A great passage from Christian Donlan’s piece for Eurogamer about the E.T. landfill in New Mexico and lack of restraint on modern app stores:

But with that access - and without curation by companies that actually appreciated games - came a race to the bottom, where much of the good stuff was then buried by an endless deluge of miserable clones and cash-grabs that were allowed in because the gatekeepers didn’t care. Free-to-play is not the problem - it’s that publishers and platform holders and sometimes even developers let the deeper value of a game erode, that there was often a failure to find the correct free-to-play model that enhanced a game - and that some people apparently think it’s fine to refer to their most valued customers as whales.

The difference is that, thirty years from now, there won’t be a New Mexico landfill to recover old apps from.