The internet (ie bandwidth) is cheap, but running servers, providing documentation and tech support all costs a decent amount of money.

However, treating an API as a profit center is a joke. These are literally companies developing software that makes the experience of owning a Tesla better. Making things unaffordable for those companies is putting short term profits over long term success of your product

Getting a CD on the N64 would have allowed for some cooler videos in the middle of the game (and would probably have made things cheaper for developers), but, in my opinion, the thing that really killed the N64 is the tiny (4k) texture cache combined with high latency RAM on the system.

That’s why N64 games have a “look” that can be easily identified.

Technically, I think the ability to sign enterprise apps (ie. Apps that can be side loaded for your company) cost $399/year.