The PC market contains a more comprehensive picture. There are plenty of "bad" yet profitable F2P PC MMOs. There are also plenty of respected premium games on S

The PC market contains a more comprehensive picture. There are plenty of "bad" yet profitable F2P PC MMOs. There are also plenty of respected premium games on Steam. F2P dominates the mass markets, but premium still captures the attention of the core audiences and enthusiast press. You don't develop for both - you target one or the other. They want different things. Relative to the size, average wealth and tastes of the market, premium now acts as the "luxury good", free is the "normal good", and generic knockoffs that litter app stores are the "substitute good". That's the result of having a race to the bottom through digital distribution - mediocre premium games fade from view in an instant, well-marketed ones continue to do gangbusters business. Console hardware preserves some role here in that it still offers the "best" premium experience, on average. PC games let you tinker with the settings more and add mods, but the lead platform for new, big budget games is usually console, and that includes portables. Plug and play still matters. Big budget experiences still matter. But it's not as big a business as the market for "small" mobile games - that's just how the numbers work out. This isn't the first time gaming has gone through a business model shift, of course. Arcade gameplay and its quarter-munching habits used to be the standard by which a game was judged. It wasn't until the 1990's that those tendencies stopped being a dominant influence.