Like back in the early days. I would like to think that we would have, by now, a wealth of top quality console ports and original releases .. and a most welcome lack of ads that you see everywhere for certain FTP games. Could this scenario ever happen again in the mobile market?
There would prob be alot more ports and console worthy releases but freemium is not going away. Its the most profitable way to make a game. I wouldnt be surprised to see consoles go this way too and have the AAA titles be freemium eventually too.
As I see it, IAP was the inevitable outcome of the truly damaging event - the race to the pricing bottom. So assuming that still happened and there was no IAP, I suspect there would be fewer big companies involved in the market at all anymore, leaving mostly indies disinterested in making much profit. And Kemco.
JRPG is the last frontier genre of game where I expect it to be premium. None of this new age of expectation that every game has to have an "end game" or unlimited hours of content. You have an adventure, you beat the last boss and its done, no different than a movie or a book. Every other genre of game, im surprised when its NOT freemium.
Since Apple doesn't allow upgrade pricing, devs are pretty much incentivized to make as many low quality apps as possible, and just move on to the next thing. Those that stick around and make more quality apps can at least charge upgrades via IAP. They could release a brand new version... app 2.0 as a separate app, but then they lose all of the reviews from app 1.0
Even though I've come to terms with IAP, deep down inside I still consider it a cancer to gaming as a whole and wish it never happened. Oh well...
The times dictate what must be done. I still remember the Palm OS days, getting my first Palm PDA back in 2000. The smallest sized game was a black and white version of Minesweeper. No shades of gray. It was literally black or white, and was only 2KB! My first games on my 16-shade grayscale Handspring Visor Neo were Froggy and Galax. As their names implied, they were clones of Frogger and Galaxia. The shocking part was not only did I pay $10 apiece for those, but I gladly did it too! I hear iOS used to be like that... where prices were in the $10 to $20 range, before this "race to the bottom" effect got started somehow. Unfortunately, piracy was rampant on that platform, and even then, I had a feeling that folks didn't really want to pay that much for games anyways. Somebody was amused how one game on pOS cost $10, was pretty much a "mini-game", whereas a GBA game cost $20 was an adventure game. That adventure game included the "mini-game" as part of it. Much like with iOS apps, pOS users would cry "pure greed" and complain how when Dataviz charged extra to be able to read PDF files as part of their Documents To Go software suite. There were gamers who complained how expensive the games were, and how they should do the same thing others in the industry does... make games cheaper by going VOLUME. Well, pOS games are more of a niche thing, so they really can't achieve the same levels of volume. Perhaps for that, and perhaps for other reasons too, but they're really no longer around. I also remember an article where somebody asked Steve Jobs if Apple would design a phone. He say the guy had a Palm Treo 600 in his pocket, chuckled, and said "you should hold on to your Treo". I remember some internet users calling him a jerk. Little did we know that Apple would eventually go into huge secrecy of creating the new iPhone.