I understand having other business models. I personally hate ads, but I’m also happy to buy a game and then pay to remove the ads. And I’m willing to pay a lot

I understand having other business models. I personally hate ads, but I’m also happy to buy a game and then pay to remove the ads. And I’m willing to pay a lot more than the $1 that most people seem to think is overpriced. I also understand having some in app purchases. My gripe is a few games took a really exploitive route with in app purchases. Having extremely aggressive timers and tons of currencies. And they CLEANED UP. From what I’ve heard it sounds like it’s mostly people who pay nothing, children being tricked into paying, and a small number of people who spend an insane amount of money. The whales. But whatever the mix it made money so every game publisher started racing to turn out identical skinner boxes. This had two effects. First, that’s what the publishers were interested in so it’s probably a lot harder to get anything else through. Second, because those games are “free“ it changed pricing expectations that games and other apps should be “free“. So if you wanted to make a good game and sell it at even a really low price, people screamed at you. How DARE you charge $1.99. By driving down the expected price we ended up at a point where the only things that can make any money at all or either crammed with ads that get shown to you constantly or designed to milk as much money out of people as possible. Games only have to be good enough to keep people looking at the ads or paying for another set of Smurfberries. Worst of all even games that were already made and were absolute classics have been ruined. Because they either get updates to add those features (Flight Control) or sequels to change the game to be more like one of those that makes a lot of money (Plants be Zombies 2, Trism 2).