> Steam does none of that and takes a 30% cut. Steam doesn't even come pre-installed on Windows. How does Steam get away with it?

By not having any walls.

Games on Steam are allowed to be sold elsewhere, for a different price. The developer can even sell Steam keys for their game via a different channel without giving Valve a cut. As a result, there is little reason for a developer not to add a 30% markup to their game and sell it on Steam and let price-sensitive customers buy the lower priced key via some other channel.

If they tried to charge 30% and prevent you from selling your game any other way, they'd have fewer games, and so fewer users, and so not be able to charge anybody anything.

> It doesn't matter whether it's legitimate, if it's a real effect.

It isn't, and even if it was, it would be unavoidable.

If you throw your iPhone into a wood chipper, it will be damaged. Idiots can blame Apple for that but it isn't Apple's fault and there is not really anything Apple can do about it. Moreover, not many people are going to blame Apple for that, because that's ridiculous.

> Windows is a pretty secure operating system if you use it properly, but people just don't, thus Mac gets the reputation of being "more secure", even if that's wholly unjustified on a technical level.

Windows is a pretty secure operating system if you don't install random things from the internet, but then you're expected to install random things from the internet in the normal course of using it, and unsophisticated users don't have a good way to distinguish between what is and isn't sensible to install.

Mac avoids this by not having that much esoteric third party software to begin with, so installing Putty from "chiark home page" isn't a regular occurrence and doesn't condition users to do that.

> Nobody uses "Linux" and nobody ships software for "Linux".

Tens of millions of people use Linux on the desktop. That thing Valve charges 30% for ships for "Linux" and so do a large chunk of those games. And Firefox and Chrome and Maya and Blender and probably a higher proportion of open source software than even ships for Windows.

> If there was a distribution of Linux that was comparable to Windows in terms of market penetration and users, it would be a similarly vulnerable platform. Actually, that distribution exists: It's called Android, where malware and scams proliferate.

Actually, that distribution exists, it's called Android, and it has far fewer problems with malware than Windows despite the ability to side load apps.

> I can. They can't. I won't. It's wholly irrelevant.

It isn't irrelevant. It's an important part of the lifecycle of many apps.

The first version will barely compile and be full of bugs. Installing it will be a huge pain, it will have thirty seven worldwide users who are all tech workers, and those people will submit bug reports and patches and cause it to be improved into the state that it makes it into some kind of distribution repository where ordinary people can install it.

Unless you make it so people can't install such things on their devices even if they know what they're doing, at which point it has two worldwide users who are actually only the original developer with two devices and it withers on the vine and never comes to anything.

> So, who gets to decide who is "established"?

Granted it's hard to make an objective determination in edge cases, but is this supposed to be a difficult problem in the common case? Epic is an established company. Amazon, Google, Valve, Canonical, Mozilla -- these are not difficult to answer in the affirmative.

> Isn't that the whole point of side-loading, that you don't have a gatekeeper?

Side loading should be possible. It isn't the thing you have to make easy.

Installing the Epic Games Store should be easy. But you won't find "cheats for Fortnite" in it.