It's easy to think of the App Store purely as a gatekeeper taking a cut of whatever you sell. That framing misses how much actual work it's quietly doing on your behalf, work a solo game builder would otherwise have to build entirely from scratch.

It handles payment processing, in every currency, in every country it operates in, without you needing to build or manage any of that infrastructure yourself. It handles hosting and delivery, so a player anywhere in the world downloads your game reliably, without you running servers or managing bandwidth.

It brings built-in trust. A player downloading through the App Store isn't wondering whether the transaction is safe the way they might with an unfamiliar website. That trust was built over years by Apple, not by you, and you get to borrow it the moment your game goes live there.

It brings discovery too — people actively searching for exactly the kind of game you built, finding it without you needing to build an audience from zero on your own.

A real partner does some of the heavy lifting so you can focus on what you're actually good at — building something people want to play. The App Store, imperfect and taking its cut as it does, is doing exactly that, every single day your game is live there.