>I suppose I'd be okay with a 30% fee if Apple didn't charge us $99 to maintain a developer account
Those two things aren't remotely equivalent. $100 for a dev account is peanuts. It's there to support the iOS dev ecosystem and isn't unreasonable. It should be a non-issue. 30% of app revenue, on the other hand, equates to thousands or millions of dollars depending on how popular your app is. That actually makes a material difference.
But Valve let's all developers generate as much free keys as they want to sell on other platforms and doesn't require devs to route all in-game transactions through Steam.
Those two things aren't remotely equivalent. $100 for a dev account is peanuts. It's there to support the iOS dev ecosystem and isn't unreasonable. It should be a non-issue. 30% of app revenue, on the other hand, equates to thousands or millions of dollars depending on how popular your app is. That actually makes a material difference.