>people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone
I've refunded more games than I've kept on Steam over the past decade. While there's now a much wider pool of games, there's not necessarily a much deeper pool of games. Since trash sells and since marketing a game has been absurdly difficult recently, I can imagine that there's plenty of people who would have made a good game, but who instead (quite rationally) decided against it.
On the flip side, the firehose of trash has pushed me to mess around and make little demos, so who knows?
What I’m really shocked is that mobile gaming is as dire as it is. My iPhone from some years back was capable of running full blown Civ6 and earlier total war games. Despite the hardware clearly being capable of running interesting, complex games, the market is dominated by shitty gacha games, copy paste puzzle games and scams.
The problem is that the mobile touch screen interface is complete ass. There are people who play all kinds of games on mobile, for example I know there's some league of legends games on mobile and I think there are some first person shooters etc bu i wouldn't even consider trying them personally, simply because I'm not interested in trying to use the touch screen to control complex game mechanics.
It can work for simpler concepts like card games, Balatro comes to mind for example.
Also personally I think the whole concept just appeals to less discriminating audiences. I never play any game that can be described as pay to win, I don't care how good it is, if you can pay for progress or advantage I'm no longer interested. But mobile games seem to both facilitate the pay to win and generally just value-extracting systems with app store purchases etc, and appeal more to people who are willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money for progress and advantages.
I did play one pay to win game while I was on vacation once, it's called The Tower and its honestly completely stupid. I tried playing it for free and it kind of just makes it impossible to progress at a satisfying pace without payment, then you have to pay significant amounts like $20-50 for relatively minor upgrades, a conservative player just buying the "necessities" to enjoy the game would probably end up spending way $50-100 or more, and it doesn't end there. The discord had people bragging that they'd spent like $40k on this stupid low effort mobile game. The studio makes millions on a monthly basis. It's ridiculous.
I just wish there were an option to buy a game, like we used to. Now every mobile game seems to prefer you watch ads every 2 minutes with no option to pay to disable them.
There are even mobile ads for other games which proudly boast "no ads" and then they still have ads. Nothing has meaning anymore.
I've refunded more games than I've kept on Steam over the past decade. While there's now a much wider pool of games, there's not necessarily a much deeper pool of games. Since trash sells and since marketing a game has been absurdly difficult recently, I can imagine that there's plenty of people who would have made a good game, but who instead (quite rationally) decided against it.
On the flip side, the firehose of trash has pushed me to mess around and make little demos, so who knows?