The Steam Direct Product Submission Fee (while refundable after you get $1,000 in sales, of which Valve will charge 30%); is only one of the fees you must pay. For example I have had to pay for additional beta codes and if you do not charge anything for your game but you get a lot of downloads then you risk getting into bad terms with Valve. (who, while darlings to gamers are pretty aggressive bullies to game developers).

> - Nintendo you also don't pay to be in, but the dev kit is 400 USD (unless this changed recently), you can dev in any machine

Nintendo is actually a little bit of an outlier, as they really want to promote indy games (not even requiring a business address!). One caveat though is that they really want you to show your project before granting you permission to buy a dev kit, so you need to make a PC game before you make a switch game.. which is weird.

> - Xbox depends on how you manage to sell your thing to them, it can even be free

My €70,000 p.a recurring fee for XBox dev kits in Ubisoft begs to differ.

Regardless; the economics are the same. If it's too much money then nobody would pay it, so there's clearly a value.

Apple aren't forcing you to use their devices, people want to because there's a large pool of people to sell to.