>And those games are horrible.

They work fine for me -- both as implementation and as gameplay.

>Almost all of them are built around exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche to convince people to spend money and become addicted.

I think you confused casual gaming with Zynga or something. I was referring to smaller, non-AAA megatitles. Could be anything from a platform game, to Angry Birds, Monument Valley, Threes, Letterpress, racing games, RPGs and so on...

I'm not saying there aren't decent games on iOS. You can find gems like Monument Valley, Florence, or, as I mentioned, the games ported from other platforms like Limbo, Terraria, and so on. But take a look at the top charts on the iOS app store and compare that to the top games on Steam. With few exceptions, the games on iOS are riddled with ads, microtransactions, and are designed to be as addictive as possible.

The point is that the kind of games that thrive on the app store tend to be exploitative and low quality. Desktop gaming isn't immune from that, but it's a dramatically better platform.

Not if Microsoft has any say. I can't count the number of Windows Updates that re-installed the previously uninstalled Candy Crush Saga, Bubble Witch 3 Saga and March of Empires (among titles).

I played the fuck out of Angry Birds - on Android. How exactly does forcing developers to adopt a platform specific API help anyone? That was a rhetorical question BTW, don't even try to answer it. Apple are being arrogant as fuck with this.

>How exactly does forcing developers to adopt a platform specific API help anyone?

Well, platform specific APIs aren't lowest-common-denominator affairs, and get support for native platform capabilities faster (plus can be more optimized).

I understand their benefits. But why refuse to support standards as well? I don't think Apple is short on resources.

I think because then you don't give developers the extra motivation to use your platform APIs.

That just means the benefits don't outweigh the down side - lack of cross platform API, new learning curve to climb.

You talk of a subset. A lot of casual games on iOS a very good: Cut the rope, Angry Birds, Bad Piggies, Simple Rockets. Civilization for iPad was very good. I can't remember all the stuff I've played but a lot of games are not the candy crush kind.

Also a lot went wrong when Apple opened up for ads and in game purchases.

PUBG Mobile is one of the best game I have played in a long time. And it doesn't cost me a penny. Nor do I have to pay to win. ( Actually I may have to upgrade my phone to play better )

But not every game are gambling. Fortnite seems to be doing great. And that shouldn't be a pay to win game.

PUBG was ported from desktop. It originally started out as an ARMA 2 mod, was turned into PUBG, and only much later ported over to mobile. It's a perfect example of the kind of game that can come out of the desktop gaming community. You don't get games like PUBG, Minecraft, Starcraft, Terraria, Civ, Kerbal, and so on without desktop gaming.

The games that grow out of the app store ecosystem are games like Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, etc. I'm not saying good games don't exist on the platform, I'm saying the platform is conducive to low quality games. Almost all of the great games on the app store did not grow out of the platform.

Woah now, Clash Royale is a good game that is skill driven.

People take level 1 accounts into legendary arena which shows that skill dominates money.

How on earth the devs at Supercell tricked management into making a skill rather than money based game is genuinely a mystery to me.

That I certainly agree. But I do think the future are Games built on top of Game engine. Unreal seems to have a massive improvement changelog every 6 months and if Unity didn't exist I did doubt how anyone is going to compete within a reasonable budget.

Game Engine Choices would become the old day of OpenGL vs DirectX. No one sane would write their own game from scratch.

“99% of everything is shit”

There are plenty great games. It help to source them from a gaming community you trust.

>> built around exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche to convince people to spend money and become addicted

I guess that explains why they are on Apple devices in the first place.