Not gonna change unless the market changes, if smart phone gamers were willing to spend $20-$60 on games then you would get the quality of games you get on the Switch and no ads, and people buy it, I say $60 because Animal Crossing was that much and people bought it.

But it seems they would rather just have it free and have it subsidized by ads and exploiting whales.

I doubt it. I think if people paid that much we'd still have the same types of games, but they'd simply cost more. PC games are becoming more like mobile games, not the other way around.

flash games, especially later ones, had this too.

Sure, there're those games.

Then there's Fortnight on the smartphone.

Kongregate can't just compete with the crappy adware games and call it a day. It also has to compete with games like Fortnight. Browser games are almost completely absent from both the multiplayer and AAA space. That is very hard to compete with.

Had to google gacha, nice that there is a catchy word for this awful mechanic

That's why I pirate

Sounds like the chicken and the egg. Game makers use in-game micro transactions because people just steal the game/ don't want to pay for a game, and you say you steal the game because they use micro transactions. More likely, studios produces shitty games because people still support them and it's an easy model, and people steal games because they don't want to pay for stuff.

Better solution is to support indie devs that produce good games and stop supporting/stealing/playing the shitty studio games.

> in-game micro transactions

Those are used in full price games. Its because they extract much greater amounts of money form player base. So that is weak argument for all those starving game-makers.

Sure some smaller ones are hurting from the piracy, but people who pirate are usually ones who don't have money to buy games in a first place.

When i was young I pirated games as we were poor. Now I don't pirate because its more convenient for me to just buy things I like.