4 ms·

What was the cut when software was published physically and sold in a store? 30% is not a lot for being in a store.

jedberg 5y ago
Depends on how you look at it. I used to work in a store that sold software in the 90s. The publisher would sell us the game wholesale and we'd charge retail. So they would sell it to us for $22.50 and set the retail price at $29. So in that sense it was a 22% cut, because we only kept 22% of the sale price. But in most cases the publisher didn't make the game. They were a middleman who took a game from a studio and sold it to us. I have no idea what their cut was between them and the actual maker of the game, but I'll bet it was more than 8%. So in that regard, the app store is a really good deal because it lets developers publish directly to consumers without a middleman.
- grishka 5y ago
  Except physical distribution is expensive by its nature. It involves producing and moving around physical objects — that's material and labor per copy. App store, on the other hand, is a digital distributor. Making a digital copy is so cheap it could as well be free. And even then, not all app developers publish on the app store because they want or need its distribution services. There are many developers who would happily arrange the distribution of their apps themselves, with their own infrastructure they already have anyway, but they have to publish on the app store because that's the only way onto millions of iOS devices. I'll say it again: it should not be legal for a hardware manufacturer to retain any kind of control over hardware after it's been sold.
  - jedberg 5y ago
    I agree with you completely. I think Apple should, at the very least, allow side loading. I was just answering the question about what the cut used to be in the packaged software world.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    This is what they're talking about when they say that productivity gains have gone only to the wealthiest. Buying an album digitally, when every single step in the production and distribution of that album have become an order of magnitude cheaper (outside of labor costs, which somehow remain flat no matter what), costs the same as it did 50 years ago. Every part of application distribution has become cheaper, so you lock down every platform and charge the same percentage.
    - grishka 5y ago
      So what? Why does the price have to remain the same despite technological advancements that are totally capable of reducing it to almost zero? It's as if we suddenly discovered a way to produce unlimited amounts of food, for free, anywhere in the world, but food manufacturers would start raising a stink about how important it is that people would still starve.

Depends on how you look at it. I used to work in a store that sold software in the 90s. The publisher would sell us the game wholesale and we'd charge retail. So they would sell it to us for $22.50 and set the retail price at $29. So in that sense it was a 22% cut, because we only kept 22% of the sale price. But in most cases the publisher didn't make the game. They were a middleman who took a game from a studio and sold it to us. I have no idea what their cut was between them and the actual maker of the game, but I'll bet it was more than 8%. So in that regard, the app store is a really good deal because it lets developers publish directly to consumers without a middleman.

grishka 5y ago
Except physical distribution is expensive by its nature. It involves producing and moving around physical objects — that's material and labor per copy. App store, on the other hand, is a digital distributor. Making a digital copy is so cheap it could as well be free. And even then, not all app developers publish on the app store because they want or need its distribution services. There are many developers who would happily arrange the distribution of their apps themselves, with their own infrastructure they already have anyway, but they have to publish on the app store because that's the only way onto millions of iOS devices. I'll say it again: it should not be legal for a hardware manufacturer to retain any kind of control over hardware after it's been sold.
- jedberg 5y ago
  I agree with you completely. I think Apple should, at the very least, allow side loading. I was just answering the question about what the cut used to be in the packaged software world.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  This is what they're talking about when they say that productivity gains have gone only to the wealthiest. Buying an album digitally, when every single step in the production and distribution of that album have become an order of magnitude cheaper (outside of labor costs, which somehow remain flat no matter what), costs the same as it did 50 years ago. Every part of application distribution has become cheaper, so you lock down every platform and charge the same percentage.
  - grishka 5y ago
    So what? Why does the price have to remain the same despite technological advancements that are totally capable of reducing it to almost zero? It's as if we suddenly discovered a way to produce unlimited amounts of food, for free, anywhere in the world, but food manufacturers would start raising a stink about how important it is that people would still starve.