Steam — mandates that all games purchased through the Steam store always run on the store which means taking a cut of all revenues in perpetuity. It also prevents players from taking their achievements, game data, and friends lists elsewhere. Despite the high fees, Steam’s lead and lock-in make it nearly impossible for anyone to compete with the platform. In 2019, EA announced that it would start releasing its games through Steam again after eight years of exclusively selling its PC games through its native EA store, which meant that EA would lose 20-25% of the revenue it collected through its own store, meaning that Steam had previously missed out on at least 30% of the PC market. Fortnite, the most popular AAA game in the West, Epic charges developers 3-6 times less in store fees than Steam, and owns users and their achievements completely — and gives away millions of free games to players, with a new free game every week — the Epic saudi arabia mobile database Games Store is already losing hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and according to Epic’s own estimates, it is not expected to generate cumulative profits until the late 2020s. Steam, meanwhile, generates billions of dollars in revenue each year, with gross margins estimated to be over 70%.
Likewise, Apple undoubtedly helped drive the mobile internet era, but it is now using its well-deserved success to restrict the “open web” and maximize the “total return on intellectual property” through its control of all iOS app distribution and monetization, prohibiting the ability to publish the App Store and related platforms within iOS, forcing metaverse platforms to change how they describe themselves to stay in Apple’s favor , taking a cut of payments, downranking competing services on its app platform , promoting its own services in ways that competitors cannot , excluding competitors from key APIsfeatures , unilaterally deciding when and how to deliver new innovations, changing its policies to hurt competitors and defining them as it sees fit . On iOS, WebGL, which can generate rich 2D and 3D rendered environments in web browsers, is severely limited to the point that it is unusable for most apps. Critics believe this stems from Apple’s desire to force all developers into the App Store, where Apple takes a cut of all purchases. Apple announced that macOS would deprecate OpenGL a year before it released its MacBook ARM line, enabling all iOS apps to run on its laptops which required the use of the Mac App Store.