My theory of the awfulness of phone games is that awful, cookie cutter games on phones can make lots of money, so lots of firms are happy to churn them out on an assembly line, knowing that a certain percentage will succeed.
There's enough not-awful phone games to establish that the platform doesn't inherently mandate awfulness, so it's about the market not the inherent platform features.
> If the game had two commands, it wouldn't work on a phone.
There's plenty of games with multiple commands on phones (one or two virtual directional sticks plus a handful, often contextually switched so the total number is greater than is onscreen at any one time, virtual buttons is not uncommon.
They can only do this in the absence of competition from non-awful games. You claim that those games exist, but you don't support that claim in any way. Why do you think they haven't displaced the awful games?
There's an infinite number of terrible games being constantly turned out for the PC too; the difference is that the PC also has good games.
Saying there are no good games on mobile is just ridiculous. Not just because quite a few decent PC games were closely ported to mobile, usually without predatory bullshit. But everything with a price sticker has to compete with "free". Saying the market will sort things out in favor of good games is just as ridiculous. Predatory tactics seem to work quite effectively, seem to make money for the industry and as such wont disappear anytime soon. Maybe if they go overboard and we consequently get some decent regulation.
There are a number of good reasons PC gaming is still a lot different from mobile, like how it started in a widely different position and still has quite different target audiences. But there is no indication it will stay that way, at least in terms of awful business practices.
No, they can only do this because there's actually a solid market for what I (and I assume you) see as awful games for extremely portable handheld devices; essentially, I think they are pretty much digital fidget spinners.
My theory of the awfulness of phone games is that it's more about the fact that phones don't have any input devices. So you see things like endless runners where the only possible command is "jump", which works well with the hardware where the only input you can provide is "I touched the screen". If the game had two commands, it wouldn't work on a phone.
I put ScummVM on my phones. It works fine; the only input an adventure game needs is mouse clicks with no time pressure. Interestingly, the current version is a huge step backwards in usability from the much older version available through f-droid -- the older version takes a screen tap to mean "click in the location of the cursor", and you move the cursor by dragging your finger around the screen. But the current version takes a screen tap to mean "click under where I tapped the screen", making clicking almost impossible.