"> It's unfortunate how bad the state of mobile gaming is, considering how powerful today's phones are." Pretty simple reason. There's enough games that charge

"> It's unfortunate how bad the state of mobile gaming is, considering how powerful today's phones are." Pretty simple reason. There's enough games that charge $0 up front that products asking for even $1 up front, get negligible downloads. Consequently, everybody has to charge $0 up front which immediately constrains you to advertising or mostly coercive business models. And this business model then ends up meshing into the game itself. It's not easy to have a game when you have this constraint of having to coerce the user into paying. It invariably lends itself to a sort of addiction + satiation pattern. And oddly what's most addictive is not necessarily the most fun; in many cases it's not really any fun at all. Arguably it's the same reason console gaming is dying. Increasingly often now a days you're not buying a game for $60, you're buying a starter pack which is then filled out a la carte with DLC and various microtransactions. And once again this model directly impacts the game experience itself. It's stripped down to the bare bones to attempt to coerce purchase of the 'whole' game. But to further 'incentivize' people to buy the 'whole' game, the stripped out content is often not only necessary for a complete experience but also grossly imbalanced in the player's favor. It's a very myopic business model. Fortunately PC gaming is full of independent developers who've yet to grasp the sophisticated business strategy of MBAing yourself to death, and then blaming everything except your own actions for your deteriorating longterm results.