Another stunning statistic: Google and Apple’s income from app store fees on games is likely higher than all game publishers’ combined income, both mobile and non-mobile.
Holy crap. Talk about egregious rent-seeking.
(Matthew Ball‘s The State of Video Gaming in 2025, page 42)
It’s been nearly 15 years since I last worked in games, but that doesn’t surprise me at all. Game publishers need to fund game developers, most of whom do a gigantic amount of work for every piece of sellable product. What Google and Apple do for the same, rounds to 0. All of their fee is profit.
@snarfed.org
@snarfed.org monopoly…
Right. Afaik the long tail of the income curve in games is not fat, but I’m not sure.
On the other hand, it looks like the combined publisher/platform number here also includes hardware sales from Nintendo and Steam store fees from Valve (!), which probably easily outweigh any tail of indie games.
@snarfed.org Wait how is that possible? Apple and google take a percentage. How can a (sub-100) percentage of someone’s income be more than their income?
Should be criminal, but it’s capitalism! I suppose they’ll get business awards for excellence. Or at the very least stock options.