I mean that in a commercial sense. The game will obviously live on.
Buying a game is a thing of the past because developers have figured out the revenue model that lets games be free.
Right now, 18 of the top 25 grossing of all apps are Free To Play Games (72%). Also, it should be noted that 22 of the 25 top grossing apps are in the games category (88%), confirming the fact you need to be into games if you want to have the biggest potential payout. The reason for this is people have a stronger emotional attachment to games than any other type of app, therefore they are more likely to spend money.
How are these Free to Play games crushing it?
After digging deeper in these top grossing apps, you can see they consist of nearly every free to play genre there is… Social games, click games, gambling games, turn based games, card games, etc but all of these have TWO things in common: They each have lots of in app purchases and they encourage the user to buy stuff (a call to action).
This is the basics, but it’s SUPER IMPORTANT, here’s how:
A very small percentage of people buy stuff in games. Of this small percentage you have people who will spend a LOT.
More here.
As many note on the HN discussion, this is really really annoying. But so are television commercials.
Not Unreasonable 