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Was the store's cut really lower back in the boxes-on-shelves days?

The margin on digital sales is a lot better than physical sales, and every large publisher has been pushing the transition to digital as fast as possible. A publisher is getting ~70% on every digital sale compared to ~50% for physical.

I think a major complaint is that for 30%, people expect some sort of marketing, but really it's nothing more than payment processing and download.

A store literally provided a box on a shelf for browsing and brought in customers to browse. The digital "stores" don't offer much in that respect.

Steam has the promoted carousel, "players like you" suggestions, curator suggestions, the discovery queue, reviews, new release announcements, the startup splash, seasonal sales, wishlist alerts, screenshots and promo videos...

It doesn't perform the same hard editorial winnowing as brick and mortar, no, and in a digital world it's hard to see why it should. The long tail has fans too and they were terribly served by the old system. But it's hardly fair to call Steam marketing "nothing".

Edit to add: the digital stores also provide an update channel, something which had no real equivalent back in the brick and mortar world. That has real business value.

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