The Core Divergence
One transaction moment, not two similar businesses.Mobile free-to-play and premium PC/console distribution are not variations on the same business; they are structurally different economies with different funnels, different monetization logic, and different definitions of a "win."
A mobile F2P title lives or dies on install cost versus lifetime value across a funnel where the download is free and the real work starts after. A premium title's entire economic bet is placed at the moment of purchase: the download itself is the sale.
This single fork, sale-at-download versus sale-after-engagement, reshapes everything downstream of it: FTUE design philosophy, user acquisition math, revenue concentration patterns, and the commission structures each storefront charges to sit between developer and player.
FTUE: Seduction vs. Delivery
The job description is different before the money changes hands.A collaborative breakdown between Recognizing Patterns and Adrian Wurst of Steer Studios frames the split precisely: mobile FTUE is seduction, premium FTUE is delivery. Mobile has to earn the sale before a player has committed anything beyond a download; premium has to earn the sale's justification after the money has already changed hands.
That distinction is not cosmetic. It determines what the first ten minutes of a game are even trying to do. A mobile onboarding sequence is a pitch. A premium onboarding sequence is a receipt the player is deciding whether to keep.
The Steam Refund Clock
A hidden design deadline that mobile never faces.Steam's standard refund policy (a purchase is refundable within 14 days provided the player has under two hours of playtime) functions as an unstated design deadline. A premium title effectively has under two hours to make its core loop, pacing, and value proposition undeniable enough that a player doesn't reach for the refund button.
This is a fundamentally different pressure than anything in mobile F2P, where the "purchase" moment doesn't exist yet during onboarding at all; the equivalent pressure point is Day 1 retention, not a refund clock.
Where Each Model Fails
Opposite failure modes, same underlying error: bad timing.Premium's characteristic failure mode is over-tutorialization: long, hand-holding onboarding sequences that assume players need to be walked through mechanics they've already inferred, wasting the two-hour window on exposition instead of hooking the player.
Mobile's characteristic failure mode runs the opposite direction: asking for too much too fast (permissions, account creation, tutorial gates, or a paywall) before a player has any emotional investment in staying.
User Acquisition Economics
A dollar of revenue is not a dollar of revenue.The FTUE split shows up again in user acquisition math. Premium UA spend is typically justified against a single upfront transaction (a wishlist click, a Steam page visit, a purchase) with payback measured in one event. Mobile UA spend is justified against projected lifetime value across a funnel that may not convert a paying user for days or weeks after install, making cost-per-install a much noisier signal of success than cost-per-purchase is on premium storefronts.
This is part of why platform revenue comparisons across storefronts can mislead studios evaluating where to launch: a dollar of premium revenue and a dollar of mobile F2P revenue were earned through entirely different acquisition funnels, with different cost structures and different failure points long before either dollar showed up on a revenue chart.
Premium vs. Mobile F2P: side by side
| Dimension | Premium (Steam / Epic / Console) | Mobile F2P (App Store / Google Play) |
|---|---|---|
| Sale moment | At download | Weeks after install, if at all |
| FTUE job | Delivery: justify the purchase | Seduction: earn a second session |
| UA payback metric | Cost-per-purchase, single event | Cost-per-install vs. projected LTV |
| Critical failure window | Two-hour Steam refund threshold | Day-1 / Day-7 retention cliff |
| Failure mode | Over-tutorialization | Front-loaded friction (paywalls, permissions) |
Commission Structure: All Six Storefronts
The cut is never just the headline percentage.Every storefront publishes a standard commission rate, and nearly every storefront also has a tier, threshold, or carve-out that changes the effective rate for a meaningful share of revenue. A comparison at the headline-rate level alone understates how different these economies actually are.
Headline rate vs. lowest published rate, six storefronts
The lowest published rate is the floor a storefront states in its own developer terms, including Steam's 20% tier above $50 million lifetime, Epic's 0% on a developer's first $1 million per product per year, and Apple's and Google's small-developer rates. Sony and Microsoft do not publish store-level tiering, so their bars show only the flat headline rate. Steam's widely quoted 24% blended rate is a separate measure entirely: it describes what Valve actually collected on average, not a rate any single developer is charged.
| Storefront | Headline rate | Effective mechanics | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steam | 30% | Drops to 25% above $10M lifetime, 20% above $50M. Blended effective rate ~24% platform-wide, but only because a small number of top earners pull the average down; most developers pay the full 30%. | High Company documentation |
| Epic Games Store | 12% | 0% on a developer's first $1M in net revenue per product per year (since June 2025), then flat 12%. No tiering above that. | High Company documentation |
| PlayStation Network | ~30% | Standard digital storefront cut; no public tiering disclosed. Bundled into Sony's broader G&NS segment reporting. | Directional Trade press |
| Xbox | 30% | Standard cut; Game Pass revenue-share terms are separately negotiated per title and not publicly standardized. | Directional Trade press |
| Apple App Store | 30% / 15% | 15% under the Small Business Program (under $1M annual revenue) or after a subscriber's first year; 30% standard otherwise. | High Company documentation |
| Google Play | 30% / 15% | 15% on the first $1M in annual revenue per developer, then 30% above that threshold. | High Company documentation |
The Decision Model
The question isn't "which store is cheaper." It's "which economy matches your game."Before modeling a launch against any storefront's headline commission rate, a studio needs to answer four prior questions that the rate itself cannot answer:
- Does your monetization design put the sale at download (premium) or after sustained engagement (F2P)? This determines which FTUE failure mode you're actually risking.
- What is your realistic revenue ceiling? Epic's $1M no-commission threshold is decisive for a small studio projecting under $1M lifetime; irrelevant for one projecting $20M.
- Which audience already exists on which platform? A UA budget calculated against console/PC-style single-event payback will misprice a mobile funnel, and vice versa.
- Do you own your demand channel, or are you renting discovery from the storefront? A studio with its own community arriving at a store as checkout, rather than as discovery, changes the math on the commission question entirely.