[theshrike79]

People are bad with scale, everyone thinks moves make a lot of money. They really don't.

Just Gaming in general made something like $200 BILLION in revenue in 2025. Movies made ... $33B globally.

And of that $200B, mobile games were over half.

If the average HN'er would just think of the money they spend on their hobbies (or don't it usually doesn't end well =P) and now apply that to mobile games. They're a hobby or a way to relax for millions and millions of people.

They pay for the "predatory IAPs" because they consider the $10 spent a good investment on the fun they're having in the game they play.

There's a specific group of people who just have the mindset of "never pay real money for anything in a game" - I'm one of them. But even I have to admit that I'm in the minority.

[Cthulhu_]

Exactly. They read headlines like "Game X did 100 MILLION revenue in 2025!" and think that's a lot, meanwhile mobile games nobody's even heard of do 20x that.

But I'd argue that the demographics for "people that read gaming news websites" and "people that play and pay for lucrative mobile games" hardly overlap.