If MS charges 30% for doing almost nothing but putting an XBox game in the store, that's also a scam. I don't know enough about it to know if they provide othe

If MS charges 30% for doing almost nothing but putting an XBox game in the store, that's also a scam. I don't know enough about it to know if they provide other services like matchmaking, etc. for that. The rest of those seem reasonable to me. The publisher is basically your marketing budget, right? Retailers' shelf space has a cost and is limited physically. They could be using the same space to sell literally anything, so I think whatever the price of that ends up being it's probably a result of competition across a ton of industries. The licensing fee is ok too IMO since the console makers take a huge risk producing and selling the consoles as cheaply as possible. It also sounds like a well known, flat fee, not a cut of ongoing revenue. The problem for me is when digital stores with a tiny marginal cost of distribution think it's reasonable for them to capture a huge portion of lifetime revenue. They're not doing that much. It's bad value and the only reason they can make it work is because they're in a position that lets them act like an extortionist. It's the cut of every single transaction for the lifetime of a customer that people think is unfair. Ex: $27 to a publisher is fine if it's a one time fee and they're providing $27 of value by advertising etc.. They could never ask for 40% of revenue for all future transactions like DLC and microtransactions because there's enough competition that no one would use them and they'd go out of business.