Microsoft developer blog:
Starting later this year, consumer applications (not including games) sold in Microsoft Store will deliver to developers 95% of the revenue earned from the purchase of your application or any in-app products in your application, when a customer uses a deep link to get to and purchase your application.
That’s a huge drop from the 70/30 split they had up to this point.
When Microsoft delivers you a customer through any other method, such as in a collection on Microsoft Store or any other owned Microsoft properties, and purchases your application, you will receive 85% of the revenue earned from the purchase of your application or any in-app products in your application
Note that this structure does not include games, which stick to the 70/30 split.
Does this apply any pressure to Apple to make a similar move? Windows is not quite a direct competitor to iOS, but the Windows market is massive.
Regardless, I like this move. Anything that helps improve the lot of the indie developer.
One thing Apple can do to one-up this move that would be even better for indie devs? Create a free tier, where up to, say the first $1,000 in sales goes 100% to the developer. Just a thought.
Then again this may signal that there’s not much developer intrest in the MS Store. The Apple App store (on the Mac) may not be much better, but they’re less likely to change, as the iOS app store is a bigger deal.
No, this applies little pressure to Apple as Windows phones are dead and while Windows on desktop has a massive audience, the vast majority of Windows desktop software isn’t purchased through their store (not unlike Apple’s own).
It would take Google making a similar move with Play for Apple to feel any pressure.
What sort of new desktop consumer apps would they be hoping to bring in?
Microsoft has an app store? Holy crap! Now they just need a platform and developer tools worth using.
Does anyone even use the MS Store to buy apps?
(I mean, I think I bought a graphics app from it on my Surface once, and on a Windows Tablet it’s a useful way to get e.g. the Facebook App, but …
Games is the telling exception, and even then it’s a joke compared to Steam.)
Hey, now.
Visual Studio is actually pretty useful, and .NET-on-Windows is a perfectly good platform.
(It’s not remotely obvious to me that ObjC/XCode is inherently superior to .NET-lang-of-choice/VS as a tool or platform worth using.
I won’t say it’s inherently inferior, either, note.)
I’ve used the Microsoft Store once.
Once…
Most of the time when I’m asked to work on something touching Windows, people care more about compatibility with Windows Vista than Windows 10. It’s a strange, strange market.
yeah VS.NET is a quality IDE, often considered better than. Xcode as far as being a dev tool. And the Swift creator said they were influenced by C# among other languages.
I really hate every version of the Visual Studio IDE I’ve tried, though I find Visual Studio Code to be… reasonable, but not great.
Don’t leave my VGA and Centronics ports hangin’, brah.