Everyone knows them: mobile game genres.
Genres like your Candy Crush-like Bejeweled clones, Flappy Birds, Clash of Clans, Tiny Towers and many more practically only exist in the mobile game space. There are even game genres that don’t exist in practice at all, and only serve for fake gameplay ads.
Interestingly enough, virtually all of these are exclusive to predatory, microtransaction- and tracker-ridden mobile schemes for casual vulnerable players: non-tech-savvy and/or young people.
There is almost no competition in those genres for non-predatory games.
The question is: are these genres inherently predatory and money focused, or can they be saved and libre-fied? It would maybe be an effective way of bringing people who are being exploited right now to the libre side by supplying an obviously better product. Only requirement is presenting them in a similar way, not with the typical FOSS clunkiness like Minetest.
I think many of the specificity we know and don’t love from mobile game is more about the economic/political environment they grew up in. Mobile itself is just a platform, with some specificit yes, but that in no way make it more difficult to make great games. The example that come to my mind is Pokemon. I love playing it on an emulator on my phone, even if it was not designed for it. Imagine a classic JRPG that was conceived with the same philosophy than any console, but with an interface build for a small touchscreen. That would be awesome !