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I think if I had to name a villain for the woes of the game industry (beyond the obvious RAM shortage one), I would probably pick performance marketing. This is what drives the economics of the typical F2P game that represent an increasingly large share of industry revenue

Basically the way this works is that you typically pay for online ads by the impression (CPM) or click (CPC). Multiply this by the ratio of people that "install" your game after an impresison/click and you have a cost per install. Attribution lets you tie this cost to individual converting users.

I remember a time when MZ and SuperCell were spending something like $20M per month on user acquisition. Absurd numbers

Yeah, none of the F2P shops I worked at were as successful as those and most of my time was on the long-tail of a game past its user-acquisition prime, but I was still astounded at the money we were pulling in. Like our game was a kind of crappy flash game, but we were still making bank

We had a separate support line/protocol for people who had spent >$100K

For a normal retail game, converting after clicking an ad requires you to pay money up front. F2P games generally only start putting up pay gates once you're already invested in the game and the amount you need to pay to keep progressing at this first "pinch" is usually pretty small