Exactly, the closest approximation to the App Store I can think of in the previous decades were game platforms like Nintendo and Sega. I would be curious to know from someone with experience how much % of revenue would have been allocated to licensing + all costs just to get someone to slam your cartridge into their system and press start.
EDIT: for an addressable market that was much smaller in scale.
> the closest approximation to the App Store I can think of in the previous decades were game platforms like Nintendo and Sega
I think a closer approximation was actual stores. If you wanted to sell in CompUSA, BestBuy, or CircuitCity, you had to go through a distributer. I think the big one most of them used was called Navaro or something like that? If you were a huge company like Microsoft, they would take a 30% cut of your sales. If you were anyone else, they would take a 50% cut. And you also had physical costs like boxes, printing, manuals, disks (floppy or CD), etc. That you can now do all of this from your own home and pay only 30% is a frickin' miracle!
The cost of licensing, manufacturing, cert etc in those days was quite high, yes. To be fair they were offering many services for that cost that you couldn't get elsewhere at the time. These days publishing on consoles is much cheaper and in some cases they've waived or eliminated many of the fees you used to have to pay for. In the XBox 360 days the certification process to push a build to consoles could itself cost you upwards of a thousand dollars depending on the circumstances, though it's my understanding that the fees would be waived in some cases (for bug fixes, etc). This was largely a necessity to prevent a broken build being shipped to 100k customers (because in those days it wasn't reasonable to expect everyone to download a 1gb patch), not as important now.
Steam is the best 1:1 approximation to the App Store and it predates it somewhat. The comparison isn't exact since they don't lock down your PC but they offer most of the same features.
I understand your comparison from how the underlying product is realized but I am looking at it from the value delivered to a software shop.
Whether it's Nintendo, Steam or iOS, the value delivered is the same: I give you docs, guides, etc to construct a program against an abstract target. When you are done and press the "ship it" button, an opportunity now exists, in the real world, for people to buy your thing and for you to keep some money.
Regardless of how the platform achieves this, the value is the same. You get to focus on building your product and collecting money. What I can't wrap my head around is why developer's are judging the affordability or fairness of this when the fractional cost may not have changed since the 80s/90s.
The iPhone may not be a PlayStation 4, but it's definitely comparable to the Nintendo Switch: powerful, handheld, the vast majority of apps are games, and you can hook it up to a TV!
The Apple TV 4K does 4K (unlike the original PS4), and the iPad Pro runs Fortnite at 120 FPS while the PS4 is stuck at 60 FPS.
Did you develop on those older platforms? Dev kits and licenses were often crazy expensive.