I do only mean mobile here... desktop is a different beast altogether.
I also disagree with it the rights part. For the most part they are getting games either free, or incredibly cheaply. This drive towards "free" gaming has been entirely driven by gamers thinking $0.99 was too expensive for a game! This is nuts of course. Consumers happily pay £10 for a movie ticket that gives them 2 hours of entertainment, but ridicule anything that charges them something but that gives them MONTHS of entertainment. I think if they want something like that, they have to accept that something else will have to pay for it.
Games cost a lot to make, and gamers undervaluing the effort and money that goes into making it means it has to be made up somewhere else. So things like analytics and advertising is how their latest favourite game gets paid for. Simple as that.
(sorry...personal rant over...I hate how games/software are so under valued. Anything that gives prolonged use/entertainment is worth the money, especially when compared to the movie industry! Grrr)
I would agree with you, if the advertised price for gratis software was something like "$0.00 + YOUR ETERNAL SOUL MWAHAHAHAHA." But it's not. I'm kidding about the eternal soul part, but perhaps "Your demographic data will be harvested and sold to advertisers, and we will be monitoring exactly how you use the software in order to see if there might be other ways we can make money from you." would be a proper advertised price for gratis software.
Look, I get that software production has costs, and that many people try to make a business model out of providing software to people. I get that in some cases revenue may be easier to generate by other means than selling a license to use the software, such as selling advertisers, or selling analytics data to advertisers. But the important thing is that this stuff is not disclosed enough. People see "FREE!" and think "ah ha, perfect, let's install that!" and don't consider anything else. Most people don't even know what their rights are, or how giving them up without understanding them puts them at risk. It seems like a pretty hopeless task sometimes to try to educate people and get them to care. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
I do agree that the bottom dropped out of the entertainment software market... a long time ago. But
part of the reason that no one wants to spend money on entertainment software
is because people can offer it "for free" and then pay for it by spying on the unwitting users who don't care. Imagine an alternative reality where spying was opt-in, and users were educated, and you might well have sustainable revenue generated by per-license sales, because for them they understand the value of, say, a dollar vs. allowing Big Brother to sublet their smartphone so you can play video games.
Part of it too is that there are SO MANY people making games, who just want to make a name for themselves, as amateur/hobbyists... the barriers to enter the market are so low now, pretty much everyone who wants to make games is making them now. I wonder who you'd blame for that one