Good for the devs who need the money but as a customer Steam just provides more, and if not Steam, GOG is DRM-free and ItchIO enables smallers indies to get their games out there. Epic isn't even on my list of places to buy. The only thing I bought in Epic, funny enough, was Fortnite Save the World, and I didn't get much out of that.
There is some merit to that but we aren't just counting players. People seem to be ultimately paying more. If mobile gaming was more available but also more affordable the revenue might not surpass console and PC games.
Which is no surprise, since most freemium games are structured to get players spending, dangling extra lives and new characters in front of them, often escalating to the point where even people grinding hours every day struggle to advance without paying. It's not uncommon to see people in mobile gaming communities saying how they spent thousands of dollars on a game and regretting it, something that is not even a possibility for console games without microtransactions.
The graph and tables are for total revenue across the industry and they even separate ad revenue into a different category. What this shows is that freemium is more expensive than paid at this point.
Expecting growth to keep up forever is investor nonsense, but it is very relevant that, up to 2021, mobile games which are largely based on the freemium model have overtaken the rest of the industry by far. Console and PC games are now a secondary market, which is sad to see.
It is an absolute sham that they aren't regulated as strictly as casinos, exclusively for adults, with the company liable if they fail to prevent minors from participating.
We are the problem in so much it's very well known that psychologically conditioning tactics work on the human brain.
The real problem is a lack of education and regulation. People know regular casino gambling is a problem but governments act to make people aware and limit its harm. Meanwhile even rating agencies play coy about the effects of lootboxes in games rated for actual children. They try to argue that it's not "real gambling" because players can't officially redeem rewards as money, but it's exactly the same as far as the negative effects go, incentiving compulsive spending which can be financially damaging.