shares for subscriptions once the user has subscribed for over a year.

Sure it’s slow progress, but it is progress.

> https://www.macrumors.com/2016/06/08/apple-major-app-store-c...

Why? You are now paying a higher rate than the big guys. 20% across the board would have been the right move, not this.

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