Maybe flip that around: iOS and macOS sales (even if just via the 'store') seem to be plenty for developers and complete studios to build entire businesses on o

Maybe flip that around: iOS and macOS sales (even if just via the 'store') seem to be plenty for developers and complete studios to build entire businesses on or at the very least invest and get a functional ROI for a business to run on. If that works, then what do those developers on the other 'stores' do that makes it so hard? Almost all games are effectively assets + scripts executed by a portable runtime. The only reason you might get in to trouble using that portable runtime effectively is when you start hacking on that level and reducing the portability to a point where it no longer works. That's a choice, not an inevitability. As a bonus (like posted earlier); in software engineering you get to discover a lot of issues by writing abstractions (to support portability) that you otherwise wouldn't be able to catch ahead of time. And no, day-1 patches are not the solution, they are the symptom of the problem.