Not only that, "we charge 10% to the big monster and 30% to the little guy" is terrible PR against the amount of money they would generate from just the little guy. It's so bad that by that point they might as well just charge the lower rate to everybody. Especially when they're trying to stave off legislation.

Steam is doing this 30%-20%, and it seems to be working fine of them.. so far. I generally think volume discounts come a bit too close to price fixing, if proven in court. Granted, it's tough to prove, as we've seen in Intel vs. AMD which settled out of court AFAICR.

Yes - although I think Steam is in a different market position where there are substitutes (e.g. developers/publishers can choose to submit via GOG, Epic store, Microsoft Store or sell direct so there is no monopsony), so providing a lower revenue split to encourage big developers to the platform is a good/valid strategy. The strategy is different for Apple (where there are no perfect(ish) substitutes, and they can exploit this to have higher margins).

The unusual thing about Steam is that their high fees discourage developers from using it. If they charged 3% then everyone would use it, there would be a million games there and being in the store wouldn't cause you to stand out at all.

If they charge 30%, most small developers don't use it and then if you choose to pay, you get to be featured on a list without that many of your competitors. You're paying for exclusivity. Then you reach an equilibrium where small developers pay to be listed next to Valve's first party AAA titles, until there are enough of them that the exclusivity is sufficiently diluted to stop attracting more developers.

That doesn't apply to Apple because anyone who wants to reach iOS customers doesn't have any reasonable alternative way to do it, so there are millions rather than thousands of apps in the store and the exclusivity of being listed is already diluted to nothing. But they still charge the same rate.

I do think Steam can charge more because it offers more good services for users than any other app/game store: search/discovery features that have gotten better over time, per game communities/mods, tons of social features including a marketplace, multiple platform support, and their customer service. Sure their fee might discourage some developers, but if there is a case to be made for 30%, this is it. It all works because there is competition between Steam/GOG/Itch/Epic/etc.. on multiple open platforms in a pretty well differentiated way.

Paying lower unit price for higher volume customers is literally how the entire economy works. People deal with this every day. It's why jumbo packs in the supermarket are cheaper. It's how Costco exists. It's the one capitalist principle almost nobody has a huge problem with.

> Paying lower unit price for higher volume customers is literally how the entire economy works.

That's not how the economy works - it's a very simplified view which IMO is incorrect in this instance.

Companies in theory only offer volume discounts when it makes commercial sense to do (i.e. 'second degree price discrimination'). Price discrimination opportunities happen when you believe that you will sell more to a customer by changing the price for a particular segment / volume target (companies in theory always try to sell at the maximum price that the buyer will accept, and price discrimination is just strategy to help sell at a higher price to certain segments if the market will accept it). Companies will also only do deals which are profitable (sometimes higher volume deals are profitable while lower volume deals aren't, for instance it might be practical to sell 1 million cans of beans to a large supermarket chain for 20 cents, while it's only practical to sell 10 cans of beans for 50 cents each to a smaller shop).

In the AppStore in reality this would mean you would need to believe that the reduction in fees would encourage enough big developers to the platform to offset the change in fees (at the moment I'm assuming the profitability threshold is met - as Apple is clearly already making money on the bigger apps here).

Now in order to pay for the 30% to 10% swap, you would need to bring c5 times the number of big developers to the platform to offset the reduced margin, which is very unlikely to happen, particularly as Apple have the dominant platform (i.e. most developers are already probably on iOS that are going to be on iOS).

Now if the industry was heavily competitive, and mobile developers could leave and go to another platform with lower fees and reach the same audience, then the competitive pressure would exist to do what you are describing and volume discounts may become a thing - but because Apple can block any competition in this space they don't need to offer any discount to encourage these big developers to use their platform - the developers have to keep using them (which is what the lawsuit is about).

i.e. Apple's market position allows them to act as a market-making monopsony, which means it's not in their interest to provide a discount as they can exploit the situation to generate super-normal profits. Economics & business strategy 101.

I'm sorry to say this but your comment reads like some core concepts from Econ 101 were absorbed but the part about how economics theory is largely descriptive not prescriptive was missed. You're not far into your comment before having the "in theory" qualifier.

There are lots of reasons why volume discounts exist:

- To encourage more use;

- It's aspirational in that users believe they can get big enough to get that lower per unit price;

- Every customer has fixed and variable costs. Volume discounts account for fixed costs. Generally speaking, a large customer will be less overhead for the provider in cost per dollar of sales;

- Bargaining power. Some customers are price takers. Others are price makers;

- Anchoring. Supermarkets in malls will tend to pay lower rents (per square foot) because mall owners know their presence brings in customers that frequent other businesses. Likewise if a customer is accustomed to buy Fortnite skins through your ecosystems they're more likely to spend on other things;

So basically I don't accept your premise so the rest is kind of irrelevant.

You're literally giving examples of how his premise applies in real life.

"Companies in theory only offer volume discounts when it makes commercial sense to do" - Encouraging more use makes commercial sense because it yields more money overall even with the discount (if done correctly) - Users aspiring to buy more makes commercial sense because people buying more means more money - It makes commercial sense to give discounts because large customers cost less relative to small ones due to fixed costs not changing based on customer size

...and so forth. You're saying his premise is irrelevant but giving a series of examples of why his premise is relevant.

It is Econ 101, and of course all this is theory - but that's the idea right, we are describing why it is in Apple's interest to do what they are doing. You are prescribing a change that goes against basic economic theory and also isn't the behaviour being observed, so I personally don't think that criticism is fair!

The main thing your comments miss is how apple is going to make up for the immediate shortfall in profit from your proposed changes. Bear in mind, they need to increase revenue 5 times to make the same amount of profit.

It's fine to hand-wave about how Apple should provide volume discounts because everyone else does, but you don't really provide a reason for why they should do that from a financial perspective and how they can do it without loosing a majority of their profit (everything is a soft-benefit which doesn't account for the huge financial losses this would incur).

I don't mean a bullet point, I mean like "I think a reduction of the fees to 10% would translate to a 20% reduction in the price of apps, and that would encourage people to buy 5 times more apps".

Or that all the money these big companies make will be so inspirational that 5x new developers will enter the market and these will, on average, be just as successful as the previous developers with zero cannibalisation.

Volume discounts come about because the true cost of a product has both fixed and variable components. If it costs a given amount to have a checkout clerk ring up your order, that amount doesn't change based on whether you buy a case of ramen or a single cup, so if you buy the case they can spread it over a larger volume.

But in this context, the fixed and variable costs are already split out. iOS developers pay the $99 fixed charge that should cover any of Apple's fixed costs and pay 30%. If you're already paying the fixed costs explicitly then the unit price only needs to cover the variable costs and higher volume yields no change.

And they're starting off from a PR hole because the rate so obviously has no relationship to their actual costs. It costs them the same to distribute a 100MB app whether the developer charges $1 or $100, but they charge $0.30 in one case and $30 in the other. A developer with a 10MB app sold for $10 pays ten times more than a developer with a 100MB app sold for $1 even though their distribution cost to Apple is ten times less.

Ordinary competitive markets don't work like that because otherwise a competitor would come in charging prices more proportional to their costs and everyone being overcharged would switch to the alternative.