I have to agree with grandparent. You can't scale down international infrastructure like this. The cost per sale for someone managing a store for you has a certain minimum cost per month plus an amount per sale and per return.
Of course they're going to hype the big games. It's opportunity cost. Advertisement leads to sales, but feeding a hype train gets you more. If they stop advertising the hot new game to showcase yours then that person is not getting promoted. The guy who had no problems ignoring your game gets promoted and now everybody answers to them.
Is it awesome? No. Do I like it? Not really. But it's rational, and getting large companies to be rational is often better than you can expect.
The fallacy there is that their push to promote big Warner is mostly promoting toxic games that milk and dime users because freemium games is where money is at.
It's no coincidence that on both stores you cannot filter out apps that have in app purchases
Except that Apple doesn't hype the big games. They never have.
Go look through the Today/Games section right now. All of the featured games will be from super high quality indie developers. It isn't the ones that make the most money.
Of course they're going to hype the big games. It's opportunity cost. Advertisement leads to sales, but feeding a hype train gets you more. If they stop advertising the hot new game to showcase yours then that person is not getting promoted. The guy who had no problems ignoring your game gets promoted and now everybody answers to them.
Is it awesome? No. Do I like it? Not really. But it's rational, and getting large companies to be rational is often better than you can expect.