[Sir_Substance]

That's not the influence of the app store, it's the influence of an influx of marketing staff and investment capital.

Games went from being a niche thing that only people who cared got involved in to a big business, and in the process the priority shifted from "make good games" to "use dodgy tricks and known mental blind spots to manipulate people into paying the maximum possible amount for a product".

The people who actually care about games are being squeezed into indie studios or right out of the business, because they keep saying inconvenient things like "the skins model compromises my vision for the game, I refuse to do it".

To be brutally honest, as a life long gamer I see more merit in starcraft-js than I do in the starcraft II series.