Not so when all the big gaming mobile companies are assigning their top talent to building stuff like Clash of Kings. And why wouldn't they, when they can make so much more money doing so than working on a quality prestige game that no one will pay for.
> the premium game market still exists and still is going strong, no reason it couldn't live on mobile devices also.
It's actually the opposite. Mobile-style microtransactions are slowly taking over the premium PC/console gaming market.
If you look at the numbers on mobile, it makes no sense from a business perspective to create non-F2P games on this platform.
You can still make money with so-called "premium" games, that were simply normal games before Apple poisoned the well, but the potential is considerably lower.
If a game developer can make a living making "premium" games, then it makes sense to do so, especially with the very real ethical problems with making free-to-play games laden with microtransactions.
Just because you would only ever choose to do what makes you the most money possible, and damn the rest of the world, that doesn't mean everyone would or should make that choice.
Most developers cannot make a living selling premium games on mobile. There have been plenty of cost breakdowns posted to HN by game developers.
Occasionally a big mega-hit can make a profit, but for the majority of developers, free is now the only viable way.
I moved from doing code for industrial use and public admin as a consultant to mobile gaming.
We have one hit game and the _daily_ marketing (a.k.a. user acquisition) budget for us is an order of magnitude bigger than the biggest projects I did at my old job.
All the "ethical problems" usually are just older (usually) men in IT not understanding that people want to pay money to have fun.
Some people go to bars to relax after a work week and drop $100 gladly. Others use that for going to the movies, some go to have a nice dinner. And some people really like relaxing while playing games and they want to pay for that, because they think it's worth the price.
Part of it may be the "don't want to pay upfront" but shareware knows how that goes (free first part of the game, then pay $30 for the rest or whatever).
I agree... but there isn't one. And I don't think it's because of an underpowered GPU.
