About what's being discussed by shinra's clone and MrNyarlathotep:
Does the current situation reflect what customers want to pay for mobile games right now? Yes.
Is the current situation also a consequence of how much the race to the bottom influenced customer's thinking of the value of a game? I'd say yes too.
What I mean is that, years ago, people were fine with paying 49.99 for Wii Sports Resort and similar titles, because they thought that value was adequate for what the title was offering. But now, they'll prefer much more it being free to play. And a big part of that is on how much the mobile market has developed towars the f2p, 0.99 at max experiences: the market made those customers change their thinking, from "49.99 is okay for that" to "naaah, it has to be free, otherwise I'll ignore it completely".
Radical changes in customers' behaviour are always a tango with two dancers: the customers themselves, who, while accepting some standards, would like to spend as less as possible for anything, and the market itself that creates the standards and influence people's line of thinking about things. Now, the mobile market went straight to the extreme and in the most deep ways possible into the lowest limit possible: price of zero. You can't go under that, it's impossible. And this has made lots of customers think that 0 is an acceptable price for way too many genres, too many games, while it's not sustainable, if not for just a few of them who strike gold.
Are f2p themselves the evil of the world? No, they can be successful without basing themselves on whales, and there's nothing wrong about the concept itself. It's the abuse that we've seen in these past years that's contitioned people and that, right now, allows for a very, very limited amount of paid game apps to be successful in the space. And most of them have to be from reknown developers / being promoted in a good way, otherwise...they're lost. Unfortunately, there should have been some moderation about amount, type and content of f2p mechanics, while giving to companies enough freedom on the matter. You know, the right in-between, one of the most difficult things to find in the universe, which I feel has to be applied in specific contexts, especially when they explode, in order to create the correct environment where, then, such "limitations" can be removed one at one (still carefully) because the environment has a solid base / culture.
Heck, just look at how many apps that are some way to spend 5 minutes and then being abandoned forever are on the store: they're not bad per se, but the massive amount has made people believe that mobile devices could be used just for them as a gaming machine, and not much else. You see? Another example of customers' will matching market reality, but being influenced by market reality as well, being conditioned by that to have a specific belief. Which is something Wii suffered as well, even if not in such a dramatic way (still heavily, but not as dramatic).
To start a perspective change, you need to start going in a different direction of where you are going now, to stop just giving customers what they express they want, and to start giving them also things that maybe they weren't aware of, but that, suddenly, become great for them and very interesting. Unfortunately, also due to touch only interfaces, I fear it's too late for mobile devices: again, they went straight and too quickly to the lowest value possible for way too many apps, to being a collection of thousands and thousands of 5 minutes things with some different attempts, some of them still successful, but many others being failures.
So, yeah, to extremely sum up, it's due to customers, but it's also due to the market itself convincing customers that's the way and there almost isn't another way, race to the level 0.