I was easily willing to spend $10 for such a game, because of the scarcity. I would expect some indy dev to jump into this space, but I guess microtransactions are just too lucrative?
Your willingness to pay $10 for a SimCity-style game probably explains the scarcity. If you and enough others were willing to pay $40-60, you'd find that game.
If you only want to pay $10 for a mobile game tops, you will get what that $10 is worth; a 4-5 hour experience with little replayability, but has great graphics and is fun. Someone is not going to recreate a AAA title that had millions of dollars put into it in their bedroom for maybe 23k people to pay $10 for it, or even less.
I simply find it hard to believe game development suddenly became so much more expensive in the last few years of F2P rise. Isn’t this just about a whole industry discovering an opportunity, and accordingly a new standard of expectations of money to be made ?
I guess the canonical example of "you can deliver a premium gaming experience on phones for under $10" is Minecraft, but unless you can sell the volume Minecraft is, you need to make more per user than they do.
$10 for a mobile game is perceived as expensive. Many people say "I don't pay $15 for a mobile game", even if they are ready to pay $30 for the exact same game on a game console or PC. And if you look at Steam and the Android Play Store, you will often notice that the the mobile version of a game is often much cheaper, even though they are not significantly different.
Upfront payment simply doesn't work on mobile. Looking at the "most profitable" apps on the Play Store, the first non-free app is ranked 78th.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/suburbia-city-building-board...