About Store Fees

[bossland]

I was recently contacted by one of the store developers, if we could decrease the fee.

Let me explain to you, why this will not happen.

You are thinking:

The Store has like 2 ppl that work on code review and approval at best, and thats it. That can not cost us 40 % fee.
We create no work for you at all, it is a bit too much, this 40 % we pay.

The Facts:

Bossland GmbH pays roughly 200.000 EUR a year for legal costs that invonve the law suits, mainly involving Honorbuddy.
And this is without the fact, that the comming up suits at the Federal Court of Justice might cost a "little" more, also the "fines" that we are lately bombarded with by Blizzard are not in that sum above.

Honorbuddy Development itself costs money. Now you would ask, why do I care? No Honorbuddy means no Store and no sales for you at all.

Our forum, you might have noticed, was always free of stupid Advertisements. Now you do not just and only advertise on our Forum, you also have access to hundreds of thousands users and all the new comming users, for example with Legion. Such insane number of users probably costs nothing, especially if its your target audience.

This is just shortly describing the effort that we as Bossland GmbH put into our company, our partners and our customers.

Apart from this, it seems like i study law since 3 years, because with 8 suits, half of them involving Honorbuddy and 2 of them invilving me personally, i am non stop protecting the IP Honorbuddy and it's future.

If anyone of you thinks that our model is not fair, is always free to go his own, better way.

 

[Studio60]

I am thankful for this statement even though it is nothing new. It comes down to your last sentence really. We might think of the store cut what we want. There is currently no better way to sell our products. Any new store would not and will not have the customer exposure we get on the Buddy Store.

And let's call it, like it is: If an independent store would be able to pull off the stunt of gaining enough exposure to become a serious Buddy Store competitor, we would surely reach a point where Bossland would prevent said store products from working with Honorbuddy by making some changes to the software. That's what I would do too. If not, then there is the possibility of Blizzard finding your cute little store and then you might get a letter or a visit. Since they do seem to have the guts to allegedly extort source code out of freelancers, I wouldn't put it past them to pressure independent stores. Even though that would be pretty stupid, because every one of those stores would help in bleeding out Bossland.

If I had a way of selling my products with a lower cut, while still being under a "somewhat protective legal shield" and while still getting the same exposure as through Buddy Store, I would do it. They are sueing Bossland and not me and I also feel Blizzard doesn't care about individual store developers (yet). I have been approached by a few people about creating our own store, but why would I want to put in that work for a store only a few people know about? I would rather have 100 sales a month through the store and keep 60% of the money than building a store, handling payments, fraud etc. only to have 5 sales a month while keeping 100% of the money. It just doesn't add up.

I do think 40% is a lot, but as of now it is still the best deal I can get. And that is all that matters to me as a businessman.