Basically, the current civil court model is 1) go to court with a case 2) demand to read internal memos of the defendants, 3) put people on the stand and walk through everything in these memos.

It is coercion. They want you to settle, or all your personal info goes online.

In addition, Steam happily allows publishers to sell their games on other platforms and does not create 3rd party exclusivity agreements.

Personally I would consider Steam to be absurdly democratic in their distribution model.

Unlike Apple or Google app stores, where you basically HAVE to be on there to access the user base, a PC game can be downloaded and played without needing steam.

A lot have their own “stores” like battle net.

Between Steam and Apple I think the case against Apple is generally stronger. Steam has competition on PC, but Apple is an effective monopoly on iPhone software. That said, Apple does more work on each release with quality control and software reviews. Valve is much more hands off on each release, but does secondary work like maintaining Proton.

This just brings up the discussion of what the cut should be. 20%? 10%? 5%? Or maybe the full 30% is necessary? In a healthy market a business like this that has relatively low barrier to entry should be ripe for disruption, but even companies like GOG take a 30% cut. Why has nobody started a competing business that only does a 20% cut? I get that there is customer inertia with Steam, but it seems like nobody is really trying very hard to win customers.

Every major publisher has tried launching their own competitor platform to Steam, some going as far as pulling their games or making them exclusive. Despite Steam simply doing nothing in response, they all essentially gave up and came back except Epic because of the Fortnite playerbase.

Apple/google/valve/etc are providing you a service and acting as a publisher, dealing with a bunch of legal and tax crap you probably don’t want to, and providing testing/rollout/apis/libraries and a lot of other features for you to use.

You can debate all day long if the cost for their service is fair, but you certainly aren’t getting nothing.

In addition Apple obviously has a walled garden, but android has had side loading and alternative app stores since its inception and it’s still not popular, every user wants to just use a centralized place, so every dev releases on the centralized market. Forcing Apple to change their rules may be warm and fuzzy morally, it won’t change the status quo in the slightest.

As many users have also pointed out valve and steam is the last of the publisher storefronts you likely want complain about as they do a ton for the gaming community.

They literally invented smart phones and app stores, and continuously release new hardware with software APIs that enable the apps.

Another issue with the analogy is that when you buy a PC in a physical store, that store does not continue taking a cut of all software bought on that PC using i.e. unrelated digital stores (but that's precisely what Apple is asking from competing stores in the EU).

Best Buy/CompUSA/Office Depot employees do not scare the customers and block the customers coming to you directly.

These are the few problems of monopoly that Apple so conveniently takes advantage of.

But do they cost the same per unit sold?

> Why isn't it ok for a digital store to require a markup to sell?

It is ok, just not 30%.

This is “I could build that in a weekend” mentality. Your data on iCloud is replicated, available via the internet, available 99.99% of the time, etc. If your $30 hard drive fails you lose everything.

The price and being able to use other services is worth debating, but comparing it to “a single $30 hard drive” is disingenuous.

The more we get this, the more dystopian thing will be.

Make the web more powerful is negative.

Is replace a 'wallen garden' with the most lock-down/monopolistic form of computing (the browser).

Is NOT possible to make your own browser. You can't. Make your own APP (from TUI and UP) is doable.