Microsoft Investing $3B In Dell

[sviola]

Or I can have a website and sell directly.

Is hosting a website free? How much do you pay for the bandwidth and storage to sell software online? Also, you'll have to provide a secure payment system for your customers, secure data storing and so on.

All this adds up to the cost. Would setting up and maintaining this be cheaper than paying 20%-30% of an app?

(This is a legitimate question, I'm curious about it)

 

[DejaWiz]

Dell going private is probably one of the best moves they can make right now since the PC market is on the decline...will give them the ability to focus on buffing up customer service, product quality, segment offerings, and not have to put share prices as first priority.

...if they choose to.

 

[Wrench00]

Is hosting a website free? How much do you pay for the bandwidth and storage to sell software online? Also, you'll have to provide a secure payment system for your customers, secure data storing and so on.

All this adds up to the cost. Would setting up and maintaining this be cheaper than paying 20%-30% of an app?

(This is a legitimate question, I'm curious about it)

The maintenance still has to be done so no real cost savings there. You can go to Amazon s3 or other cloud services to the same on top of that your not locked in. IE Subscriptions revenues etc.

 

[rudy]

Is hosting a website free? How much do you pay for the bandwidth and storage to sell software online? Also, you'll have to provide a secure payment system for your customers, secure data storing and so on.

All this adds up to the cost. Would setting up and maintaining this be cheaper than paying 20%-30% of an app?

(This is a legitimate question, I'm curious about it)

The answer is actually often no for a small developer which is alot of why app stores took off. Its not that it cannot be cheaper its that you as a person either have to pay someone else often alot to do it or you have to learn it all yourself which distracts you from your core job, making your product.

People who say 30% is high dont really think about it, why are tons of game devs willing to take that to go on steam? Surely many of them can get around steam but steam offers you the ability to forget that entire side of the business. Really big companies care enough they wont do it like blizzard. But smaller companies often just cant be arsed to waste the time. That's separate from the added exposure and simplicity of an environment people know.

I also find it funny that we have all these discussions when no one said shit when apple and google did it. Do people think they have measly 5% cuts or something? Heck no I am sure MS set their price right at the price of their competitors.

The arguement is also similar to making an engine in a game, very few developers waste the time creating their own engine, can you save money, yes, but whats your time worth when you release a game a year or 2 later because you had to build an engine and avoid patents?