This issue is something of a Google thing...

But let's not pretend Apple doesn't see pay-to-win games and IAPs as a massive massive cash cow, too. That's not a Google exclusive.

this is a post about google

Yes it is. But "Google does this!" can have implicit "This is a Google issue", not "This is an issue."

(And I say that as someone who has had only iPhones since the Lumia 920.)

I know someone who makes $10m a year pumping out absolute garbage games on Android with all sorts of dark patterns, and have the thick skin to give talks at GDC.

But if you took out all the scammy apps out of Google or Meta ecosystems, they will be worth far less

$10M from garbage mobile "games", and no liabilities? Is it some lucky exception, or that's a norm in the industry?

Maybe I should shove up my ideals and principles where the sun doesn't shine, and ramp up a LLM game generator factory trained on a wiki of dark patterns... I will have pangs of conscience, but if it works I'll also have my own place to live and some basic financial security that may suffice if^W when my health degrades. And surely a good therapist would be able to fix the conscience later.

(Or does the lion's share of that money goes to the lawyers, haha?)

> pay to win games.

This has nothing to do with scams, only you disapproving of a monetization model you don't understand while making wildly incorrect estimates.

Scams are a monetization model we don't understand and disapprove of, yes.