There are still lots of great games (mobile and board games) which aren’t like this at all. It’s just that mobile gaming is an awful platform because it has fully succumbed to financialisation.
I remember having an iPhone 5 and the quality of games were pretty good, albeit pricey. I did pay for a bunch of games at the time because I thought that was fair. Coming back to iOS a decade later and the quality of games is unrecognizable from the era I started in. Even Apple Arcade has a lot of stuff that feels like f2p/p2w stuff that is basically mobile casinos.
I tried to give a bunch of modern games a shot and they're essentially slot machines that gate game progress with pulls. I'm glad console and PC gaming hasn't been completely taken over by this, but it is very close.
The Pathless. Monster's Expedition was also great, but it's not available any more. And that exposed a nasty detail of Arcade: Once a game isn't “available” any more, all of your copies instantaneously stop working.
Unlike PC and console gaming, mobile gaming's market is practically "Everyone". So there probably are some great mobile games out there, just buried in the charts under what the masses preferred. What's most popular on mobile is going to be a reflection of a very different demographic's interests. Kind of like trying to find the "best" movie from box office charts, you will get a list of the most popular movied, not the best.
The most popular movie today is not ten years old. They have made movies since The Avengers. (Notably, Avengers: Endgame, but less facetiously, a Super Mario movie and James Cameron's Avatar sequel were pretty popular.) I'm not asking for something inventive and genre-defying, just a game that is not literally ten years old.
Mobile is really tough to monetize the way console/desktop can monetize. If you were to make an app which is identical across desktop and mobile, you would neged to charge less for the mobile version because people don't value a mobile app as much. This is even true in cases where a mobile version is superior to desktop, such as star tracking apps.
The mobile market figured out[0] a way to monetize a customer base where the median will not pay, but the mean will. Unfortunately, the method they figured out is really harmful and really profitable. Profitable enough that other platforms are copying it.
[0] Technically many Asian MMOs were already doing this for a while before mobile apps existed. But it was the mobile market that has researched and data-scienced it into the mainstream monster it is now.
