Why are mobile games nowadays so large?

Back in my day you could just play whatever simple mobile game you'd like and it didn't require the latest most powerful cellphone money could buy. I miss those days, it was simple, it was straight to the point, the games... honestly weren't that good, but they'd be playable on basically anything.

As cellphones have become more and more capable and the mobile game market has grown and grown, it's gotten increasingly difficult to be able to play what you DO get interested in. A lot of mobile games are not available in any other platform, so how can we, if we don't have the highest end cellphone be able to play them? I could have the most expensive console money could buy but I can't run the game I want on it, even if I know the console is completely capable of doing so

This is a very half-assed complaint, because honestly I don't really care that much. But I recently tried to play Tears of Themis again on my phone and I didn't have enough space for it, then I remembered my old ipod I had stored and charged it back up. It still had some old games on it like Tiny Tower and Tiny planes and I played them for a few hours with no problem. And I guess I got reminded of how easy it was to just play whatever u wanted. There wasn't a huge expectation or huge 3d worlds to render, it would just be a simple game to pass the time, nothing too involved.

Nowadays even gacha games have become so involved they require basically all your time and attention. And yeah I exaggerate, but honestly, are they not designed for you to play them for the foreseeable future? Are they not designed to never give you a satisfying place to stop and move on to play something else? I digress since I'd like to talk about that more later

Well, that's my rant of today, and I don't know what my point is exactly. Mobile games are allowed to grow and become closer to regular games but it also feels like it's no longer accesible to everyone, and I thought that was the appeal of that market. Everyone has a phone, right? So why not get people addicted to micro transactions on an easily accessible app? I guess the market changed, or maybe that's the future of a lot of markets. First the product is easily acquired but then as hardware improves accessibility isn't as important. What matters is selling to the highest bidder, which in this case is people who can afford really expensive phones.