> to be discoverable one has to pay the advertisement dollars to be displayed in the top spots

That's not how the iOS App Store works. You cannot pay Apple to be featured. The closest approximation you could do is pay one of those companies that try and game the ranking system by getting "fake" downloads (e.g. paying people to "buy" the game, etc) in order to get placed highly on the top charts, but that's not the same thing as being featured on the store, and it's widely regarded as a scummy move.

In any case, if you had to self-host your own game download instead of having Apple provide the download, that certainly wouldn't fix any of this. People still need to discover your game, which means you need to market it, and you can provide a link to the app store just as easily as you could provide a link to a self-hosted download.

I don't know what you mean.

Every "featured app" on the App Store was chosen by Apple. Nobody can pay to be featured. Apple decides what apps they want to feature on their own.

Oh, ok then, i was entirely wrong. I thought it operated like Steam. (I don't own an iDevice.)