Beds really changed the whole game.
Building a base didn’t just mean a place to put your chests, it also had to be a place worth spending the whole night in. I cared a lot about making the interior a nice place to be. And the exterior of the base had to be a good fort too because you couldnt skip all the monster spawns at night.
Back then I took minecraft to be like a fort building game. Explore by day and craft by night. The first night I spent huddled in a small dark grave i dug for myself in a wall. It taught me that a good base was important.
I think beds were added in the halloween update if i remember right. I was blown away how they skipped monster spawning. That’s when I felt the game changed direction the hardest, because you no longer needed a base to survive.
Apple and Google’s 30% not only hits the base price, but every single transaction that happens inside apps as well. Imagine a toll bridge in front of your nearest supermarket where the people working the toll booth inspect every bag of grocery you bought and then charged you toll based on what you bought there.
Apps arent entirely like video games. If you wanted to open a non-subscription based music store or book store or whatever, you’d find it economically impossible to pay the publishers their cut, apple their cut, your server host their cut, and have anything left over for yourself without charging your customers their arms and legs. This is why all those kinds of apps are subscription based. You can cleverly batch and bundle stuff in a monthly subscription fee which gives you room to dance around google and apples high fees and have enough money to keep your lights on.