In the AAA game space you mean. Else, in the casual gaming space, iOS is perhaps the most popular platform -- and the new integration effort means all those games will be able to run on macOS as well soon.
They work fine for me -- both as implementation and as gameplay.
>Almost all of them are built around exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche to convince people to spend money and become addicted.
I think you confused casual gaming with Zynga or something. I was referring to smaller, non-AAA megatitles. Could be anything from a platform game, to Angry Birds, Monument Valley, Threes, Letterpress, racing games, RPGs and so on...
Well, platform specific APIs aren't lowest-common-denominator affairs, and get support for native platform capabilities faster (plus can be more optimized).
The point is that the kind of games that thrive on the app store tend to be exploitative and low quality. Desktop gaming isn't immune from that, but it's a dramatically better platform.
I guess that explains why they are on Apple devices in the first place.
There are plenty great games. It help to source them from a gaming community you trust.
But not every game are gambling. Fortnite seems to be doing great. And that shouldn't be a pay to win game.
The games that grow out of the app store ecosystem are games like Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, etc. I'm not saying good games don't exist on the platform, I'm saying the platform is conducive to low quality games. Almost all of the great games on the app store did not grow out of the platform.
Game Engine Choices would become the old day of OpenGL vs DirectX. No one sane would write their own game from scratch.
People take level 1 accounts into legendary arena which shows that skill dominates money.
How on earth the devs at Supercell tricked management into making a skill rather than money based game is genuinely a mystery to me.
Also a lot went wrong when Apple opened up for ads and in game purchases.
And even in cases where they are available, for example Macbook Pros, the cost difference involved in stepping up from an integrated GPU to an entry-level dedicated card is greater than the cost of buying an Xbox or PlayStation.
Having a fixed set of hardware to target is a dream.