“The companies can charge what they deem acceptable on their store fronts”
The EU likely disagrees though, they’ve already ruled against Apple taking 30% cuts of subscriptions and micro transactions.
There are also cases pending in the EU against Apple and Google, and one in the UK against Sony for their 30% cut.
Realistically, they’re not wrong. Platform providers claim 30% is the “cost of maintaining the store and services” but realistically, it cannot be:
1. Bandwidth costs per game are no where near 30%, a dollar or two at most. Cloud storage is dirt cheap nowadays too.
2. The cost of maintaining services has dropped severely because a lot of developers have moved away from platform provided matchmaking, networking, relays etc and have moved to custom solutions or middleware like Photon, EOS, PlayFab, which place next to no burden on PSN and Xbox Live.
3. Micro transactions and 3rd party subscriptions literally incur zero cost for platform holders aside from 2-4% credit card fees. That 30% is almost pure profit.
Ultimately all that happens is, that 10-30% cost is passed onto us as consumers.
It will be interesting if that 30% is blocked or drastically reduced. Console prices are heavily subsidized in the hope that money is made back via the software and subscriptions, so any change there could cause a pretty big impact on the industry as we know it.
