You're looking through the App Store or the Google Play Store trying to find a good game to entertain you, and you just can't help noticing one thing in common that the vast majority of the games seem to share.
"In-App Purchases"
In-app purchases aren't always bad, but some developers, out of pure greed, make games so boring and slow until you feel forced to cough up your cash just to get out of being tortured. I've already talked about that quite a lot, and I don't want to repeat myself here (because this article is about a slightly different topic) so please read the article "In-App Purchases" on the sidebar to read more.
The vast majority of games are free, and almost all of the free games are rigged in the same way.
1. You get the game for free.
2. You start earning rewards by playing the game, like experience points and game currency.
3. After playing for a while you realise that your progress is slowing down.
4. You get the option to "buy" the progress for real money.
This sounds bad enough on its own, but it's even worse when the whole game deviates from that pattern and starts becoming pay-to-win.
Pay-to-win, as the name suggests, incorporates a model in which players can pay real money to get massive advantages. The model is most widespread in simulation and strategy games, but the way this is going, it can spread to ruin every single type of game. Racing games would be wrecked. Card games would be wrecked. Puzzle games would be wrecked. Arcade games would be wrecked. Fighting games would be wrecked. RPGs would be wrecked. Every single type of game - you name it - could be completely wrecked by the pay-to-win model.
In racing games, they dominate the outcome by upgrades rather than skill. In strategy games there are long waiting times and ways to buy resources with premium currency. In fighting games and action games they put in an "energy bar" to limit your progress unless you pay.
There is no type of game that cannot be ruined by this model.
The payers feel like winners and the non-payers feel like losers. Obviously, many non-payers don't want to feel like losers so they decide to pay up to stop feeling defeated when it actually wasn't their fault. This is basically all psychologically engineered to manipulate people into emptying their wallets into the developers' pockets. They're exploiting their customers and deceiving them into thinking they've got a "free game" when in fact it's a piece of software specifically designed to con people out.
I actually find it quite depressing that all types of games can be destroyed in this way. Playing games is supposed to give you fun, not to leech so much money out of you that you end up going bankrupt. If they want to make money, at least they shouldn't make it pay to win.