Strongly disagree. The microtransaction games are flooding the market, but there's still a substantial number of quality games which have a purchase once model. More have been released this year alone than I'll ever have time for.
pockettactics.com is a good place to start for seeing what quality games are out there and what the new releases are.
I used to play mobile games quite often, but it's been getting harder and harder to find games that don't require an insane amount of grinding or a pay to win model. I like strategy games, but when looking for games on the genre, I keptwszz finding recommendations for games like Clash of Clans, and that's precisely the opposite of what I want (it looks relevant, and the intro feels like what I want, but after a couple of hours of playing, I realize it's a waste of time).
Unfortunately, it seems games for desktop are also trying to go that direction, but with DLC and cosmetics instead of more direct pay to win. I really don't understand why people stand for this crap, but the fact that it's becoming more popular means that it works.
I miss the days when buying a game meant you got a good experience out of the box and you weren't hassled to pay more for the same game. Companies would sometimes sell an expansion or two, but those were almost like sequels, not missing features from the base game.
So I'm an avid boardgamer (as in Euro games aka boardgamegeek.com) and, for me, the phone and tablet have been an absolute boon as some of those have high quality ports. You'll typically pay $5-10 for them but it's totally worth it if this is your thing. Honestly I want more of this so I'll basically buy any quality implementation of a board game just to encourage more of this.
Here are some of the better ones:
- Through the Ages (totally playable on a phone)
- Agricola (this one probably needs a tablet)
- Race for the Galaxy
These are of course the usual suspects there too like Settlers of Catan, Carcasonne, Ticket to Ride, Splendor, etc for games on the lighter end.
The only IAPs with these are expansions, which I'm totally fine with.
Non-PTW games seem to be largely dead, which is sad. Think Waking Mars. But the market has spoken as there's way more money in PTW. But I actually really enjoyed playing the earlier Asphalt games (like 6/7 whereas later they went free and heavily upsell you on buying in-game stuff). I've put more hours than I'd care to admit into Bejeweled HD (the Diamond Mine variant). Years ago I also played a lot of Angry Birds but even those went heavily PTW.
I'll close by saying this to game developers out there: games can be free that are PTW, have ads or both or they can be non-free with no ads and no IAPs other than purchasing more content. Nothing annoys me more than a game that tries to charge to buy and then you find out it's actually PTW or (worse) it started off non-PTW but then they bolt on PTW or ads or they just nag you to death.