Even patching out gacha payments could open a big can of worms. When loot boxes were removed from Belgium’s version of Overwatch without any other concessions, international players half-jokingly demanded the same treatment, joking only in the sense that they knew it wouldn't happen POE currency trade. A free-to-play game would not make that concession without adding a new monetization method in its place.

Any backlash to those additions would be much more serious unless these additions were simultaneously added to non-US versions. We probably wouldn't see any reworks comparable to Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Piling up more monetization schemes on top of gacha pulls is still problematic for those other countries, but I expect that to be the most realistic strategy, especially since Japan's hyper-popularGranblue Fantasy already does that by selling character skins.

These limitations herd games taking this option towards using only cosmetic or single-time convenience microtransactions. A select few of big shakers in the F2P market likePath of Exile demonstrate they can find continual success by sticking with that kind of business model. Unfortunately, no such equivalents are popular on mobile, so it may be much more challenging for mobile games to convert to a safer model. But to be blunt, the only games that have any reason to take this option are games that mean something more to their creators than only revenue.

That still leaves a metaphorical Grand Canyon-sized hole that future games will try to fill. Given the mobile market's track record for lazily copying trends, we’d see most of those games fall back towards examples that previous mobile games attempted to set. Since this bill is cracking down on so many tools that games as a service abuse, I expect many more one-time payment games like Super Mario Run buy POE currency.

Actually, Super Mario Run is technically an example of how expansion packs are exempt from the bill since you can play the first world for free and pay to access everything else. Mobile games have almost always had a massive stigma, and even after introducing this bill, many consumers would be hesitant to drop $10 on a game they expect to be shallow and cheaply made. That's even a part of why Super Mario Run had a (relatively) rocky reception. Mobile players expect they never have to commit their cash to get into a game's meat and potatoes. But should the US become a country where most freemium services are not viable products and most competitors charge up front, this free-to-start model would suddenly be a tool for dealing with that stigma.Larger and more ambitious mobile games will likely take a similar approach, but with episodic releases like the decently receivedFinal Fantasy Dimensions.