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literally an indie developer has a better chance of getting me to play their game on my mobile device by developing it for Super Nintendo or Game Boy Advance and selling the rom on itch than by getting it into the Play Store

I literally beg people around me to just spend a few bucks to have a GOOD game on their phone that won't relentlessly pester them for ingame purchases. "But it's just a phone game" no it's not it's Balatro.

I was actually really worried about indie pricing about 10-15 years ago, because it looked like it might go the way of mobile. which we were already seeing as a completely disaster.

In the world we live in, where most studios that ship their first game go out of business, this means any game you buy on mobile probably has an expiration date of about 3 years before the OS itself will not allow you to download or install it.

yup, not popular statement but letting apps be as low as 1$ did a lot of damage to what you could reasonably put out on mobile. there was a reason there was a price floor on consoles and other platforms to that point

"Why are mobile games all micro-transaction ridden gacha hells" Because that's the only type of games stores will highlight, since they take a cut on the transactions!!

Its the economic reality of everybody expecting apps to be free or $1

They have struggled to shake that reputation because it's correct about 99% of mobile games, it's basically a giant garbage dump for shovelware most actual game enthusiasts are repulsed by

Plus something like 90% of mobile games aren't really games so much as just slot machines

And they simply have no worthy expertise to speak of, every presentation from both platforms, internal or external, is different ways of saying "Here's how you could be squeezing even more juice from your users" "Indies for mobile" is a field that was already explored and it's not worth it