At the end of the day the audience have voted with their wallets - since 2011 (3 years after the introduction of the app store & 7 years ago) f2p revenue have surpassed "premium" game revenue & the situation has only gotten more and more in favor of f2p since then.

You will occasionally find someone online saying "I'd have bought it as a $10 premium game" but in reality trying to pay salaries with premium games is almost impossible.

Yes, there are the rare outliers like monument valley but there are orders of magnitude more people making a living working on f2p games.

I've done a couple mobile games. One I had priced at 99 cents. Got 200 downloads. A couple years later, I change the price to free. Hundreds of thousands of downloads, no change to the game.

Then you put ads into the free version and an in app purchase that gets rid of the ads for 99 cents.

I think the platforms have a part to play in this. They would be more incentivised to promote a F2P game with in app purchases (of which they get a 30% cut) over a game that doesn't include them but might ask for a few bucks up front.

They still get a 30% cut on sales afaik, so if someone spends $10 on a F2P game or $10 on a premium game, the platform gets the same cut. What actually happens is that more people play the F2P game, and some people spend a lot on those microotransactions, so the company gets more money out of a F2P game model than a premium game.

People just don't seem willing to commit on mobile, while they are on desktop. It's weird, but I feel like $10 is cheap for a desktop game, but expensive for a mobile game, so I expect a lot more out of a mobile game than a desktop game at the same price. Perhaps it's a graphics thing, IDK.

Unfortunately, that model seems to be getting quite popular on desktop as well, with tons of games offering "loot boxes" and cosmetics using in game currencies. I avoid those games like I avoid that model on mobile, but for some reason people are choosing that model on desktop as well.

but they also get 30% cut on the initial price of a premium game, so they're only incentivised to push f2p cause customers are more willing to spend & (on average) spend more on them.

Indeed. There’s a few proper games that trickle out now and then, and the App Store editors do try to highlight them, but they’re still few and far between and buried under crap. And now days even paid games aren’t immune to gambling and pay to win scams either.

It is sort of surreal how little the needle has moved since the F2P boom. I bought the first gen iPad, and back then there was a ton of excitement about gaming possibilities on the platform, and some good stuff came out.

I left with the 2nd gen and hadn’t touched one since but a couple years ago I got a new current gen iPad on sale, and was surprised to find that basically, a lot of the best games were still just the same ones that were out back then for the iPad 2. And then the switch to 64-bit happened and we lost a ton of those older games entirely that never got updated.

It’s really depressing. I don’t really even try to find mobile games anymore either.

> and the App Store editors do try to highlight them,

That’s funny, because I place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the App Store.

The one function I’ve been waiting for, both directly as a customer and as a parental control, is to be able to have the app store search filter out results with in-app purchases.

Right now there is no way to effectively -find- real premium games, let alone purchase them. Of course they’re going to die under the flood of freemium garbage.

They'd probably lose a ton of money if they allowed you to filter those out. People seem to pay more with in-app purchases than up front purchases, so it makes little sense for them to offer such a feature.

And in-app purchases can be done well (e.g. pay to remove ads functions basically like a free trial for me), but they've become predatory since they've started influencing game design.

> They'd probably lose a ton of money if they allowed you to filter those out.

Oh, I agree - which is why I don’t buy the idea that the App Store editors try to highlight “premium” games. Making them easily discoverable would be trivial - but cuts against their profit motive.

Hopefully things get better with the Apple Game subscription this fall that will not have ads or in app purchases.

The worst is the old games (even ones that I paid for) that have now added all the ads.

pockettactics.com is a good place to start. They highlight the quality games, frequently put out "best-of" lists, and avoid F2P games unless a F2P game is particularly exceptional.