A lot of folks are sleeping on mobile games either because they’re mobile games or because of gacha, when a small amount of research (in the right places) will inform you on what the quality of the games are as well as how much gacha is required to enjoy the game. A lot of which don’t “require” it or give you more than enough to obtain enough out of it to progress (usually the gear based ones). Though if you outright don’t like the blatant waifu/husbando nature a lot of them have you’re free to avoid those, no point in forcing yourself to do something you don’t like.

Genshin Impact for example, might have a massive number of players, but I have found the game itself and the storytelling to be very underrated because folks either expect far too much out of it or just don’t care. Even out of my friend group there’s a few that only play to collect characters, that’s their prerogative. It’s also technically not a mobile game since it is available on just about everything, but it does have a gacha and therefore gets lumped in with other mobile games.

I can understand why some folks were put off by the first act back when the game was new and there wasn’t much else to do, but it’s grown considerably and there’s a lot more available to new players to keep them occupied during downtime. Like an entire TCG mode that gets updated regularly and even has its own competitive scene.

A lot of these games have more effort put into them than full releases on consoles and it amuses me how many players are quick to shit on mobile games when the games they play on whatever other devices are either worse, equally if not more “predatory”, or similar enough that they would enjoy it if they actually gave it a chance.