Comment by joshstrange

There is a market, unfortunately it might be a small one as I've been unable to find good resources to find games without IAP or without "bad" IAP, aka gems, coins, powerup, speedup, etc. The only good IAPs are DLC, Full Unlock, or Remove Ads. If a game has anything but that I will not download the game. No matter how many times they scream "Free to play" we all know that's 100% bullshit (and if you don't then I've got a bridge to sell you). The only exception to this rule is if the only IAP is cosmetic-only (think: Fortnight).

All other F2P games progress to the point that they require you to pay to proceed either by making your progress slow down to near-zero and/or forcing you to grind for hours to move forward even a tiny bit. No, it's not "The game is just harder", they specifically make the game too hard at a certain point to force you into paying. It's a really ingenious system where they will let you get quite far in the game before they turn the screws, when you think "Well I have played X hours, I can spend $Y on this powerup". PvZ2 is a good example of this. EA absolutely ruined the PvZ franchise (they even went back and screwed up PvZ1, adding ads/IAP even if you bought the game previously) with their greed.

F2P/IAP game developers have perverse incentives to milk you for all you're worth and no matter how "pure"/"moral" they think they want to be. The siren call of money will always lead them to ruin games and make them effectively P2W, even if subconsciously. It's simply too easy to do, just bump the boss HP up by a factor of 10, make this part of the level near-impossible without a powerup, etc.

Apple Arcade helps will some of this but the catalogue is limited (though there are some real gems in there, some of which are games that were F2P/P2W initially). I've found Apple's "Games you might like" or "Based on your downloads" to actually be surprisingly good. I just have to filter them out if they have "bad" IAPs.