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.
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.
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.
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.