Also look up K shaped economies at the same time and you get a better answer.

But the gist of it is, companies do free to play systems that support themselves by a very small portion of their user base spending a very large amount of money. The free/low paying users find themselves with poor/no service as the companies do anything to attract more whales.

K based economies are somewhat related as you see a very small portion of the participants in an economy make a huge amount of money while everyone else gets poor.

Whales are the tiny percentage of users who spend large amounts of actual money on bullshit non-products offered by mobile apps and online platforms. AKA suckers.

Or addicts and people with other mental issues that make them easy to prey upon.