Nintendo consoles seem to provide the experience you're looking for. Clean and curated games with no ads or subscriptions. And the games tend to be of higher quality, focused on actual gameplay as opposed to the dark patterns common on phone apps (e.g. time-limited "stamina" and other psychological manipulation tricks to encourage addictive behavior).
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> Nintendo consoles seem to provide the experience you're looking for. Clean and curated games with no ads or subscriptions.
This mostly matches my experience, for example Nintendo Switch occasionally gets some critique for being a bit dated (apparently a new version is in the works), but it feels like a step up from mobile gaming and has all sorts of great games, from Legend of Zelda to Animal Crossing and even well made ports from other platforms.
That said, there are also free games that do have aspects of monetization, but I think it's easy enough not to save card details or anything like that.
Honestly, I kind of wish the first Switch generation would hang around for longer and developers would keep making well optimized games for it.
How does this work financially? From what I understand, access to the console market involves considerable upfront cost, so these games will hardly be from independent developers. If the games come from studios they wouldn't offer them for free, so who pays for these apps?
The business model is simply selling the game (typically in a $10-60 range), and sometimes additional DLC (downloadable content).
There are many games by independent developers on consoles, too. For example, Nintendo regularly releases "Indie World Showcase" promotional videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brNLmMMB-J4
Ok, I understand, the games are not free, just one-time payment and done. That's something.
You probably haven’t seen the Nintendo Online Shop on Switch. It’s filled with so much crappy games it’s hard to find anything of value at all, apart from going on the front page recommendations of first part Nintendo games and other big publishers.
If you browse through the new section it’s full of mostly cheap indie games.