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Microsoft Hopes Money Will Entice More Developers (engadget.com)
At Build conference, Microsoft announced that starting later this year, all consumer apps (except games) sold in the Microsoft Store will ship a whopping 95 percent of the revenue earned from app and in-app purchases to the developer. From a report: That is, if the customer purchases the app via a deep or direct link. If the customer gets your app via a Microsoft-assisted method, like getting featured on the Microsoft Store, then devs will get 85 percent of the revenue, which is still a pretty good amount.
Microsoft has been become that desperate, clingy ex-girlfriend. “If I pay you will you be our friends?!!”
Entire operating systems and huge software suites have been built by volunteers. Looking at things through the eyes of a bean counter limits them to myopic tunnel vision.
There should be one package manager to download from one or more sources.
Problem is 95% of nothing is nothing.
Also, just what their store needs more terrible throw away apps by people just looking to make money off a platform with a lower app count. 95% of what is on there now could be thrown away and no one would care.
Microsoft Hopes Money Will Entice More Developers
These are geeks we're talking about. Sex would work better.
Myopia != tunnel vision.
different things bro.
Lets say that the total cost of developing my app is 70 currency units - 5 programmers worked on it, I had to pay them and myself a salary for 2 years. And the app then sells for 100 currency units on the Microsoft Store - that is the equilibrium price for this app - giving me 30 currency units max profit per sale. If Microsoft then takes 15 currency units from that "for use of the app store", I am left with 50% or "half" of the profit I would have made per unit sold without use of the store. Depending on how many units I sell at 100 units a pop, that may be hundreds of thousands of Dollars or millions of Dollars Microsoft took from me, or more, for the simple privilege of using their "Store Cloud". Does that make economic sense? Giving up a whopping 50% of the potential profit margin for an app to MS, for a little product page on their App store?
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
I (and every game developer I know) stopped making games for linux because there is no money in it.
let them have adult games in the app store.
leisure suit Larry would of been banned if we had app stores back in the day
Still trying for that "Year of the desktop" award...year after year after year.
You could just setup a website with your game, keep 100% of the revenue, devote a portion of it to advertising.
OR
You could hook up with a multiple times convicted criminally organization, and hope what they say they will do and what they do are going to be exactly the same thing.
Microsoft has earned their black mark reputation through years and years of shenanigans and illegal activity which continues to this day with their update system and telemetry data which if anyone else were to do it would very obviously be considered an illegal remote connection to your machine forcing data on/taking copies of data present.
In a similar vein to common wisdom like do not eat yellow snow, do not stick your dick in crazy, you could also add do not trust microsoft.
MSFT, fix your corporate spying first.
BTW, I developed multiple titles for Windows, but somethings aren't just about the money. Stopped when they changed the EULA to spy on their customers. Haven't released anything since.
AC for obvious reasons.
throwing effort at a money train that left the station 6 years ago with Steve Jobs as its conductor is a classic microsoft blunder. Steam is for games, google is for word processing, Chrome is for browsing...what are you for again?
pack it in and put the paddles on your cloud platform while you still have a chance to compete with it...and for god sakes stop asking cloud customers for feature suggestions you just come across as desperate and directionless as always.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Money? Entice developers? That's crazy talk!!
We prefer sensitivity training and 30 page codes of conduct, my fried :)
Lets say that the total cost of developing my app is 70 currency units - 5 programmers worked on it, I had to pay them and myself a salary for 2 years. And the app then sells for 100 currency units
Well there's your problem right there. If you really wanted 30 units of profit you should have charged 115 units for it on the App Store (well really a little more but you get the gist).
It's not like expenditure and profit are not intertwined; you could also have reduced costs of production by buying crappy paddles for your ping-pong table.
But 15 units of profit is STILL A PROFIT. And 15% of some much, much larger number is still in absolute terms much larger than 30% of a much smaller number...
Does that make economic sense? Giving up a whopping 50% of the potential profit margin for an app to MS, for a little product page on their App store?
When the "little product page" enables millions of people literally one click away from purchase (because they have registered payment methods) to see your product, then HELL YES that makes sense because you have an order of magnitude (or more) chance of a sale.
You seem to have forgotten how hard it is to sell software to real people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Have a games store more like steam with
no / limited sandboxing (at least multi exe and open dir's to logged in user) and no
work shop / mods or at least open dir to install mods.
OpenGL
Does not need to be an Universal App
open to dos box games / say things like classic doom with wads that can be used with your own ported exe.
full video mode control
let Nvidia Control Panel / ATI one link to store games.
I wasted enormous amounts of time developing an application, getting it to build with their inane tools and waiting forever for them to accept it in the store, all the while getting insulted by their completely incompetent, might-as-well-be-robots Indian "support" "people", only to realize that the Microsoft Store is a pure scam. You don't get a single page view of "exposure". It didn't take me long to realize that it was a dead end after that, but it took me another eternity to get their fucking retards to remove the app from their store after I decided to never have anything to do with Micorsoft again.
They are still flooding my inbox with their garbage "Developer News" spam which I've unsubscribed to countless times and added manual filters for, but it keeps showing up anyway. I would murder every single one working for Microsoft if I had the guts.
Microsoft have 0% development costs, if they were smart and used dynamic self distributing apps via Bittorrent virtually 0% distribution costs... 1% to an APP store for their window showcasing system would be more than sufficient
Between VS code, typescript, Linux subsystems, neat new hardware concepts, a new CEO and serious pressure from competitors like Google, Apple and Amazon and now this MS seems to be inching it's way back into the heart of opinion leaders, i.e. us.
I can't complain. And who knows, I might someday check out this new surface stuff they're offering. And Win2k was the last OS of them I used.
Isn't it nice, the wonders real competition can do?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
why not now? so, go start on your project and we'll see if it happens.
Speaking as a Microsoft developer, there are two problems:
1. Microsoft distributed my program for a "free trial" without my consent. This creates bad blood with developers.
2. Consumers do not understand how to get money to Microsoft. Do I use an Xbox gift card? Where are the Microsoft Store gift cards when I walk into my local grocery store? All I see is Google Play and Apple gift cards.
I can keep 100% of the revenue by distributing it myself.
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
I wonder what they paid this crop of "editors" for plugging redmond so much.
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To the PUBLISHER, not the Developer.
And they wonder why they're hemorrhaging customers? You didn't have to pay to publish apps before the app store.
Only eleven mentions of Microsoft on the front-page :]
That is true, but is there any evidence that selling via Microsoft's store is likely to generate a much larger number of sales to offset the fee?
There is evidence in terms of seeing top listed apps that have been there for a long time and are making a healthy profit.
But the thing is just the facts of the situation alone are enough - like I said, millions of people with already registered credit cards, vs you and your own brand of confusing ordering interface you set up.
I'm not saying it cannot work, just that selling your own software is hard and the ordering system can be tricky to do well, not to mention having to deal with customer service issues. Microsoft takes almost all of that away.
Book publishers have been making this argument for decades
For a while though, they were right. You could self-publish but you've have a rough time getting into national chains with any volume, otherwise you were going to sell a handful of copies for just about no money. Again it's all about absolute numbers, even at $2 a book if you sold a few hundred thousand copies you were still better off than 100% of a few hundred or thousand copies.
But now that you can self-publish on Amazon, that's obviously a way better path (though there again Amazon is taking a cut, but again it's worth it for the reach).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
is a niche market filled with bad desktop apps no one wants.
Be or ben't
A new era in Hollywood Accounting, that is.
If the folks (collectively; obviously you can have more than 1 coder on a project) that actually write the code get 1% of gross for longer than the time it takes for Microsoft to gain control of the project I'd be stunned.
Heck, I'd be surprised if it happened at all. Maybe to one or two "loss leader" projects so they MS can trot those out and say "You, too can become rich selling magazine subscriptions in your free time and summers".
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I have no XBox, so I have to ask... hey, wait, I remember something, from when my Laptop with Win10 arrived and I removed a bunch of preinstalled junk... I think I remember something like this flying off the SSD with a bunch of other useless crap, could that be it?
What is it for?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Whatever deal Microsoft offers today, in a couple years they will alter the deal. It's what they do, over and over again.
Microsoft isn't the only company that seems to do everything they can to eliminate all trust anyone has in them, and to sink every last bit of credibility they ever had. But though not the only one, they are certainly Grand Masters at it.
You could make money on 85% if users actually bought these apps. Its not about how much percentage developers get, its how many users buy their apps to begin with. Obviously not very many.
I must be weird, I haven't bought anything through the app store, ever.
You mean to say "Microsoft will steal 5% of revenue from app developers"
Jesus, way to spin that bullshit
I thought this was about the software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ...
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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It would entice me! However, ageism is such a problem now, that I wouldn't have a chance. They'll get some young fellows who pretend to be developers.
Microsoft's only strength is money and many mind challenged fanboys who know no better. When the money runs out, the fanboys will find another deity to worship. MS is dying.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti