By the time companies tried to regain the mobile space, the only way to make the sort of money demanded was to fill it with microtransactions and/or gacha elements

I'd argue what happened was that "serious" developers basically conceded the mobile game space entirely to two groups of people:

- Micro-transaction slop, the sort you see with fake or AI generated ads.
- Gacha titles with enormous marketing budgets; your Cygameses, your Mihoyos and so on

I'm going to be studying for a Masters degree in Cyber Security starting January 2026, so there's a non-zero chance I resume streaming just for something to do in the evenings.

Oh hell yeah, time to serve concoctions!

I may not have streamed for a while but dropping my pngs anyway!

I want to be a kind creature with a worldview rooted in empathy so bad but I'm forced to be a survivor cockroach holding on to my moral core with a grip so tight it hurts because the alternative is letting them make us into something worse