I make games on Roblox. When a user spends $1 in your game, you get to keep about $0.25 of it ($0.70 if you spend the funds to buy other stuff on Roblox).<p>Basically 1/4 is the Apple/Google cut, 1/4 is Roblox profit, 1/4 is what they say is used to run servers etc.<p>This is not a complaint. I’m a big fan of the platform and think they provide huge value to developers. Just thought some might find the economics of it interesting.
It's not just payment processing.<p>A app store offers reliable hosting of the game binaries and provides a versioning and upgrade mechanism on a platform with billions of user accounts.<p>Keeps the user's OS and device drivers up to date, maintains the OS and develops the hardware that it runs on.<p>Maintains the developer tools, compilers, documentation, so that your binary can run on the device's OS.<p>These things are expensive. I don't know how much exactly it would cost a company like Roblox to develop and maintain all the necessary tools and services provided by the app stores in order to run on all those devices.<p>Probably a lot. In fact, if they could do it, they would be Apple or Google :).<p>Whether it's a lot more than it should be, I don't know, but it helps to keep in mind that the app store cut is for a lot more than just payment processing.
I own an e-commerce business. We offer PayPal and credit card checkout - 75% of users choose PayPal. When we buy a lot of our products to sell, we get lots of them from small businesses in lots of different locations, many of them also offer PayPal to us (even on wholesales transactions), because it gives some level of comfort with international transactions. Because we often have cash in our PayPal account and it’s cheaper than paying our bank to send internationally, we often pick PayPal.<p>So PayPal get a cut of the wholesale price and a cut of the sales price, on literally the same goods. Some of our customers create their own products from our products and use PayPal to sell them on again, making it a 3x cut for PayPal.<p>Being a payment processor and solving that last click purchase problem / apps store is incredibly lucrative.
It seems crazy to me that they're allowed to do this. Imagine paying 30% more for software on your computer. It's pretty obvious that very few competitors could pierce the phone market, even less the phone app store market.<p>At least on Google phones you're allowed to jailbreak it and install whatever you want if you're a power user, but you can't do this on Apple's phones.<p>They should allow people to download and install APKs.
From Roblox's own website (<a href="https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/articles/developer-economics" rel="nofollow">https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/articles/developer-econom...</a>), the game owner's share after all of the other costs is only 24.5% and Roblox also takes a cut of 24.5%, compared to an App store portion of 25%. So essentially, Roblox charges as much as Apple/Google for their "platform fee".<p>Who decides what is a right amount of "platform fee" in either case?
Interesting that Apple/Google don't get sued for this. (I assume other stores like Amazon demand a similar amount.) It obviously is a result of a monopoly and the lack of competition of software stores. I'd assume the price to go down if there were a real competition. On Android, you can at least use other stores if you want to take the risk. But on iOS?
Imagine if the mall where you rent your store takes 30% of your revenue (plus a negligible fee). Now think of visa and mastercard that you use to charge your customers: imagine them also taking another 30% cut. That's basically what is happing here.<p>Many here pretend that Apple, Google, MS - first layer platform hegemons - and Roblox, unity, Uber etc - second layer platforms - charging 30% is fair because it's result of competitive market dynamics. But there's no true competition between these platforms. Specially when you consider that the longer a user is in a ecosystem, the costlier it is to move away from it.
This title is silently reframing the issue to change the discussion in a way that favors the viewpoint of the poster.<p>“for payment processing and worldwide store distribution” is a more accurate headline, and specifically highlights that they’re not just paying a payment processor. This is, however, more complicated and no longer permits the easy comparison with card processing fees, and so I see many headlines show up that try to dodge this.<p>It’s fine to disagree with app store fee structures, it’s fine to disagree with how they manage their distribution models or handle approvals or whatever — but it’s totally uncool to lie-by-omission that it’s about credit card processing fees alone.
Can one simply charge more, to compensate totally or partially for a perceivedly unfair "tax"?<p>"Charge more" is somewhat common advice. A high-quality business that played its cards well might get away with it.<p>One generally doesn't want to play a race to the bottom anyway.
As a seller on eBay, this is my seller's fees for YTD. 24.8% of your total sales. I'm not a fan of it, but I do admit they give me the reach and ease to customers.
I worked for a mobile games publisher in my last job. 30% platform fee, followed by a 30/70 split on revenue (70 to the dev, 30 to the publisher). It's a tough market. Combined with less profitable ad monetization and paid installs being less predictable - it was not always a phenomenal business model. You had to really hit to make money.
I thought Robux could only be purchased outside of iOS, cutting Apple out of the loop. Can you buy Robux with IAP these days?<p>Hmm, maybe I'm thinking of the fact that you can't redeem a gift card on iOS, you have to go to a desktop to do that.
How much revenue wouldn't they have if they weren't using those services?<p>It is really easy to say "that's extortion" but I personally would take the extra revenue over not having it at all.
More importantly, Apple doesn't allow using any other payment processor other that their own.<p>Even if the product/service you are selling is mostly outside of apple ecosystem (like email or cloud storage or something like that, where web users pay only 2-3% payment processor fee), Apple won't allow you to use your existing payment processor via a link to your website. If that's not anti competitive behaviour then what is?<p>Hope EU legislators take action soon.