19 ms·

For a full view of not just what an executive says, but Microsoft's actions here: The Windows app store gives a 95/5 cut to developers, as long as the download

by 013a 6y ago

For a full view of not just what an executive says, but Microsoft's actions here: The Windows app store gives a 95/5 cut to developers, as long as the download happened from an external link to the page. If the discovery happened via an app store search or marketing within the app store, that cut changes to 85/15 [1] I would also like to find some revenue split data for the Xbox store, though I imagine that's far more nuanced, with many different contracts for different third parties. If I'm an indie developer with no negotiating power, is that a 70/30? [1] https://9to5mac.com/2019/03/06/microsoft-store-revenue-share/ https://9to5mac.com/2019/03/06/microsoft-store-revenue-share...

theNJR 6y ago
I never knew that. How incredibly ... reasonable. Really changes your UA math in a good way.
hn_check 6y ago
We should note that the Windows app store is a massive failure, so Microsoft's actions as an also-ran are going to be "benevolent" and "open" because they have nothing to lose. Browse through the derelict mess that is the app store to understand just how miserable their state is. The overwhelming bulk of sales in the Windows app store are Microsoft's own products. Recall when Microsoft was lagging far behind the other cool instant messenger kids, and was loudly crying for open interoperability and cooperation. Once MSN Messenger had a foothold, it slammed shut and their noble goals dissolved. Microsoft is certainly not alone in this self-serving morality -- it is a logical position -- but they do have a lot of examples in their corporate history. Apparently the Microsoft employees are out in force today. It's also interesting how making an observation like this -- that the Windows app store is a failure -- leads people to pigeonhole. As I sit here on my Lenova 720 in Windows 10 Pro cross compiling an app between Windows and Linux in the WSL...hurrrRRRRrrr)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 013a 6y ago
  I would be willing to bet a non-zero amount of money that, much like the average Hacker News reader would woefully under-estimate how much .Net code is out there being written today, so to would we woefully underestimate how much usage the Microsoft Store gets.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    It's probably higher than you think for consumers, mostly due to XBox/Minecraft. Enterprises? Forget it.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      Which is partly Microsoft's fault because Enterprises should have easily embraced the Microsoft Store for Business (emphasis on the "for Business" as a part of the name following one of Microsoft's more confusing name patterns; it's a separate more customizable "store front" than the "not for Business" consumer store): it's a lot nicer UX than System Center's "just ported from Silverlight" Vista-era ugliness, has more features than System Center (including easier license management for applications sold on the non-Business store), and better install technology. In one of Microsoft's many "forgot to build a bridge" problems with the Store, they forgot to provide easy upgrades from System Center, especially for the then (too many) companies still supporting Windows 7 side-by-side Windows 10 installs up until the security support deadline. It's probably still too early to tell, but App Management for Microsoft Teams, updates to MSIX, and better Windows 7 compatibility for companies over-paying EOL extended security support agreements, at least for Microsoft/Office 365 companies, has opened the door to enterprises re-evaluating the Microsoft Store for Business. It might actually replace System Center like it was intended to, just years late.
  - fr2null 6y ago
    While I agree that the windows store is used more than some people might think, it is used nowhere near as much as the Play or App Store are, and is nowhere near as import for Windows as the others are for their respective platforms.
    - 6y ago
- kyriakos 6y ago
  i wouldn't call it a failure i actually bought a couple of apps and I don't usually buy apps (in the past 5-6 years I think i bought another 3 on play store). its just that windows app delivery is traditionally done via application's website so it never took off especially cause at first it only catered for UWP stuff.
- toyg 6y ago
  Upvoted for the attitude (of course MS's calls are entirely self-serving) but it's hard to know how much of a "failure" the Windows Store is - I tend to use it and recommend it as a safer-than-average port of call for the less skilled.
- teddyh 6y ago
  Even earlier than MSN Messenger was the RTF document format, promoted by Microsoft as an interoperability format to allow them to co-exist with Microsoft Word in a market dominated by WordPerfect, WordStar, etc. And of course Microsoft dropped RTF like a hot potato when they managed to use their new Microsoft Windows platform to leverage into a huge market advantage for Microsoft Word. Other vendors were obviously initially reluctant to spend enormous resources to port their software to Windows, a competitor’s platform, but Microsoft could spend hugely on developent of Microsoft Word for Windows, making it very impressive graphically, and when the Windows platform was successful, all other word processing software vendors were left behind, forced to play catch-up. I also remember hearing that Microsoft were using secret Windows APIs to get nice things like toolbar icons in color, not available to non-Microsoft companies.
  - gtk40 6y ago
    It's interesting RTF is discontinued when it is still the default format on the included word processor in Windows. I checked WordPad on Windows 10 and it still saves to RTF by default, though it supports docx and odt as well.
    - magicalhippo 6y ago
      Unless they changed something the last couple of years, WordPad is just a wrapper around the Windows rich edit common control[1], which as its name implies, is based around RTF[2]. [1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/rich-edit-controls https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/rich... [2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/em-settextex https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/em-s...
    - teddyh 6y ago
      Microsoft is famously backwards-compatible, and support for RTF is still present in those programs which originally had it, like Write, the included word processor in Windows since Windows 1 (replaced in Windows 95 with WordPad, which retains its features). But is RTF usable for its original purpose – interoperability? Can you open a reasonably complex Word document and save it as RTF, and then open it in LibreOffice? Can you save an RTF document from LibreOffice and open it in Microsoft Word without loss? Is Microsoft working to maintain RTF interoperability in order to promote cross-program document compatibility? No. To quote Wikipedia, “Microsoft has discontinued enhancements to the RTF specification. New features in Word 2010 and later versions will not save properly to the RTF format.”¹ 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rich_Text_Format&oldid=957899109#History https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rich_Text_Format&...
- theonemind 6y ago
  I don't necessarily disagree with your analysis of Microsoft's motivation. However, it does nothing to change my support of it. The 30% Apple takes for its App Store seem a bit much for a middle man.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Compared to what industry? Retail and the wholesaler? The Kindle? Google Play? Steam? Spotify?
gjsman-1000 6y ago
Remember though that until BUILD 2018, the revenue split on the Windows Store (even though it had long been a failure at that point) was 70/30. At BUILD 2018, they changed it to the 85/15 and 95/5 as a last-ditch effort, although it took until December 2018/January 2019 to finally roll out that change.
- rapind 6y ago
  Interesting. So it's a play to increase adoption / apps for their store. If successful though, do they just raise their cut back up?
  - masklinn 6y ago
    Chances are pretty good since the Xbox Games Store remains at 30%. And 5% is very, very low even for low-cut stores: apparently Itch is whatever the dev chooses, Epic is 12, Humble Store is 15% + 10% to charity or as store credit and Steam is 30 sliding down to 20 (above 50m sales). Short of individual agreements I think everything else is 30% flat.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      > Xbox Games Store remains at 30% I believe it is a lot more complicated than that. Non-game Apps on the Xbox see the same splits as on Windows (the 85/15 and 95/5 based on "marketing"). The 70/30 is offered to game developers that want to do only the bare minimum Xbox integration possible to get on the platform, almost every other scale and publisher agreement is presumably covered under NDA of one sort or another. Some rumors are that the sliding scale is today competitive to Steam's (and better than Sony's, maybe? Sony's seems even more NDA encumbered), with a lot of complicated other factors such as Xbox Play Anywhere titles and allowing Xbox Game Pass rotations are rumored to get substantial cut discounts based on the shifting whims of Microsoft's marketing teams.
  - rch 6y ago
    I think you've pretty much captured the general post-Ballmer strategy.
Danieru 6y ago
) If I'm an indie developer with no negotiating power, is that a 70/30? That rate is under nda. What I can say is I've never heard of big studios getting a better rate in the first place. As in real estate you can get upfront money, marketing commitments, or guarantees, but landlords/platforms are loath to give out better rates.
- LanceH 6y ago
  I don't know about the rate, but sometimes they get cash up front to be on a console, or to be exclusively on a console.
Spooky23 6y ago
The Windows app store also isn't very popular. I'd attribute that less to a sense of fairness and more to a way to drive adoption. Microsoft has deployed all sorts of carrots and sticks to try to drive more adoption. In the early Windows 10 days, you could secure $500k-$2.5M in services investment even for internal apps at a not so huge scale.
- ceo_tim_crook 6y ago
  It feels pretty widely used to me, I mean yeah slow start and all but that's to be expected
ksec 6y ago
It seems every thread there is a comment on console. They are not the same. Console is a loss leader, or sold at cost. No one on planet Earth could make an exact replica of Playstation 5 or Xbox 5 for discount. And that is excluding all the IP, R&D and Software / OS Development involved. The 30% is where they make the money. And personally that is a fair share. Microsoft also make their profits via selling OS to OEM and Business. The current App Store model are there to help distribution of Software. And the 5% are essentially zero considering you will have to paid ~3% for credit processing any way. i.e Linking to the App Store frees you the burden and duty of hosting yourself for free. Edit: And if you dont mind share why you downvote.
- pico303 6y ago
  I disagree. It doesn’t matter if the company makes money on the device or not. A device with a walled off App Store, be it a PS4, Xbox, Switch, or an iPhone, operates in the exact same murky legal waters. MS better be careful, or they could wind up breaking their own console’s ability to limit access to their store. Why shouldn’t Steam or Epic be allowed to sell games to an Xbox customer?
  - ksec 6y ago
    So you are suggesting console maker to sell at a loss while others come in and paid nothing for using their platform? Even EPIC have no problem with the console business model.
    - baddox 6y ago
      Or, maybe don’t sell at a loss?
      - ksec 6y ago
        You then end up with no body buying the console. It would cost $999, and everyone would have problem justify that price tag. And the total market would shrink, which means for Game developers their Games would also have to be priced higher in order to make a return of investment. Normally that wouldn't work because pricing it higher also means less people are willing to buy, so the solution would be to lower the cost of making games. And less ridiculously expensive AAA titles.
wayneftw 6y ago
> The Windows app store... Thank you for saying "app store" instead of "App Store". If you dictate this sentence on an iPhone it comes out as "The windows App Store". In other words, the people that work for Apple are so petty that they won't capitalize the word "windows" even if it was preceded by the word "Microsoft" but they always capitalize the words "App Store" because they insist that they have a trademark on this very generic term even though they really don't [0]. According to them, the generic phrase for app store is "online store" [1], which is hilarious because nobody ever says that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_store#%22App_Store%22_trademark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_store#%22App_Store%22_trad... [1] https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/appletmlist.html https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...
- robertoandred 6y ago
  Why do Apple haters insist on lying? Of course it capitalizes it.
- usaphp 6y ago
  > they won't capitalize the word "windows" even if it was preceded by the word "Microsoft" Typing Microsoft Windows from my iPhone. It does capitalize it properly...
  - joshmanders 6y ago
    Yup, iOS I believe learns your typings over time and chooses what you use the most. So if you talk about Windows a lot and capitalize it, it will start suggesting it, but if you talk about your house windows more, it'll lowercase it.
  - wayneftw 6y ago
    Yeah, but not when you dictate the same sentence. My main complaint is that they insist that they own "app store" when the courts already told them that they don't.
    - ndesaulniers 6y ago

by 013a 6y ago

theNJR 6y ago

I never knew that. How incredibly ... reasonable. Really changes your UA math in a good way.

hn_check 6y ago

We should note that the Windows app store is a massive failure, so Microsoft's actions as an also-ran are going to be "benevolent" and "open" because they have nothing to lose. Browse through the derelict mess that is the app store to understand just how miserable their state is. The overwhelming bulk of sales in the Windows app store are Microsoft's own products. Recall when Microsoft was lagging far behind the other cool instant messenger kids, and was loudly crying for open interoperability and cooperation. Once MSN Messenger had a foothold, it slammed shut and their noble goals dissolved. Microsoft is certainly not alone in this self-serving morality -- it is a logical position -- but they do have a lot of examples in their corporate history. Apparently the Microsoft employees are out in force today. It's also interesting how making an observation like this -- that the Windows app store is a failure -- leads people to pigeonhole. As I sit here on my Lenova 720 in Windows 10 Pro cross compiling an app between Windows and Linux in the WSL...hurrrRRRRrrr)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
013a 6y ago
I would be willing to bet a non-zero amount of money that, much like the average Hacker News reader would woefully under-estimate how much .Net code is out there being written today, so to would we woefully underestimate how much usage the Microsoft Store gets.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  It's probably higher than you think for consumers, mostly due to XBox/Minecraft. Enterprises? Forget it.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Which is partly Microsoft's fault because Enterprises should have easily embraced the Microsoft Store for Business (emphasis on the "for Business" as a part of the name following one of Microsoft's more confusing name patterns; it's a separate more customizable "store front" than the "not for Business" consumer store): it's a lot nicer UX than System Center's "just ported from Silverlight" Vista-era ugliness, has more features than System Center (including easier license management for applications sold on the non-Business store), and better install technology. In one of Microsoft's many "forgot to build a bridge" problems with the Store, they forgot to provide easy upgrades from System Center, especially for the then (too many) companies still supporting Windows 7 side-by-side Windows 10 installs up until the security support deadline. It's probably still too early to tell, but App Management for Microsoft Teams, updates to MSIX, and better Windows 7 compatibility for companies over-paying EOL extended security support agreements, at least for Microsoft/Office 365 companies, has opened the door to enterprises re-evaluating the Microsoft Store for Business. It might actually replace System Center like it was intended to, just years late.
- fr2null 6y ago
  While I agree that the windows store is used more than some people might think, it is used nowhere near as much as the Play or App Store are, and is nowhere near as import for Windows as the others are for their respective platforms.
  - 6y ago
kyriakos 6y ago
i wouldn't call it a failure i actually bought a couple of apps and I don't usually buy apps (in the past 5-6 years I think i bought another 3 on play store). its just that windows app delivery is traditionally done via application's website so it never took off especially cause at first it only catered for UWP stuff.
toyg 6y ago
Upvoted for the attitude (of course MS's calls are entirely self-serving) but it's hard to know how much of a "failure" the Windows Store is - I tend to use it and recommend it as a safer-than-average port of call for the less skilled.
teddyh 6y ago
Even earlier than MSN Messenger was the RTF document format, promoted by Microsoft as an interoperability format to allow them to co-exist with Microsoft Word in a market dominated by WordPerfect, WordStar, etc. And of course Microsoft dropped RTF like a hot potato when they managed to use their new Microsoft Windows platform to leverage into a huge market advantage for Microsoft Word. Other vendors were obviously initially reluctant to spend enormous resources to port their software to Windows, a competitor’s platform, but Microsoft could spend hugely on developent of Microsoft Word for Windows, making it very impressive graphically, and when the Windows platform was successful, all other word processing software vendors were left behind, forced to play catch-up. I also remember hearing that Microsoft were using secret Windows APIs to get nice things like toolbar icons in color, not available to non-Microsoft companies.
- gtk40 6y ago
  It's interesting RTF is discontinued when it is still the default format on the included word processor in Windows. I checked WordPad on Windows 10 and it still saves to RTF by default, though it supports docx and odt as well.
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    Unless they changed something the last couple of years, WordPad is just a wrapper around the Windows rich edit common control[1], which as its name implies, is based around RTF[2]. [1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/rich-edit-controls https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/rich... [2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/em-settextex https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/em-s...
  - teddyh 6y ago
    Microsoft is famously backwards-compatible, and support for RTF is still present in those programs which originally had it, like Write, the included word processor in Windows since Windows 1 (replaced in Windows 95 with WordPad, which retains its features). But is RTF usable for its original purpose – interoperability? Can you open a reasonably complex Word document and save it as RTF, and then open it in LibreOffice? Can you save an RTF document from LibreOffice and open it in Microsoft Word without loss? Is Microsoft working to maintain RTF interoperability in order to promote cross-program document compatibility? No. To quote Wikipedia, “Microsoft has discontinued enhancements to the RTF specification. New features in Word 2010 and later versions will not save properly to the RTF format.”¹ 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rich_Text_Format&oldid=957899109#History https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rich_Text_Format&...
theonemind 6y ago
I don't necessarily disagree with your analysis of Microsoft's motivation. However, it does nothing to change my support of it. The 30% Apple takes for its App Store seem a bit much for a middle man.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Compared to what industry? Retail and the wholesaler? The Kindle? Google Play? Steam? Spotify?

gjsman-1000 6y ago

Remember though that until BUILD 2018, the revenue split on the Windows Store (even though it had long been a failure at that point) was 70/30. At BUILD 2018, they changed it to the 85/15 and 95/5 as a last-ditch effort, although it took until December 2018/January 2019 to finally roll out that change.

rapind 6y ago
Interesting. So it's a play to increase adoption / apps for their store. If successful though, do they just raise their cut back up?
- masklinn 6y ago
  Chances are pretty good since the Xbox Games Store remains at 30%. And 5% is very, very low even for low-cut stores: apparently Itch is whatever the dev chooses, Epic is 12, Humble Store is 15% + 10% to charity or as store credit and Steam is 30 sliding down to 20 (above 50m sales). Short of individual agreements I think everything else is 30% flat.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    > Xbox Games Store remains at 30% I believe it is a lot more complicated than that. Non-game Apps on the Xbox see the same splits as on Windows (the 85/15 and 95/5 based on "marketing"). The 70/30 is offered to game developers that want to do only the bare minimum Xbox integration possible to get on the platform, almost every other scale and publisher agreement is presumably covered under NDA of one sort or another. Some rumors are that the sliding scale is today competitive to Steam's (and better than Sony's, maybe? Sony's seems even more NDA encumbered), with a lot of complicated other factors such as Xbox Play Anywhere titles and allowing Xbox Game Pass rotations are rumored to get substantial cut discounts based on the shifting whims of Microsoft's marketing teams.
- rch 6y ago
  I think you've pretty much captured the general post-Ballmer strategy.

Danieru 6y ago

) If I'm an indie developer with no negotiating power, is that a 70/30? That rate is under nda. What I can say is I've never heard of big studios getting a better rate in the first place. As in real estate you can get upfront money, marketing commitments, or guarantees, but landlords/platforms are loath to give out better rates.

LanceH 6y ago
I don't know about the rate, but sometimes they get cash up front to be on a console, or to be exclusively on a console.

Spooky23 6y ago

The Windows app store also isn't very popular. I'd attribute that less to a sense of fairness and more to a way to drive adoption. Microsoft has deployed all sorts of carrots and sticks to try to drive more adoption. In the early Windows 10 days, you could secure $500k-$2.5M in services investment even for internal apps at a not so huge scale.

ceo_tim_crook 6y ago
It feels pretty widely used to me, I mean yeah slow start and all but that's to be expected

ksec 6y ago

It seems every thread there is a comment on console. They are not the same. Console is a loss leader, or sold at cost. No one on planet Earth could make an exact replica of Playstation 5 or Xbox 5 for discount. And that is excluding all the IP, R&D and Software / OS Development involved. The 30% is where they make the money. And personally that is a fair share. Microsoft also make their profits via selling OS to OEM and Business. The current App Store model are there to help distribution of Software. And the 5% are essentially zero considering you will have to paid ~3% for credit processing any way. i.e Linking to the App Store frees you the burden and duty of hosting yourself for free. Edit: And if you dont mind share why you downvote.

pico303 6y ago
I disagree. It doesn’t matter if the company makes money on the device or not. A device with a walled off App Store, be it a PS4, Xbox, Switch, or an iPhone, operates in the exact same murky legal waters. MS better be careful, or they could wind up breaking their own console’s ability to limit access to their store. Why shouldn’t Steam or Epic be allowed to sell games to an Xbox customer?
- ksec 6y ago
  So you are suggesting console maker to sell at a loss while others come in and paid nothing for using their platform? Even EPIC have no problem with the console business model.
  - baddox 6y ago
    Or, maybe don’t sell at a loss?
    - ksec 6y ago
      You then end up with no body buying the console. It would cost $999, and everyone would have problem justify that price tag. And the total market would shrink, which means for Game developers their Games would also have to be priced higher in order to make a return of investment. Normally that wouldn't work because pricing it higher also means less people are willing to buy, so the solution would be to lower the cost of making games. And less ridiculously expensive AAA titles.

wayneftw 6y ago

> The Windows app store... Thank you for saying "app store" instead of "App Store". If you dictate this sentence on an iPhone it comes out as "The windows App Store". In other words, the people that work for Apple are so petty that they won't capitalize the word "windows" even if it was preceded by the word "Microsoft" but they always capitalize the words "App Store" because they insist that they have a trademark on this very generic term even though they really don't [0]. According to them, the generic phrase for app store is "online store" [1], which is hilarious because nobody ever says that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_store#%22App_Store%22_trademark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_store#%22App_Store%22_trad... [1] https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/appletmlist.html https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...

robertoandred 6y ago
Why do Apple haters insist on lying? Of course it capitalizes it.
usaphp 6y ago
> they won't capitalize the word "windows" even if it was preceded by the word "Microsoft" Typing Microsoft Windows from my iPhone. It does capitalize it properly...
- joshmanders 6y ago
  Yup, iOS I believe learns your typings over time and chooses what you use the most. So if you talk about Windows a lot and capitalize it, it will start suggesting it, but if you talk about your house windows more, it'll lowercase it.
- wayneftw 6y ago
  Yeah, but not when you dictate the same sentence. My main complaint is that they insist that they own "app store" when the courts already told them that they don't.
  - ndesaulniers 6y ago