Apple did this to itself. Reportedly it was Jobs' opinion turned policy that Apple don't do games or pornography.

Exactly this policy and their interference to app developers created a selection pressure and a cutout hole in shape of "only slightly gamelike && technically not pornographic && in high demand", and the category of apps more accurately represented as "strip clubs with casinos with no cash-out" filled the vacuum like a Ghibli film blob monster.

Early iOS games were more game-like. Apps like SNES remakes, flappy birds and music games, were more common, but they all converged down and down into porn territory.

It doesn't happen naturally; not even pornographic game markets, let alone Steam or Itch, aren't as badly infested with gambling as App Store. It only happened artificially by how Apple ran it over the past ~15 years.

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brigade 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Microtransaction infested games were inevitable even if mobile gaming didn’t exist. Like, of the top 10 highest lifetime grossing games, 3 are arcade pay-per-play (the original microtransaction), 6 are f2p that got their start on PC, and only one is mobile-first / only.

Last year, 58% of PC gaming revenue was from microtransactions, and that percentage is only growing.

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kilpikaarna 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Early iOS games were more game-like. Apps like SNES remakes, flappy birds and music games, were more common, but they all converged down and down into porn territory.

Game devs discovered pretty quickly that, Apple having set the initial expectation that an iOS game should cost $0.99, the only viable way to run a business on a mobile platform was a f2p/exploitation/casino model.

	▲	LeifCarrotson a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Assuming your ongoing costs are low (or zero, because Apple's hosting the downloads), and your development costs are just a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of man-hours of labor, well, 70% take on a market of 1.5 billion people is enough to keep my family and I fed and housed for quite a few years!
	▲	FMecha 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Even back in pre-iPhone days, actually getting a mobile game required one to subscribe to a text message subscription service that may or may not be hard to unsubscribe.