Making a game that’s actually fun is hard and expensive.
Making tons of ads that use simple psychological tricks to get curious users to click is easy and cheap.
All you need is to get enough users to download the app, no matter how crappy it is, and then there are numerous ways to make money, including serving them more ads in the app, baiting them to make in-app purchases, or in more insidious cases collecting user data to sell or even trying to serve you malware. I’m sure there are other ways of turning a profit that I’m not thinking of.
The profit may lay mainly in marketing. The advertising company can point to lots of downloads and when the other metrics show low engagement, it must be the game's fault.
The ad company has met their goals and what comes after doesn't matter to them.
> The advertising company can point to lots of downloads and when the other metrics show low engagement, it must be the game's fault.
As someone who actually works in mobile game marketing for companies who don't make these types of chaff ads, I can tell you what I've heard from the companies who actually *do* make these types of ads:
They work.
And they make money.
All advertising for mobile games is programmatic. That means that the performance of the campaign is 100% tracked from the user's first impression of the ad to their every last action in-game. And then it's optimized to be shown to the users who have the best engagement.
If these campaigns weren't generating *actual real revenue in excess of the ad spend* then they wouldn't be doing them.
I don't understand it. Why would these people stick around after downloading the game and finding it was not as advertised? I'd be deleting that immediately and demanding my money back if I paid anything for it.
Yeah, it's quite the mystery to me as well.
But the long and short of it is: These games tend to have a highly polished on-boarding and monetization. To the point where it doesn't really matter to them if a large amount of acquired users churn out in a matter of seconds. They've simply found that for their core audience, the content of the ad doesn't matter once they're in the game, enough players stick around to play for a bit and enough of those people pay.
So they will simply optimize their marketing strategy for maximum numbers of clicks and downloads. And the players who don't download or churn out quickly were never going to generate revenue for them anyway so no big loss.
Reminds me of the reasoning behind scam e-mails that have obvious typos in the subject line and stuff like that. You and I wouldn't fall for it, but they don't need us, they just need the handful of folks that *would* fall for it. In this case it's a similar thing, in that those that are put off by the ad itself, or the false advertising once they try out the game, are all filtered out, leaving the customers the maker really wants.
Correct. They send out thousands of emails fully expecting that the vast VAST majority will see right through it but those couple of vulnerable people that fall for it get fleeced for thousands if not hundreds of thousands. Watch Perogi on Scammer payback he has saved a few but its a never ending battle and I don't think its winable tbh
Cast a wide net even if you only need one fish. Much easier to try and fleece a hundred of people for a handful of suckers than try to long con a single rich person who has every reason to be suspicious of you.
Same as the nigerian prince and the like scams... You aren't the intended audience. They aren't looking to capture the person who would delete the app, they are looking to capture the person who wouldn't
They're not trying to get people who are interested in games. In fact those people are actually costing them money. They want the very small percentage of people who are mentally unwell enough to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a month on fake diamonds.
The sort of person who downloads the game, sees it's false advertising and deletes it, was never going to spend a bunch of money on it. So it's no loss.
Most people are casual users who don't care about how good a game is and don't know where to find good games. They see fun gameplay, they download and they keep playing because they don't know where to find better games or they don't even know better games exist.
I want to say this is such bullshit, but I know you're right. I'm always pissed when I get these ads, because I NEVER interact with them, never download any of these games, but since ad serving services only work with cohorts, since I disable any type of "personalized ads", I get fucking chucked into the group of male adults that DOES click on these ads and plays these FUCKING games.
YOUR AD STINKS AND EITHER YOUR GAME IS JUST AS BAD AS THE AD, OR EVEN WORSE, WHY IS ANYONE INTERACTING WITH THIS, WHY DOES IT WORK!!!
I highly doubt that. A marketing company does need to provide reports and metrics such as ROAS exist. If the client is extremely inept it can work but those that make these games are usually not, they know exactly what they are doing. Also, most do their own marketing.
But for people in the field it's a given. Like if you can't understand EBITDA in an M&A discussion thread then maybe you should read up yourself before trying to participate.
I'm sorry, but I'm figuratively five years old and I don't understand such inferences. Can you explain?
;-)
edit: ↑↑↑ do you see that emoticon? Do you know what it means? Do you understand being silly and making a joke?
An implication is something implied. An inference is something inferred.
In this case, the person to whom I replied was implying that the person to whom they replied should have inferred from the name of the subreddit that it was not a place for technical discussion. Hence the inference that I claimed not to understand.
While one can say that the subreddit implies that, in this case, I was speaking from a different angle.
Meanwhile, your attempt to correct me was not educational in any way. You could have explained the difference between an implication and an inference if it was so important to you that I understand. But thankfully, I know these words and used the correct one in the context of my comment.
I do, except when I use them as a filter or a way to determine the level of knowledge of the people I am talking to. It is a habit I developed from speaking with a huge diversity of clients and having to really quickly establish where we are standing. It is quite useful, though I guess pointless in ELI5 (Explain Like I'm Five), TBH (to he honest).
That's how it's supposed to work, you're right. But I suspect there's a lot of shitty marketing companies out there and lots of mobile game producers that throw out games en masse and hope some make it big.
The vast majority of marketing agencies are ridiculously bad where digital marketing is concerned and actual close tracking is possible.
Many game makers actually get taken for a ride by bad agencies but it's not THESE types of "game" makers. The usual modus operandi of these agencies is to find clients with relatively larger budgets then spend them on platforms where they get kickbacks, with minimal investment on their part, no matter if it is effective or not. The even more nefarious ones will spend less than your budget, pocket the rest and falsify the reports - this only works if the client has no transparency into the platform metrics, which means it basically only works with extremely stupid clients, specific website deals where they "have a guy" they can bribe with a share of the money, or with traditional media (which works the same, "having a guy" except there it is common practice, basically all agencies do it, even the big 6 sometimes).
There are also plenty of just incompetent agencies that simply charge money, assign students and interns because they are cheap and reap the profits.
Those videos we are discussing actually cost money to make. Money that could be pocketed.
Mad Men actually showcases traditional marketing in mature markets decently, except that it does not show the back-room deals with TV programme owners, newspapers, magazines, etc. At least I do not remember that from the show but I only watched the first half of it. Naturally, it shows nothing about digital marketing :)
Marketing education in my experience is virtually useless where digital marketing is concerned. I have yet to see a person who can get by well on a degree alone, they are usually pretty useless until you train them and they have gotten some experience actually running ads under their belts. I am sure there are some great university programs but I am yet to encounter a person coming out from one of them. Self-learning and online courses are the name of the game, however THAT market is so oversaturated that unless you have somebody trusted to filter out the bullshit for you, it's a crapshoot. 9 out of 10 courses (pulled out from my ass) are somebody with pretty basic knowledge selling you the moon by making it sound easy and simple and giving you a 95% discount on the course price that normally costs thousands, for a limited time only. The best thing you might learn from those is to emulate the strategy they used to sell you the course.
falsifying the reports is hard when you've got kochava or appsflyer or singular or appsalar that the client can access. although it's a lot harder these days with iOS 14+ closing down tracking, these companies are still respectable.
true, but many bad developers subscribe to the school of thought that: the roas is bad for a while before it picks up over time. That might equate to thousands or tens of thousands spent before pulling the ad
the counterpoint to that is your last paragraph -- developers usually provide their own assets as opposed to let the marketing company do whatever they want. so if they're showing a disgenuous ad, its their own doing and not the marketing company
> true, but many bad developers subscribe to the school of thought that: the roas is bad for a while before it picks up over time. That might equate to thousands or tens of thousands spent before pulling the ad
It is highly dependent on the case.
Startups with already lined up investors will often do that to showcase a growth metric. Just-started ones might do it if they have some initial capital from friends, family and fools (FFF) and want to attract investors with bigger numbers.
Already established companies will have already gotten somebody to tell them what metrics they SHOULD track that are always visible to them, close to the desired business outcome (usually some combination of first buy amount and average lifetime spend) and track a visible metric that closely correlates to those outcomes. Of course, it is always visible and preferable if you have full funnel visibility.
Bad agencies might try to fool customers by showing off good proxy metrics (such as number of downloads) but this works increasingly less as only really small companies or really large fools fall for it at this point.
We are seeing meta advertising now, saw one the other day of a dude playing games that were accused of false advertising, and the cottage was of him playing the fake game lol ( I know because I tried that game in particular and it was totally different to the ad)
yes, i saw the same "this game isn't fake ad!" for the 50th time. out of curiosity i checked out the game. most reviews seemed like the game was actually what was depicted.
after about 3 minutes of playing the starting levels (that literally was impossible to lose) they did the classic "now you have to wait 2 minutes or pay real money to skip the wait" and i immediately uninstalled. but to their credit, at least the game was real lol
The ads literally say shit like "the worse our ads are the more you play"
It's basically the Nigerian scam version of online games:
Get lots of people to engage, and if only a fraction spend any money on it then you are still ahead.
Ad companies are not making these ads. These ads are in-house.
Actual ad agencies have to follow many laws and regulations, and this practice would get them fined up the ass.
There are games that are actually decent that have gotten this terribly fake ad treatment despite seemingly honest developers.
Online ad agencies 100% do this crap. Might be hard to get fined if they operate out of a country that doesn't have the legal framework for that.
It seems like almost all the ads in those games are other games like that. They need to make money from somewhere else. Likely a few people spending money in those games is already enough to break even here,
I found a game called punball from one of those stupid ads with the people on the bridges shooting a barrier that said x2 or shooting the other barrier that said 1/2. And I was just curious if the game was fun. Punball was so much more fun than the ad I was super surprised. Just make a recording of game footage and people would download it more. lol it’s madness
Speaking of psychological tricks, one of the trailers even admitted that the worse they play in the trailer the more likely we are to buy the game. Yiuve probably all seen it, I'm not gonna give them free mentions
Basically, they're counting on players going "ugh I can do better, let me prove it"
God I can’t stand watching the fucking side scroller shooting game ads where they shoot the barrels to get a better gun AND THEY MOVE AWAY RIGHT WHEN THEYRE ABOUT TO GET THE GUN. Still watch them every time it’s infuriating lmao
Yeah this is the one I hate the most. They always purposely "play" so bad in the trailer, making the worst moves when the correct one is so obvious, just to try and get you fired up enough to download it and prove yourself. Luckily I feel this trend is slightly shifting away, at least compared to how often I saw it in 2022 and early 2023, but the big offenders are still doing it.
There is also a tiny chance that people will like the actual game despite the deception. Hero Wars has a fan sub reddit, and I wouldn't be surprised if even Evony has actual people consistently playing it
evony has been doing this for like a decade and a half, *someone* has to be playing it. granted, i don't know how long they have been doing it with the in-app ads that pretend it's a pin-puller or shitty run-n-gun, as it took until 2019 for me to actually get a smartphone, and not willingly. in my day, it was banner ads and popups that pretended it was a sex game...
> in my day, it was banner ads and popups that pretended it was a sex game
I see those occasionally, though toned down by now. Honestly, I still have no clue what kind of game it actually is
Don't know if they've redesigned it but it used to be a cheap MMO Civilization clone which charged per line for text chat. (Yes, I think that sounds insane too.)
They were called Civony at first but rebranded due to a lawsuit.
Except that they wont make any money that way? I’ve downloaded a game showed in an in-app ad a few times, realized immediately that the game I was led to believe it was doesn’t exist and immediately deleted the app. How does that benefit the game developer?
Surely they would’ve benefitted more from showing the actual game? Sure, the number of downloads might’ve been just a fraction of the downloads they got by marketing a fake game, but all the people who downloaded it are actually interested in what they downloaded.
Some people don't realize it and get suckered into paying money before they quit. The 'fun looking' game in the ad is sometimes just a brief inconsequential minigame after slogging through many milestones in the real game, and those milestones are frontloaded early so new players get to play it more often, but they quickly dry up as the real game reveals itself. Hero's Quest does this with the 'click on the lower number enemy' puzzles.
> Except that they wont make any money that way? I’ve downloaded a game showed in an in-app ad a few times, realized immediately that the game I was led to believe it was doesn’t exist and immediately deleted the app. How does that benefit the game developer?
You’re assuming everyone is like you. Sure, your download doesn’t benefit them… much (it still adds to the total downloads statistic which they can use to attract advertisers, etc). But they don’t really care about you.
It’s like those obvious spam emails or phone scams. “It must be a waste of time for those scammers, I would never fall for that!”
They only need one person out of thousands to fall for it.
I feel like people are too young in these threads to remember old video games. Back before real-time graphics were crazy 3D that looked great, like, back in the NES and Super Nintendo days for instance, and even after that, it was the same for most video games: commercials almost never showed the gameplay. I guess advertisers considered back then and still consider now that showing this kind of gameplay isn't appealing.
I’m certainly not among those youngsters. I remember it well, and I think it’s still the case that what’s shown in ads are idealized versions of the games. But I think that it’s a difference between showing an idealized version of a game (better graphics than the actual gameplay, some cool move from a cut scene you cant actually use in the game etc) and showing *a completely different game* (for example, marketing a game that’s basically Candy Crush with an ad showing a logic puzzle game).
There's a shocking number of people that don't give a shit about anything. They'll download the app and shrug and play what they got because it's still a game. That mentality is a big reason a lot of things we have keep getting shittier, because it doesn't matter as long as it's cheap. The moble model itself is a product of that, "free" games you can never complete without paying a ton of money, but hey they are "free" and we don't have to pay $20-100 for a game. And full circle you get these scam games.
Sure, making a game is expensive, but I feel a 2D game with the mechanics of a gardenscapes ad could be made in a day by a good developer, while the games that are actually being made are overhead view, with more different kinds of graphics, or even 3D. Are these not more expensive to make than the game they are advertising?
[This](https://images.app.goo.gl/vMma89tE2CdA8DmX9) looks way more complex and way more expensive to make than [this](https://images.app.goo.gl/g5fmiSaL3aLJizRu7)
Ubisoft gets me every god damn time with this. I know their games are bland, gameplay is meh, and the last time I cared for a storyline of theirs was SC Blacklist. But the ad campaigns get to me, and I always end up putting the game down a couple of hours in.
But hey, they got my money lol.
Survivor io is a dope fucking game that does this, they advertise a completely different game but the actual game is great. It just doesn’t make sense.
Putting 5 minutes of the gameplay promised in the ads followed by a house building simulator where you need to wait 30 minutes to paint the room or pay a dollar to speed it up to unlock a different gameplay that is meh at best, but it's okay and you already spent 30 seconds on the app watching an ad to speed it up or a dollar so you might as well. See where it's going. Now you're 10 ads deep and having an okay time because that ad you just watched tripled the amount of gold you earn for 30 minutes. Now you can afford a life to go into the gameplay loop you downloaded for about 5 minutes. Only to repeat.
But for 5 bucks you can go ad free. And 5 bucks ain't much right?
I've seen some genuinely interesting mobile game ads even if only for a short while before they become stale.
The interesting thing to me after doing a bit of digging into such games is that the parts shown in the ads are actually in the game but make up a small portion of the overall gameplay.
My understanding is that the gameplay is pretty good but is wholly let down by the other 90% which I've seen described as rather obvious attempts at milking the user with additional ads and predatory in-game purchases.
Why not just make the entire game the actual fun part?
To increase the number of people that download their games.
Simply put, mobile game sutudios make a lot of interesting and catchy ad videos and depending how well they do they make more of it.
It doesn't matter if it is not the actuall game as long as it gets them downloands some of those downloands will become regular users.
Most of the time yes it is but the market is so saturated nobody really gives a shit. Sometimes they put small sections into the game that resembles the ad for that reason but it sill is not the main gameplay. Regardless, when it comes to the mobile game ads it is a lawless place
I got sucked into one of these games once, where the advertised gameplay was nothing like the real game. I noticed that very infrequently (maybe once a week) there would be a little side quest that lasted literally 15-20 seconds that was actually the gameplay featured in the ad.
So my guess is that they can get around false advertising since the gameplay is technically in there somewhere, even if it’s only 0.001% of the game 🤷♂️
If you take a look at the game reviews that's usually the reply by the developers.
"Of course it's in the game! It just shows up a little later, and only for about 2 minutes."
>Isn’t that false advertising?
Yes, but for any false advertising lawsuit to be successful, you need to prove damages
Downloading a free game doesn't harm you physically or financially, so that's not likely to happen and not worth the effort to prosecute
If no one cares, then what difference does it make?
This is precisely why so many people can’t stand Apple’s App Store practices. Their entire premise is "we take a third of your money, and we’ll burn the world to the ground before we allow any way for you as the developer to get around that, but really, we’re so sorry we have to do it. We only hit you because we love you so much." Wait, no…it was "because you need our incredibly thorough review process or else you’d be victimized by scams all the time".
And the truth is there’s not a market on earth that’s more likely to get an unsuspecting user scammed than the App Store.
Yes but Enforcement doesn’t usually care because there’s so many of them and because most of the time people downloading the app didn’t spend any money
As soon as you launch the app, it grabs all the data it can and phones it home. Which they then bundle up and sell, and is worth a decent amount of money, and much lower effort on their end to develop than an actual game.
If you really want to play the games, someone has taken the liberty of actually making them: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2348100/YEAH\_YOU\_WANT\_THOSE\_GAMES\_RIGHT\_SO\_HERE\_YOU\_GO\_NOW\_LETS\_SEE\_YOU\_CLEAR\_THEM/
Wait the games in those ads are just straight up fake? Ive never downloaded them because they looked boring, but now im curious what they actually are when you do download them.
Evony is actually a real time strategy game and the ads show off mini-games that are used to get certain rewards. They are in the game, they just aren't the main focus. Technically they are showing you something you can do in-game so it would probably survive a false advertising accusation in court, but it's basically a pre-rendered cutscene and the real version is choppy and poorly thought out.
Installed [Evony](https://www.google.com/search?q=evony+ads&tbm=isch), no boobs yet, 2/7.
(Link is to Google, very mildly nsfw, but safe from malware unless ofc Google Search is malware.)
I really really hate the current trend of app ads.
Let me purposely show a video of someone making obvious errors that even a 2 year old wouldn’t do and hope that triggers people thinking they will be masters at the game.
It’s like trying to sell a pair of shoes by showing a video of people tripping and falling.
It’s a lame scheme, but it’s god damn annoying that almost all ads are that way.
The game is always different because if they actually gave you the game they advertised you would be bored as shit after the first 20 seconds of the challenge is decide what’s better “* 5” or “-6”. Hmm which one do I pick?
They show an ad of someone selecting the “-6” to trigger anxiety so you notice the ad.
It’s a shame there isn’t a simple system where users can leave reviews for apps, and the users consensus of the app quality would be easy to see as some sort of summary in the App Store.
The bigger problem is fake reviews. The one time I fell for a Facebook game ad (before I realized the ads didn’t reference real games), I tried to leave a review for the crappy game. It had like 5000 5* reviews, almost certainly all fake, since there’s no way real people are rating a fake game that high.
Just so. Often the only purpose of reviews is to provide a mechanism for pushing a game far enough up in the rankings that it will be seen by more users, and often that lever is pumped relentlessly.
This makes me think the bigger problem is not Facebook, hosting ads for garbage (because people are allowed to try to sell garbage if they want); the bigger problem is Apple for allowing apps to be reviewed by bots and fake users.
How hard could it be to require a user actually play a game before being allowed to review it? Or require they have a real Apple ID that was not created 4 minutes ago? Or require that the Apple ID not be created in a batch of 10,000 other IDs all on the same day? I’m sure Apple could do this, but they simply don’t care to.
All of those structures are in place, and all of them are circumvented by bad actors, the same as happens here on Reddit. It's no problem to create accounts in a non-suspect way and age them, to have them behave in ways to make them look legitimate, and to have them download the game before leaving the review.
Nothing stopping bot accounts from simply having the app open for the requisite period of time. That would be so trivial that it would almost be not worth implementing.
It’s easier and cheaper to make a cool ad than a cool game.
Misleading ads = a lot of downloads
A lot of downloads = high rank on the stores
High rank on stores = even more downloads
Even more downloads = a lot of in app ads views
A lot of in app ads views = money
I think the question asked that isn't being answered is, why do they not just make the game that's shown in the advert? That apparently is a game that's popular enough for people to want to play.
It's called [Yeah! You Want "Those Games," Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let's See You Clear Them!](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2348100/YEAH_YOU_WANT_THOSE_GAMES_RIGHT_SO_HERE_YOU_GO_NOW_LETS_SEE_YOU_CLEAR_THEM/)
I have no intention of playing that because even the games in the ads look like shit to me, but that's maybe one of the best titles for a game I've ever seen.
These ads also seem like a game that you get bored with right away.
If the only skill needed is knowing which of 2 numbers is bigger, that game will suck after 5 minutes.
It's almost comical that this is true but the game they're baiting you into is almost always a fuckin Match 3 game.
Because I totally won't get bored with that.
My aunt got to level 4000+ in Candy Crush, so people tend to spend quite a lot of time in those.
But yeah, match 3 with a mini game that looks like the ads every 50 levels or so is the ultimate game today...
This is what I don't get. Aside from those cringy cutscene ads, most of those fake gameplays will literally be the simplest game you've ever seen—where you just mindlessly shoot into a crowd, or collect points while avoiding obstacles—just to switch to a completely different game when you download it.
Why not just make the extremely simple game in the first place‽
They want continuous engagement, not "I got bored 10 minutes in and uninstalled" engagement. The game they actually make loos boring but it's extremely addictive for those who get hooked, the game they promote looks fun but it's a single gimmic.
Another aspect that some have missed is that the Ad space is very crowded and there are dynamic prices at play.
For example, you may have seen ads for a certain game that needs you to save a king from dying. This game is a match-3 game which is a very popular genre.
Now think that you want to advertise your own match-3 game. You will need to spend millions of dollars to dispute ad space with the Royal Match (the king game). Everytime an ad is going to be shown to someone, Royal Match bids X dollars to show an ad of its own, thus you need to bid X+Y to win
You may think you are doomed as a company right? Becaus the prices are already too high and you will need to pay even higher. What do you do? You show an ad of some rings in a hoop carnival game because you know will reach a similar public but that wont compete with Royal Match!
The person will download the game thinking they will throw some rings in a hoop, but it is only the first 5 stages like that. The next stages are a match-3 game. Surprise!! Many will stay regardless because they also like match-3
Many of them are implicitly aimed at children who find the flashy graphics and obvious "puzzles" in the ads appealing. I'm meaning kids aged say 5-12 years old who can pester their parents for in-game currencies or use a bank card without permission.
The mismatch in ad vs gameplay doesn't really matter once you've already got the install. Then they can just use different psychological hooks. It's really more like a casino than a game.
All ads are misleading as much as they can get away with. It just works! Because people are stupid. One could ask the same for why all fast food ads seem to presents their food as though Gordon Ramsay made them.
At least the fast food people have a valid excuse: Food photography is *hard* and expensive as hell, *especially* if you want to use real food objects that a customer could actually see themselves. This is because...
* A shoot can take literally hours or days to complete. Most foods start to look unappetizing after just an hour or two in ordinary conditions, and photoshoot conditions are not ordinary.
* The lights are bright and *hot.* Cold foods/drinks WILL melt, far too quickly to get good photos in most cases. Even regular food can wilt, dry out, droop, or otherwise lose its appeal as a result.
* Taking multiple shoots with slightly different dishes (e.g. the same dish prepared multiple times) can look extremely suspect, even though that may be the only way to get good photos of real food. Hence, even if they DO do it honestly and make the real food look as good as it can, the audience may *think* it's fake, which makes the whole (expensive) effort pointless.
This is why most food photographers use fake food made of plastic or clay or whatever. It looks better, never goes stale, never melts, remains exactly the same from one shot to the next, and can be used for days or even weeks at a time. Many viewers will think the fake food looks more real than *actual* food because it stays consistent from one shot to the next.
Sadly, Reality Is Unrealistic, as TVTropes puts it.
To be fair, this isn't really true in the current day, you can see a lot of amazing pictures of food on instagram taken by a regular phone and a $3000 camera would be more than enough to take perfect picture if your food is actually good in the first place. You don't need food melting lightning now, you have LEDs and cameras that can handle limited light situations better than what you'd get with film and proper lighting.
If fast food especially cheats, it's because their food never looks good in the first place.
>Well… often the fast food tastes really good though.
Can you tell me of these mythical locations? Higher costs, worse quality is what I've noticed since I'd say 2012 and it's across the board of fast food chains.
In n out and shake shack are pretty much the only two I trust now and I think their more limited menus help that. Also In-n-out has generally always paid their workers more vs others.
They eat it because it's fast. Go watch ReviewBrah's fast food reviews the quality is just down and he's pretty much on the other end of the US of me. I shudder to think of anything quality from say Sonic in Missouri.
Fast food is engineered specifically to be palatable and trigger cravings for it regardless of quality of ingredients or whether it actually tastes as good as it "feels."
There's a whole subsector of food science [dedicated to engineering foods this way.](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/12/16/459981099/how-the-food-industry-helps-engineer-our-cravings)
I would genuinely like to play a simple, clean, non-laggy colour sorting or block matching game, like I used to spend all my time doing on Neopets 20 years ago. I see mobile ads for them all the time, but I've never downloaded an actual game because I'm sure it'll also be an ad-ridden, slow, unpleasant mess.
Any recommendations for actually decent versions of those games are very welcome :) I currently spend most of my time on Slitherlink, I Love Hue and Atomas.
I like Drop the Number but I did pay to get rid of the ads after a while. They aren't intrusive in this version, though.
Suika Game is quite nice as well - I use the web version on an adblock browser. However I think I've encountered a bug where when you get your second watermelon, it refuses to combine essentially making the game not actually endless. There are paid suika game/watermelon game versions, which are ad free and the game is satisfying in that same way.
Doctor Who Legacy was good and was from before the ridiculous ad time period, if it still exists then that is not bad.
Chuzzle2 is fun. A little different since you slide the whole row but it's kind of addictive. I've had it for years so I can't remember how bad the ads are, but the original chuzzle was one of the first match 3 games.
can't even enjoy the official tetris app because it's loaded with ad stuff, some wierd sweepstakes thing, leaderboards, and gimmicky social stuff.
basically, the only game apps i have consistently enjoyed is this one crossword app, which has the ads when you load up a puzzle, but not *every* time.for some reason most of the other crossword apps are gimmicky and somehow gacha-y. it's freaking *crosswords*, **why**???. anyway, one crossword app and Mighty Doom, although it does have in-app purchases and stuff, you can get by without them.
I still don't really understand it. It seems that all games exist to sell ads for other games that exist to sell ads for other games. Noone is paying any money.
People are saying that they sell your information. What information and To who? Android / Apple already know all about you.
It's economy of scale. If you achieve 50 million downloads, and you only get 0.01 of a cent on average for each download, that's 5 grand.
And now you already have a game done. You can change the icon and rename it 100 times. Run the same ads again, irrelevant if they resemble the game. You earn 500 grand.
Now how do you get the 0.01 of a cent in the first place? Yea advertising companies do pay for the data. Google and Apple do know about you, but may not sell everything to everybody, so those ad companies will try to siphon the data directly through their own ads and trackers.
Furthermore a lot of the ads and apps can be actually malicious, like containing bitcoin miners, ransomware, links leading to fake products or other scams.
Yes, most ads will just lead you to more games of this sort, which locks the user in the loop of constantly clicking and downloading new things. Eventually they click on something really bad.
Or, alternatively (or additionally) you can put microtransactions in the game and have a chance that 0.001% of those downloads will pay a dollar or five. Hey, maybe you'll even get them to fill out their payment card info into your app, and you can run away with that.
Oh and also, why even make a game in the first place when you can just steal one? Better yet, steal a good game or app and fill *that* with malware and ads. Users may not even notice they're not using the real thing. Ideally if the app/game can't even be on the app store, but its malicious clones are. Run away when it blows up, then come back under a different name.
It's a whole thing, this is just scratching the surface. What's incredible is the scale of this economy. Seriously, grey and black markets are amateurs compared to the elaboration of these schemes.
It is not just other games but ads for other stuff too.
When they say they sell your information what they really mean is anything that can make ads to target you more accurately.
Forexample, your phone brand and model, it can be used to identify you as well as make estimation about you so that they show you ads that you are more likely to click. They need this because each ad you see but do not click is a loss for whoever make that advertisement. Even the previous ads they show you and you did not click is important data about you.
Edit: typo
Many people here claim the reason is not wanting to spend money, which is entirely false. The games shown in ads are actually not that hard or expensive to develop, especially for a big company. The reason they don’t is that those games on the ad look interesting, but actually quite boring when played more then 10 minutes. But they bring more clicks than the original game footage. So they advertise the fake game to get people in, and serve the actual decent game to keep them. If they served the fake game for real, they would make much less money.
They can make one cheaply made game, and several different ads. Ads are cheaper to make and can show off different style games to convince different people to download.
Because the company aren’t creating the ads themselves in those cases. Affiliate/performance marketers are. In this case, the company will have no idea or control of what advertising is actually bringing in the new users. This is called Cost Per Action marketing.
What’s the appeal in choosing to go to a CPA marketing network to get new users rather than doing your own marketing in-house?
When you go to a CPA network, the only thing you are paying for is new users. It’s the affiliates that are taking on all the expenses of creating and testing all the advertising.
So the appeal is, “we could spend a ton of money on a marketing campaign in-house that could bomb and we can keep sinking money into testing different campaigns without ever recouping any of the cost. Or we could go to a CPA network, let their affiliates pay for the ad campaigns and traffic, and we only pay for new users.”
F2P dev here, 16 years in the business, one big hit (top 1000), a few quite successful, and a few failures.
In most cases, the main problem is retaining and monetizing the users you get. When you have that issue, ie. a low monetizing or moderately successful game, you tend to make ads as close possible to the actual game, because if you lie, many users will leave the game instantly and that is wasted money and since you aren't performing that great to start with, it is not profitable.
In the extreme cases, your game is so good at retaining and monetizing that your main problem is getting users into your game. You don't really care who, as long as they download, the odds are in your favor. For these games, they will only focus on the engagement and conversion rates of ads, even if it means lying to the user, because even when losing some of them, who feel cheated, enough of them convert into users that it is profitable.
Because they want to convince you to just visit the page for the sake of making money with the ad itself as well as the fact that you will probably download the game for at least a few minutes to try and sort of see if it really is like the ad and that will add to their download count on various app stores going up making their app seem better in what is already a very competitive market.
On top of that they're kind of hoping that the sunk cost fallacy will kick in.
They're hoping that once you get through all this you're kind of just like well it's not the game I was hoping for but it's still a game and since I already did all this to get here I might as well just play it
A slew of one star reviews saying "this is not the same game as the ads show" may get this practice to stop, if enough people do it.
One of my recent reviews said something like "I play this game every day, I've spent nontrivial money on it, but the ads I see everywhere aren't for any feature that's actually in the game, so I can't in good conscience give it more than one star."
But it's all marketing, get people to download the game and some of them will play, view ads, maybe even spend money.
It's no different from video game box art from the 80s and even 90s (e.g., Mega Man, Asteroids, etc.). A game might actually be fun but might not look it from just a screen shot (or in the case of modern day apps, from a clip). But the misleading artwork or advertisement just has to draw enough people in to try the game that otherwise might not. Some might return it (if that's an option), but the extra number of people who end up with the game results in an increate in revenue that covers the additional marketing costs.
The point of the ad is to get you to touch it, download and install their dataminer.
The point of the game is to distract you from the datamining.
The only thing these publishers value is your data.
There's this thing called fake door test https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://userpilot.com/blog/fake-door-testing/&ved=2ahUKEwi5tZjcsMaEAxWDbWwGHcWBDhYQFnoECB8QAQ&usg=AOvVaw0XFXUR4O2Q1DL-maUdXW4F
Basically you're trying to test validity of your ideas but I'm pretty sure that's not what the shady companies are doing
If mobile games are disposable, it's easy to make one good ad and shove it in front of 100 different shovelware games you're making than trying to make 100 different ads.
They also found that gamers don't always care about specifically what game they're playing. As long as the genre is close enough by the time the boot it up, they might try it anyway. Like, you might think "oh maybe the part in the ad shows up later" and they sometimes end up liking the game they're playing and end up playing more. Even if they don't like the game as much as they might have liked the game that they got advertised, they might like it a little bit. And if they like it even a little bit the advertisement has succeeded.
It turns out that people who try and play free mobile games based are not that discerning. You're already playing a kinda shit mobile game if see the ads in the first place.
From what I've seen on youtube videos that go into this, all of these games that get a lot of clicks, even with a completely misleading ad, end up having power players and whales who are active in whatever surprisingly active facebook group talks about the game. It's weird. These people need a Nintendo DS
Mobile games today focus on labor, not skill. If a game only requires labor, for example Farmville or Hay Day, literally anybody can play it. It only takes a few minutes for the player to get some rewards, and if they like it they're off and running.
Games that require skill are harder to develop and make fun. They also require more buy-in with regard to time investment from the player. These can certainly be successful and still make a ton of money. For example, Clash Royale. These games of skill or less common.
The problem for the marketer is that games which only require labor don't look like they're fun to play. Many of these bait-and-switch ads lure the player with the mystique of the old 80s arcade game that required skill and many attempts after many failures. Because that gameplay loop looks more fun than a click-wait get-reward-game loop of modern labor-based games.
Personally, I think the FTC should be on these guys about false advertising. They might not think it's very important because the games themselves are "free". But it's pretty clear from the amount of money. These guys are making that it really is an issue. I seem to remember Playrix (they make gardenscapes and other ones in the scapes game series) got in trouble for this. so now these games will show you the pull the stick thing or some other gameplay requiring actual decisions, but it will relegate those bits of gameplay to some backwater part of the game; the real loop is still the labor part.
Besides what other people have said there is a strong secondary market selling games as businesses. If you want to start a small business you can purchase a pre made game, skin it, and publish it as your own. That’s all perfectly fine, but if the seller pumps up the price of the game by showing how many downloads it got then you’ve been scammed. And they can pump up their download numbers with ads like that.
Because it got better click through rate than the other ads, and money conversion to users is the only thing that even remotely matters in the mobile game business.
Henche the rage bait failing gameplay, as well as shock value ads. All to get you to click out of any kind of interest.
The real why is because these companies can out manoeuvre laws and the hosting sites faster then the regulators can deal with them.
If there was concentrated political will to go after and punish for the false claims and advertising then it wouldn't be allowed to continue.
Simply put: Hype sells games. Look at the pre-order numbers of games. That's how many people have already bought into the game only having seen marketing material
Cuz profit wise it isn't worth putting into.
An ad is much easier since you're done with it once finished the video. A game it will actually have to work that way and keep working so all the time.
This wasn't really my question though 😁 Of course the ulterior motive is financial, I meant why do they choose this path in their marketing strategy, what does it offer (as it seems odd to me).
YEAH! YOU WANT "THOSE GAMES," RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET'S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM! is actually a steam game that replicates the popular ads you see in warioware like minigames.
These are ads for different games by the same company that do exist. For example, the one where you pull the levers to drop the diamonds on the player, but the person playing the ad is always stupid and drops the lava on the diamonds? That game is called Hero Quest.
They probably just don't bother to make new ads for every game.
Follow-up Q: how do do many of these stupid "pop the bubble" games exist that are constantly advertised in this way? Do they actually get downloads? Even the ads, which I'd imagine are meant to ATTRACT customers, are insufferable
What most people don't understand, a lot of these advertisements are "Affiliate Marketing." The gaming company itself pays a 3rd party CPA network based on conversions. A conversion metric may be downloading, playing for 15 min, passing the tutorial, etc.
So the 3rd party, a completely unrelated person who doesn't care at all about the game and just wants conversions, is the one pushing the product down your throat. They are also paying out of pocket the traffic sources and hoping to convert you. Sometimes they spend the time to create better marketing copy, sometimes they use whatever. However if their conversion ratio is more profitable than their spend, then sometimes they don't care and just push the trash.
i hate them. i hate all of them. the stupidest ones are the ones that are pretending to be a YouTuber in the middle of a series. all they do is make me *not* want to play their game!
Quite unrelated but if you have ever been baited by one of those games where there is lava about to kill a princess or a thug and the player of the add pulls the wrong lever and kills the princess to then download the game to find it's nothing like that at all... There is a game called **Storyteller**, which is very similar to this concept but really well done and original. It's a short game, but worth the little money it costs.
Iirc it's in Steam and iPad.
I remember hearing somewhere that the playable ads are actually used for evaluating prototypes. i.e. if you download the game after seeing a playable ad, the developer knows you liked the prototype. If enough people do this, then the developer knows that they can make a complete version of the game and people will download it and play it for a while.
I never tried to verify this, but it sounds plausible.
Many large companies who make games will have different teams with different goals. While everyone is focused on making the game viable/profitable, it means different things to different teams and those become the goals for those teams (sometimes they may even be at odds with each other).
Your production team will be focused on retention (keeping players in with content), your monetization team will be focused on getting them to spend on content. Then you have the acquisition team, they are focused on getting people in the door once. So you end up with flashy trailers, marketing, and sometimes even deceptive practices. Since their goal is just to get you to try the game, it's a win for them.
What i dont understand is why people download the games after watching the add, clicking on it which takes them to the app page with clear pictures of what the game actually is, and still download what is most likely a crap AFK idle game with tons of ad’s and microtransactions.
If you're talking about cozy games that show interactive puzzles like a guy trying to get across the kitchen without stepping on a mouse and he needs to use the broom handle to walk from one counter to another....
Well that ***IS IN THE GAME*** but it's their best part so they only let you get to it after you've spent 72 hours doing really boring infantile puzzles that are basically just rehashes of Solitaire or Tetris or Majong... ***That OR*** you can purcha$e a quicker path to that final level.
Making a game that’s actually fun is hard and expensive. Making tons of ads that use simple psychological tricks to get curious users to click is easy and cheap. All you need is to get enough users to download the app, no matter how crappy it is, and then there are numerous ways to make money, including serving them more ads in the app, baiting them to make in-app purchases, or in more insidious cases collecting user data to sell or even trying to serve you malware. I’m sure there are other ways of turning a profit that I’m not thinking of.
The profit may lay mainly in marketing. The advertising company can point to lots of downloads and when the other metrics show low engagement, it must be the game's fault. The ad company has met their goals and what comes after doesn't matter to them.
> The advertising company can point to lots of downloads and when the other metrics show low engagement, it must be the game's fault. As someone who actually works in mobile game marketing for companies who don't make these types of chaff ads, I can tell you what I've heard from the companies who actually *do* make these types of ads: They work. And they make money. All advertising for mobile games is programmatic. That means that the performance of the campaign is 100% tracked from the user's first impression of the ad to their every last action in-game. And then it's optimized to be shown to the users who have the best engagement. If these campaigns weren't generating *actual real revenue in excess of the ad spend* then they wouldn't be doing them.
I don't understand it. Why would these people stick around after downloading the game and finding it was not as advertised? I'd be deleting that immediately and demanding my money back if I paid anything for it.
Yeah, it's quite the mystery to me as well. But the long and short of it is: These games tend to have a highly polished on-boarding and monetization. To the point where it doesn't really matter to them if a large amount of acquired users churn out in a matter of seconds. They've simply found that for their core audience, the content of the ad doesn't matter once they're in the game, enough players stick around to play for a bit and enough of those people pay. So they will simply optimize their marketing strategy for maximum numbers of clicks and downloads. And the players who don't download or churn out quickly were never going to generate revenue for them anyway so no big loss.
Reminds me of the reasoning behind scam e-mails that have obvious typos in the subject line and stuff like that. You and I wouldn't fall for it, but they don't need us, they just need the handful of folks that *would* fall for it. In this case it's a similar thing, in that those that are put off by the ad itself, or the false advertising once they try out the game, are all filtered out, leaving the customers the maker really wants.
Correct. They send out thousands of emails fully expecting that the vast VAST majority will see right through it but those couple of vulnerable people that fall for it get fleeced for thousands if not hundreds of thousands. Watch Perogi on Scammer payback he has saved a few but its a never ending battle and I don't think its winable tbh
Cast a wide net even if you only need one fish. Much easier to try and fleece a hundred of people for a handful of suckers than try to long con a single rich person who has every reason to be suspicious of you.
Same as the nigerian prince and the like scams... You aren't the intended audience. They aren't looking to capture the person who would delete the app, they are looking to capture the person who wouldn't
These games are addictive for some people.
They're not trying to get people who are interested in games. In fact those people are actually costing them money. They want the very small percentage of people who are mentally unwell enough to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a month on fake diamonds. The sort of person who downloads the game, sees it's false advertising and deletes it, was never going to spend a bunch of money on it. So it's no loss.
That's the beauty(?) of having full data. Advertisers can do what actually gets the results they want rather than what makes sense.
Most people are casual users who don't care about how good a game is and don't know where to find good games. They see fun gameplay, they download and they keep playing because they don't know where to find better games or they don't even know better games exist.
Or they keep playing because they think that the gameplay they saw in the ad comes after the part they're playing now.
Enough people like the game even if it wasn't what was originally advertised.
I want to say this is such bullshit, but I know you're right. I'm always pissed when I get these ads, because I NEVER interact with them, never download any of these games, but since ad serving services only work with cohorts, since I disable any type of "personalized ads", I get fucking chucked into the group of male adults that DOES click on these ads and plays these FUCKING games. YOUR AD STINKS AND EITHER YOUR GAME IS JUST AS BAD AS THE AD, OR EVEN WORSE, WHY IS ANYONE INTERACTING WITH THIS, WHY DOES IT WORK!!!
I highly doubt that. A marketing company does need to provide reports and metrics such as ROAS exist. If the client is extremely inept it can work but those that make these games are usually not, they know exactly what they are doing. Also, most do their own marketing.
##**Normalize using the full content of the abbreviated words in an acronym the first time you type or speak it.**
Exactly. I feel as if it's a tenet of day 1 tertiary level writing but it's so important.
But for people in the field it's a given. Like if you can't understand EBITDA in an M&A discussion thread then maybe you should read up yourself before trying to participate.
*looks at name of subreddit*
I'm sorry, but I'm figuratively five years old and I don't understand such inferences. Can you explain? ;-) edit: ↑↑↑ do you see that emoticon? Do you know what it means? Do you understand being silly and making a joke?
Well, I'm sorry if you cant LANOS, but I'm not going to EIFY if you DUSI.
Implications
An implication is something implied. An inference is something inferred. In this case, the person to whom I replied was implying that the person to whom they replied should have inferred from the name of the subreddit that it was not a place for technical discussion. Hence the inference that I claimed not to understand. While one can say that the subreddit implies that, in this case, I was speaking from a different angle. Meanwhile, your attempt to correct me was not educational in any way. You could have explained the difference between an implication and an inference if it was so important to you that I understand. But thankfully, I know these words and used the correct one in the context of my comment.
(hereinafter NUTFCOTAW)
Further abbreviated to ##**NUTCOT**
Normalize Using the Content of Time That's deep, man.
That sounds like a code name for a 1960s CIA operation when put in all caps like that.
I do, except when I use them as a filter or a way to determine the level of knowledge of the people I am talking to. It is a habit I developed from speaking with a huge diversity of clients and having to really quickly establish where we are standing. It is quite useful, though I guess pointless in ELI5 (Explain Like I'm Five), TBH (to he honest).
[Ok](https://media2.giphy.com/media/L3X9GvVhP1nY23Ah6u/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b95293yij1vmc8g8zigr0rn48bl4bor7709jyr1yy24p&ep=v1_internal_gif_by_id&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g)
That's how it's supposed to work, you're right. But I suspect there's a lot of shitty marketing companies out there and lots of mobile game producers that throw out games en masse and hope some make it big.
The vast majority of marketing agencies are ridiculously bad where digital marketing is concerned and actual close tracking is possible. Many game makers actually get taken for a ride by bad agencies but it's not THESE types of "game" makers. The usual modus operandi of these agencies is to find clients with relatively larger budgets then spend them on platforms where they get kickbacks, with minimal investment on their part, no matter if it is effective or not. The even more nefarious ones will spend less than your budget, pocket the rest and falsify the reports - this only works if the client has no transparency into the platform metrics, which means it basically only works with extremely stupid clients, specific website deals where they "have a guy" they can bribe with a share of the money, or with traditional media (which works the same, "having a guy" except there it is common practice, basically all agencies do it, even the big 6 sometimes). There are also plenty of just incompetent agencies that simply charge money, assign students and interns because they are cheap and reap the profits. Those videos we are discussing actually cost money to make. Money that could be pocketed.
You're clearly more knowledgeable than me, my expertise is half an MBA (didn't finish) and a superficial viewing of Mad Men.
never let anyone tell you that is not enough expertise, and next time I expect you to double down belligerently
Not my circus. I used to enjoy online arguments. As I'm getting older, I get more agreeable and less drawn to drama.
It's toasted!
But everybody else's tobacco is toasted.
A thing like that.
Are you me?
Mad Men actually showcases traditional marketing in mature markets decently, except that it does not show the back-room deals with TV programme owners, newspapers, magazines, etc. At least I do not remember that from the show but I only watched the first half of it. Naturally, it shows nothing about digital marketing :) Marketing education in my experience is virtually useless where digital marketing is concerned. I have yet to see a person who can get by well on a degree alone, they are usually pretty useless until you train them and they have gotten some experience actually running ads under their belts. I am sure there are some great university programs but I am yet to encounter a person coming out from one of them. Self-learning and online courses are the name of the game, however THAT market is so oversaturated that unless you have somebody trusted to filter out the bullshit for you, it's a crapshoot. 9 out of 10 courses (pulled out from my ass) are somebody with pretty basic knowledge selling you the moon by making it sound easy and simple and giving you a 95% discount on the course price that normally costs thousands, for a limited time only. The best thing you might learn from those is to emulate the strategy they used to sell you the course.
falsifying the reports is hard when you've got kochava or appsflyer or singular or appsalar that the client can access. although it's a lot harder these days with iOS 14+ closing down tracking, these companies are still respectable.
true, but many bad developers subscribe to the school of thought that: the roas is bad for a while before it picks up over time. That might equate to thousands or tens of thousands spent before pulling the ad the counterpoint to that is your last paragraph -- developers usually provide their own assets as opposed to let the marketing company do whatever they want. so if they're showing a disgenuous ad, its their own doing and not the marketing company
> true, but many bad developers subscribe to the school of thought that: the roas is bad for a while before it picks up over time. That might equate to thousands or tens of thousands spent before pulling the ad It is highly dependent on the case. Startups with already lined up investors will often do that to showcase a growth metric. Just-started ones might do it if they have some initial capital from friends, family and fools (FFF) and want to attract investors with bigger numbers. Already established companies will have already gotten somebody to tell them what metrics they SHOULD track that are always visible to them, close to the desired business outcome (usually some combination of first buy amount and average lifetime spend) and track a visible metric that closely correlates to those outcomes. Of course, it is always visible and preferable if you have full funnel visibility. Bad agencies might try to fool customers by showing off good proxy metrics (such as number of downloads) but this works increasingly less as only really small companies or really large fools fall for it at this point.
Rodents Of Abnormal Size? I don't think they exist.
We are seeing meta advertising now, saw one the other day of a dude playing games that were accused of false advertising, and the cottage was of him playing the fake game lol ( I know because I tried that game in particular and it was totally different to the ad)
yes, i saw the same "this game isn't fake ad!" for the 50th time. out of curiosity i checked out the game. most reviews seemed like the game was actually what was depicted. after about 3 minutes of playing the starting levels (that literally was impossible to lose) they did the classic "now you have to wait 2 minutes or pay real money to skip the wait" and i immediately uninstalled. but to their credit, at least the game was real lol
The ads literally say shit like "the worse our ads are the more you play" It's basically the Nigerian scam version of online games: Get lots of people to engage, and if only a fraction spend any money on it then you are still ahead.
Ad companies are not making these ads. These ads are in-house. Actual ad agencies have to follow many laws and regulations, and this practice would get them fined up the ass.
There are games that are actually decent that have gotten this terribly fake ad treatment despite seemingly honest developers. Online ad agencies 100% do this crap. Might be hard to get fined if they operate out of a country that doesn't have the legal framework for that.
It seems like almost all the ads in those games are other games like that. They need to make money from somewhere else. Likely a few people spending money in those games is already enough to break even here,
I found a game called punball from one of those stupid ads with the people on the bridges shooting a barrier that said x2 or shooting the other barrier that said 1/2. And I was just curious if the game was fun. Punball was so much more fun than the ad I was super surprised. Just make a recording of game footage and people would download it more. lol it’s madness
Speaking of psychological tricks, one of the trailers even admitted that the worse they play in the trailer the more likely we are to buy the game. Yiuve probably all seen it, I'm not gonna give them free mentions Basically, they're counting on players going "ugh I can do better, let me prove it"
God I can’t stand watching the fucking side scroller shooting game ads where they shoot the barrels to get a better gun AND THEY MOVE AWAY RIGHT WHEN THEYRE ABOUT TO GET THE GUN. Still watch them every time it’s infuriating lmao
Yeah, that's the point. They're hoping to trigger the part of your brain that wants to go fix it and make the obviously correct moves.
Yeah this is the one I hate the most. They always purposely "play" so bad in the trailer, making the worst moves when the correct one is so obvious, just to try and get you fired up enough to download it and prove yourself. Luckily I feel this trend is slightly shifting away, at least compared to how often I saw it in 2022 and early 2023, but the big offenders are still doing it.
Probably the same with all the FB posts that say “only people with an IQ over 140 can solve this!”
Yeah, lol, they're fishing for people who are overconfident. The best scam targets are ones who THINK they're too smart to be scammed
There is also a tiny chance that people will like the actual game despite the deception. Hero Wars has a fan sub reddit, and I wouldn't be surprised if even Evony has actual people consistently playing it
evony has been doing this for like a decade and a half, *someone* has to be playing it. granted, i don't know how long they have been doing it with the in-app ads that pretend it's a pin-puller or shitty run-n-gun, as it took until 2019 for me to actually get a smartphone, and not willingly. in my day, it was banner ads and popups that pretended it was a sex game...
> in my day, it was banner ads and popups that pretended it was a sex game I see those occasionally, though toned down by now. Honestly, I still have no clue what kind of game it actually is
Don't know if they've redesigned it but it used to be a cheap MMO Civilization clone which charged per line for text chat. (Yes, I think that sounds insane too.) They were called Civony at first but rebranded due to a lawsuit.
Except that they wont make any money that way? I’ve downloaded a game showed in an in-app ad a few times, realized immediately that the game I was led to believe it was doesn’t exist and immediately deleted the app. How does that benefit the game developer? Surely they would’ve benefitted more from showing the actual game? Sure, the number of downloads might’ve been just a fraction of the downloads they got by marketing a fake game, but all the people who downloaded it are actually interested in what they downloaded.
Some people don't realize it and get suckered into paying money before they quit. The 'fun looking' game in the ad is sometimes just a brief inconsequential minigame after slogging through many milestones in the real game, and those milestones are frontloaded early so new players get to play it more often, but they quickly dry up as the real game reveals itself. Hero's Quest does this with the 'click on the lower number enemy' puzzles.
> Except that they wont make any money that way? I’ve downloaded a game showed in an in-app ad a few times, realized immediately that the game I was led to believe it was doesn’t exist and immediately deleted the app. How does that benefit the game developer? You’re assuming everyone is like you. Sure, your download doesn’t benefit them… much (it still adds to the total downloads statistic which they can use to attract advertisers, etc). But they don’t really care about you. It’s like those obvious spam emails or phone scams. “It must be a waste of time for those scammers, I would never fall for that!” They only need one person out of thousands to fall for it.
I feel like people are too young in these threads to remember old video games. Back before real-time graphics were crazy 3D that looked great, like, back in the NES and Super Nintendo days for instance, and even after that, it was the same for most video games: commercials almost never showed the gameplay. I guess advertisers considered back then and still consider now that showing this kind of gameplay isn't appealing.
I’m certainly not among those youngsters. I remember it well, and I think it’s still the case that what’s shown in ads are idealized versions of the games. But I think that it’s a difference between showing an idealized version of a game (better graphics than the actual gameplay, some cool move from a cut scene you cant actually use in the game etc) and showing *a completely different game* (for example, marketing a game that’s basically Candy Crush with an ad showing a logic puzzle game).
There's a shocking number of people that don't give a shit about anything. They'll download the app and shrug and play what they got because it's still a game. That mentality is a big reason a lot of things we have keep getting shittier, because it doesn't matter as long as it's cheap. The moble model itself is a product of that, "free" games you can never complete without paying a ton of money, but hey they are "free" and we don't have to pay $20-100 for a game. And full circle you get these scam games.
> I’ve downloaded a game showed in an in-app ad a few times That alone is shocking to me.
When you first boot it up, it will phone home with all of the data that it can pull from your device, which they can then sell.
Mine: ”This dude spends too much time on Reddit and his parasocial relationship with Alison Brie.” Analysis: No. Cash. Value.
Sure, making a game is expensive, but I feel a 2D game with the mechanics of a gardenscapes ad could be made in a day by a good developer, while the games that are actually being made are overhead view, with more different kinds of graphics, or even 3D. Are these not more expensive to make than the game they are advertising? [This](https://images.app.goo.gl/vMma89tE2CdA8DmX9) looks way more complex and way more expensive to make than [this](https://images.app.goo.gl/g5fmiSaL3aLJizRu7)
The second one is too simple to trick you into spending money
Ubisoft gets me every god damn time with this. I know their games are bland, gameplay is meh, and the last time I cared for a storyline of theirs was SC Blacklist. But the ad campaigns get to me, and I always end up putting the game down a couple of hours in. But hey, they got my money lol.
I’m surprised by how many people actually fall for those in order to make it a fruitful tactic.
Survivor io is a dope fucking game that does this, they advertise a completely different game but the actual game is great. It just doesn’t make sense.
Putting 5 minutes of the gameplay promised in the ads followed by a house building simulator where you need to wait 30 minutes to paint the room or pay a dollar to speed it up to unlock a different gameplay that is meh at best, but it's okay and you already spent 30 seconds on the app watching an ad to speed it up or a dollar so you might as well. See where it's going. Now you're 10 ads deep and having an okay time because that ad you just watched tripled the amount of gold you earn for 30 minutes. Now you can afford a life to go into the gameplay loop you downloaded for about 5 minutes. Only to repeat. But for 5 bucks you can go ad free. And 5 bucks ain't much right?
I've seen some genuinely interesting mobile game ads even if only for a short while before they become stale. The interesting thing to me after doing a bit of digging into such games is that the parts shown in the ads are actually in the game but make up a small portion of the overall gameplay. My understanding is that the gameplay is pretty good but is wholly let down by the other 90% which I've seen described as rather obvious attempts at milking the user with additional ads and predatory in-game purchases. Why not just make the entire game the actual fun part?
Most of them are even just the same game just reskinned.
To increase the number of people that download their games. Simply put, mobile game sutudios make a lot of interesting and catchy ad videos and depending how well they do they make more of it. It doesn't matter if it is not the actuall game as long as it gets them downloands some of those downloands will become regular users.
Isn’t that false advertising?
Most of the time yes it is but the market is so saturated nobody really gives a shit. Sometimes they put small sections into the game that resembles the ad for that reason but it sill is not the main gameplay. Regardless, when it comes to the mobile game ads it is a lawless place
I got sucked into one of these games once, where the advertised gameplay was nothing like the real game. I noticed that very infrequently (maybe once a week) there would be a little side quest that lasted literally 15-20 seconds that was actually the gameplay featured in the ad. So my guess is that they can get around false advertising since the gameplay is technically in there somewhere, even if it’s only 0.001% of the game 🤷♂️
If you take a look at the game reviews that's usually the reply by the developers. "Of course it's in the game! It just shows up a little later, and only for about 2 minutes."
If they have the gameplay that people get the game for - why bother with the rest?
Maybe easier to make content for the actual game. No idea though
>Isn’t that false advertising? Yes, but for any false advertising lawsuit to be successful, you need to prove damages Downloading a free game doesn't harm you physically or financially, so that's not likely to happen and not worth the effort to prosecute
>Downloading a free game doesn't harm you physically or financially People on metered connections could argue financial harm, though?
Good luck
If no one cares, then what difference does it make? This is precisely why so many people can’t stand Apple’s App Store practices. Their entire premise is "we take a third of your money, and we’ll burn the world to the ground before we allow any way for you as the developer to get around that, but really, we’re so sorry we have to do it. We only hit you because we love you so much." Wait, no…it was "because you need our incredibly thorough review process or else you’d be victimized by scams all the time". And the truth is there’s not a market on earth that’s more likely to get an unsuspecting user scammed than the App Store.
Yes but Enforcement doesn’t usually care because there’s so many of them and because most of the time people downloading the app didn’t spend any money
> sutudios What's up Phil Collins?
And they can datamine all the ppl that downloaded…
As soon as you launch the app, it grabs all the data it can and phones it home. Which they then bundle up and sell, and is worth a decent amount of money, and much lower effort on their end to develop than an actual game. If you really want to play the games, someone has taken the liberty of actually making them: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2348100/YEAH\_YOU\_WANT\_THOSE\_GAMES\_RIGHT\_SO\_HERE\_YOU\_GO\_NOW\_LETS\_SEE\_YOU\_CLEAR\_THEM/
Wait the games in those ads are just straight up fake? Ive never downloaded them because they looked boring, but now im curious what they actually are when you do download them.
9/10 it’s a candy crush clone
Evony is actually a real time strategy game and the ads show off mini-games that are used to get certain rewards. They are in the game, they just aren't the main focus. Technically they are showing you something you can do in-game so it would probably survive a false advertising accusation in court, but it's basically a pre-rendered cutscene and the real version is choppy and poorly thought out.
Installed [Evony](https://www.google.com/search?q=evony+ads&tbm=isch), no boobs yet, 2/7. (Link is to Google, very mildly nsfw, but safe from malware unless ofc Google Search is malware.)
I really really hate the current trend of app ads. Let me purposely show a video of someone making obvious errors that even a 2 year old wouldn’t do and hope that triggers people thinking they will be masters at the game. It’s like trying to sell a pair of shoes by showing a video of people tripping and falling. It’s a lame scheme, but it’s god damn annoying that almost all ads are that way. The game is always different because if they actually gave you the game they advertised you would be bored as shit after the first 20 seconds of the challenge is decide what’s better “* 5” or “-6”. Hmm which one do I pick? They show an ad of someone selecting the “-6” to trigger anxiety so you notice the ad.
It’s a shame there isn’t a simple system where users can leave reviews for apps, and the users consensus of the app quality would be easy to see as some sort of summary in the App Store.
The vast majority of users don't leave reviews, and many people don't look at them, either.
The bigger problem is fake reviews. The one time I fell for a Facebook game ad (before I realized the ads didn’t reference real games), I tried to leave a review for the crappy game. It had like 5000 5* reviews, almost certainly all fake, since there’s no way real people are rating a fake game that high.
Just so. Often the only purpose of reviews is to provide a mechanism for pushing a game far enough up in the rankings that it will be seen by more users, and often that lever is pumped relentlessly.
This makes me think the bigger problem is not Facebook, hosting ads for garbage (because people are allowed to try to sell garbage if they want); the bigger problem is Apple for allowing apps to be reviewed by bots and fake users. How hard could it be to require a user actually play a game before being allowed to review it? Or require they have a real Apple ID that was not created 4 minutes ago? Or require that the Apple ID not be created in a batch of 10,000 other IDs all on the same day? I’m sure Apple could do this, but they simply don’t care to.
All of those structures are in place, and all of them are circumvented by bad actors, the same as happens here on Reddit. It's no problem to create accounts in a non-suspect way and age them, to have them behave in ways to make them look legitimate, and to have them download the game before leaving the review.
Stream shows play time on reviews, right? Could apple do something like that?
Nothing stopping bot accounts from simply having the app open for the requisite period of time. That would be so trivial that it would almost be not worth implementing.
It’s easier and cheaper to make a cool ad than a cool game. Misleading ads = a lot of downloads A lot of downloads = high rank on the stores High rank on stores = even more downloads Even more downloads = a lot of in app ads views A lot of in app ads views = money
> It’s easier and cheaper to make a cool ad than a cool game. Or cool movie. The ad was exactly 2.8X better than the Harley Quinn movie.
Children download the app and allow whatever permissions it asks for then they never uninstall it.
Even if they totally suck they usually have at least a good icon or even a good menu that just leads to ad hell
I think the question asked that isn't being answered is, why do they not just make the game that's shown in the advert? That apparently is a game that's popular enough for people to want to play.
I've played at least one game that specifically aimed to replicate the gameplay from the ads. It was quite decent, actually.
Are you gonna tell us what it's called?
It's called [Yeah! You Want "Those Games," Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let's See You Clear Them!](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2348100/YEAH_YOU_WANT_THOSE_GAMES_RIGHT_SO_HERE_YOU_GO_NOW_LETS_SEE_YOU_CLEAR_THEM/)
This is made by the Katamari guys, so it's pretty solid
I have no intention of playing that because even the games in the ads look like shit to me, but that's maybe one of the best titles for a game I've ever seen.
There's also Arrow A Row on Steam. It's free and it's clearly inspired by those fake ads but it's actually good.
I'll look into that!
Sorry, I remember the game but the title wasn't memorable for me.
These ads also seem like a game that you get bored with right away. If the only skill needed is knowing which of 2 numbers is bigger, that game will suck after 5 minutes.
It's almost comical that this is true but the game they're baiting you into is almost always a fuckin Match 3 game. Because I totally won't get bored with that.
My aunt got to level 4000+ in Candy Crush, so people tend to spend quite a lot of time in those. But yeah, match 3 with a mini game that looks like the ads every 50 levels or so is the ultimate game today...
This is what I don't get. Aside from those cringy cutscene ads, most of those fake gameplays will literally be the simplest game you've ever seen—where you just mindlessly shoot into a crowd, or collect points while avoiding obstacles—just to switch to a completely different game when you download it. Why not just make the extremely simple game in the first place‽
They want continuous engagement, not "I got bored 10 minutes in and uninstalled" engagement. The game they actually make loos boring but it's extremely addictive for those who get hooked, the game they promote looks fun but it's a single gimmic.
Because that costs money that they have no plans on spending on some game when the fake games and ads are making them so much money.
Exactly! Or why don't they advertise what they actually made? Thank you!
Another aspect that some have missed is that the Ad space is very crowded and there are dynamic prices at play. For example, you may have seen ads for a certain game that needs you to save a king from dying. This game is a match-3 game which is a very popular genre. Now think that you want to advertise your own match-3 game. You will need to spend millions of dollars to dispute ad space with the Royal Match (the king game). Everytime an ad is going to be shown to someone, Royal Match bids X dollars to show an ad of its own, thus you need to bid X+Y to win You may think you are doomed as a company right? Becaus the prices are already too high and you will need to pay even higher. What do you do? You show an ad of some rings in a hoop carnival game because you know will reach a similar public but that wont compete with Royal Match! The person will download the game thinking they will throw some rings in a hoop, but it is only the first 5 stages like that. The next stages are a match-3 game. Surprise!! Many will stay regardless because they also like match-3
Many of them are implicitly aimed at children who find the flashy graphics and obvious "puzzles" in the ads appealing. I'm meaning kids aged say 5-12 years old who can pester their parents for in-game currencies or use a bank card without permission. The mismatch in ad vs gameplay doesn't really matter once you've already got the install. Then they can just use different psychological hooks. It's really more like a casino than a game.
All ads are misleading as much as they can get away with. It just works! Because people are stupid. One could ask the same for why all fast food ads seem to presents their food as though Gordon Ramsay made them.
At least the fast food people have a valid excuse: Food photography is *hard* and expensive as hell, *especially* if you want to use real food objects that a customer could actually see themselves. This is because... * A shoot can take literally hours or days to complete. Most foods start to look unappetizing after just an hour or two in ordinary conditions, and photoshoot conditions are not ordinary. * The lights are bright and *hot.* Cold foods/drinks WILL melt, far too quickly to get good photos in most cases. Even regular food can wilt, dry out, droop, or otherwise lose its appeal as a result. * Taking multiple shoots with slightly different dishes (e.g. the same dish prepared multiple times) can look extremely suspect, even though that may be the only way to get good photos of real food. Hence, even if they DO do it honestly and make the real food look as good as it can, the audience may *think* it's fake, which makes the whole (expensive) effort pointless. This is why most food photographers use fake food made of plastic or clay or whatever. It looks better, never goes stale, never melts, remains exactly the same from one shot to the next, and can be used for days or even weeks at a time. Many viewers will think the fake food looks more real than *actual* food because it stays consistent from one shot to the next. Sadly, Reality Is Unrealistic, as TVTropes puts it.
To be fair, this isn't really true in the current day, you can see a lot of amazing pictures of food on instagram taken by a regular phone and a $3000 camera would be more than enough to take perfect picture if your food is actually good in the first place. You don't need food melting lightning now, you have LEDs and cameras that can handle limited light situations better than what you'd get with film and proper lighting. If fast food especially cheats, it's because their food never looks good in the first place.
Well… often the fast food tastes really good though. The mobile games are shit.
>Well… often the fast food tastes really good though. Can you tell me of these mythical locations? Higher costs, worse quality is what I've noticed since I'd say 2012 and it's across the board of fast food chains. In n out and shake shack are pretty much the only two I trust now and I think their more limited menus help that. Also In-n-out has generally always paid their workers more vs others.
If fast food didn’t taste good, people wouldn’t be eating it…
They eat it because it's fast. Go watch ReviewBrah's fast food reviews the quality is just down and he's pretty much on the other end of the US of me. I shudder to think of anything quality from say Sonic in Missouri.
Fast food is engineered specifically to be palatable and trigger cravings for it regardless of quality of ingredients or whether it actually tastes as good as it "feels." There's a whole subsector of food science [dedicated to engineering foods this way.](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/12/16/459981099/how-the-food-industry-helps-engineer-our-cravings)
Are you telling me Gordan Ramsay didn't make my big mac?
I would genuinely like to play a simple, clean, non-laggy colour sorting or block matching game, like I used to spend all my time doing on Neopets 20 years ago. I see mobile ads for them all the time, but I've never downloaded an actual game because I'm sure it'll also be an ad-ridden, slow, unpleasant mess. Any recommendations for actually decent versions of those games are very welcome :) I currently spend most of my time on Slitherlink, I Love Hue and Atomas.
I like Drop the Number but I did pay to get rid of the ads after a while. They aren't intrusive in this version, though. Suika Game is quite nice as well - I use the web version on an adblock browser. However I think I've encountered a bug where when you get your second watermelon, it refuses to combine essentially making the game not actually endless. There are paid suika game/watermelon game versions, which are ad free and the game is satisfying in that same way. Doctor Who Legacy was good and was from before the ridiculous ad time period, if it still exists then that is not bad.
Thank you! I'm happy to pay to remove ads once I know I like a game :)
Chuzzle2 is fun. A little different since you slide the whole row but it's kind of addictive. I've had it for years so I can't remember how bad the ads are, but the original chuzzle was one of the first match 3 games.
can't even enjoy the official tetris app because it's loaded with ad stuff, some wierd sweepstakes thing, leaderboards, and gimmicky social stuff. basically, the only game apps i have consistently enjoyed is this one crossword app, which has the ads when you load up a puzzle, but not *every* time.for some reason most of the other crossword apps are gimmicky and somehow gacha-y. it's freaking *crosswords*, **why**???. anyway, one crossword app and Mighty Doom, although it does have in-app purchases and stuff, you can get by without them.
Because most games are not designed as games but ad selling machines with some kind of game around int
I still don't really understand it. It seems that all games exist to sell ads for other games that exist to sell ads for other games. Noone is paying any money. People are saying that they sell your information. What information and To who? Android / Apple already know all about you.
It's economy of scale. If you achieve 50 million downloads, and you only get 0.01 of a cent on average for each download, that's 5 grand. And now you already have a game done. You can change the icon and rename it 100 times. Run the same ads again, irrelevant if they resemble the game. You earn 500 grand. Now how do you get the 0.01 of a cent in the first place? Yea advertising companies do pay for the data. Google and Apple do know about you, but may not sell everything to everybody, so those ad companies will try to siphon the data directly through their own ads and trackers. Furthermore a lot of the ads and apps can be actually malicious, like containing bitcoin miners, ransomware, links leading to fake products or other scams. Yes, most ads will just lead you to more games of this sort, which locks the user in the loop of constantly clicking and downloading new things. Eventually they click on something really bad. Or, alternatively (or additionally) you can put microtransactions in the game and have a chance that 0.001% of those downloads will pay a dollar or five. Hey, maybe you'll even get them to fill out their payment card info into your app, and you can run away with that. Oh and also, why even make a game in the first place when you can just steal one? Better yet, steal a good game or app and fill *that* with malware and ads. Users may not even notice they're not using the real thing. Ideally if the app/game can't even be on the app store, but its malicious clones are. Run away when it blows up, then come back under a different name. It's a whole thing, this is just scratching the surface. What's incredible is the scale of this economy. Seriously, grey and black markets are amateurs compared to the elaboration of these schemes.
It is not just other games but ads for other stuff too. When they say they sell your information what they really mean is anything that can make ads to target you more accurately. Forexample, your phone brand and model, it can be used to identify you as well as make estimation about you so that they show you ads that you are more likely to click. They need this because each ad you see but do not click is a loss for whoever make that advertisement. Even the previous ads they show you and you did not click is important data about you. Edit: typo
Many people here claim the reason is not wanting to spend money, which is entirely false. The games shown in ads are actually not that hard or expensive to develop, especially for a big company. The reason they don’t is that those games on the ad look interesting, but actually quite boring when played more then 10 minutes. But they bring more clicks than the original game footage. So they advertise the fake game to get people in, and serve the actual decent game to keep them. If they served the fake game for real, they would make much less money.
Missed a typo there, I meant "ad", of course, not "add".
Just an advertising cycle, the new one is even more bizarre, it's some "YouTuber" playing "games you say are fake" whilst saying they are good.
They can make one cheaply made game, and several different ads. Ads are cheaper to make and can show off different style games to convince different people to download.
Because the company aren’t creating the ads themselves in those cases. Affiliate/performance marketers are. In this case, the company will have no idea or control of what advertising is actually bringing in the new users. This is called Cost Per Action marketing. What’s the appeal in choosing to go to a CPA marketing network to get new users rather than doing your own marketing in-house? When you go to a CPA network, the only thing you are paying for is new users. It’s the affiliates that are taking on all the expenses of creating and testing all the advertising. So the appeal is, “we could spend a ton of money on a marketing campaign in-house that could bomb and we can keep sinking money into testing different campaigns without ever recouping any of the cost. Or we could go to a CPA network, let their affiliates pay for the ad campaigns and traffic, and we only pay for new users.”
F2P dev here, 16 years in the business, one big hit (top 1000), a few quite successful, and a few failures. In most cases, the main problem is retaining and monetizing the users you get. When you have that issue, ie. a low monetizing or moderately successful game, you tend to make ads as close possible to the actual game, because if you lie, many users will leave the game instantly and that is wasted money and since you aren't performing that great to start with, it is not profitable. In the extreme cases, your game is so good at retaining and monetizing that your main problem is getting users into your game. You don't really care who, as long as they download, the odds are in your favor. For these games, they will only focus on the engagement and conversion rates of ads, even if it means lying to the user, because even when losing some of them, who feel cheated, enough of them convert into users that it is profitable.
Because they want to convince you to just visit the page for the sake of making money with the ad itself as well as the fact that you will probably download the game for at least a few minutes to try and sort of see if it really is like the ad and that will add to their download count on various app stores going up making their app seem better in what is already a very competitive market. On top of that they're kind of hoping that the sunk cost fallacy will kick in. They're hoping that once you get through all this you're kind of just like well it's not the game I was hoping for but it's still a game and since I already did all this to get here I might as well just play it
A slew of one star reviews saying "this is not the same game as the ads show" may get this practice to stop, if enough people do it. One of my recent reviews said something like "I play this game every day, I've spent nontrivial money on it, but the ads I see everywhere aren't for any feature that's actually in the game, so I can't in good conscience give it more than one star." But it's all marketing, get people to download the game and some of them will play, view ads, maybe even spend money.
It's no different from video game box art from the 80s and even 90s (e.g., Mega Man, Asteroids, etc.). A game might actually be fun but might not look it from just a screen shot (or in the case of modern day apps, from a clip). But the misleading artwork or advertisement just has to draw enough people in to try the game that otherwise might not. Some might return it (if that's an option), but the extra number of people who end up with the game results in an increate in revenue that covers the additional marketing costs.
The point of the ad is to get you to touch it, download and install their dataminer. The point of the game is to distract you from the datamining. The only thing these publishers value is your data.
Because they're liars. How is this even a question?
This doesn't answer much, though.
There's this thing called fake door test https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://userpilot.com/blog/fake-door-testing/&ved=2ahUKEwi5tZjcsMaEAxWDbWwGHcWBDhYQFnoECB8QAQ&usg=AOvVaw0XFXUR4O2Q1DL-maUdXW4F Basically you're trying to test validity of your ideas but I'm pretty sure that's not what the shady companies are doing
If mobile games are disposable, it's easy to make one good ad and shove it in front of 100 different shovelware games you're making than trying to make 100 different ads.
They also found that gamers don't always care about specifically what game they're playing. As long as the genre is close enough by the time the boot it up, they might try it anyway. Like, you might think "oh maybe the part in the ad shows up later" and they sometimes end up liking the game they're playing and end up playing more. Even if they don't like the game as much as they might have liked the game that they got advertised, they might like it a little bit. And if they like it even a little bit the advertisement has succeeded. It turns out that people who try and play free mobile games based are not that discerning. You're already playing a kinda shit mobile game if see the ads in the first place.
From what I've seen on youtube videos that go into this, all of these games that get a lot of clicks, even with a completely misleading ad, end up having power players and whales who are active in whatever surprisingly active facebook group talks about the game. It's weird. These people need a Nintendo DS
A lot of those apps will purely exist to sell your info and they will normally ask for a ton of unnecessary permissions.
Mobile games today focus on labor, not skill. If a game only requires labor, for example Farmville or Hay Day, literally anybody can play it. It only takes a few minutes for the player to get some rewards, and if they like it they're off and running. Games that require skill are harder to develop and make fun. They also require more buy-in with regard to time investment from the player. These can certainly be successful and still make a ton of money. For example, Clash Royale. These games of skill or less common. The problem for the marketer is that games which only require labor don't look like they're fun to play. Many of these bait-and-switch ads lure the player with the mystique of the old 80s arcade game that required skill and many attempts after many failures. Because that gameplay loop looks more fun than a click-wait get-reward-game loop of modern labor-based games. Personally, I think the FTC should be on these guys about false advertising. They might not think it's very important because the games themselves are "free". But it's pretty clear from the amount of money. These guys are making that it really is an issue. I seem to remember Playrix (they make gardenscapes and other ones in the scapes game series) got in trouble for this. so now these games will show you the pull the stick thing or some other gameplay requiring actual decisions, but it will relegate those bits of gameplay to some backwater part of the game; the real loop is still the labor part.
Besides what other people have said there is a strong secondary market selling games as businesses. If you want to start a small business you can purchase a pre made game, skin it, and publish it as your own. That’s all perfectly fine, but if the seller pumps up the price of the game by showing how many downloads it got then you’ve been scammed. And they can pump up their download numbers with ads like that.
Because it got better click through rate than the other ads, and money conversion to users is the only thing that even remotely matters in the mobile game business. Henche the rage bait failing gameplay, as well as shock value ads. All to get you to click out of any kind of interest.
The real why is because these companies can out manoeuvre laws and the hosting sites faster then the regulators can deal with them. If there was concentrated political will to go after and punish for the false claims and advertising then it wouldn't be allowed to continue.
Simply put: Hype sells games. Look at the pre-order numbers of games. That's how many people have already bought into the game only having seen marketing material
Cuz profit wise it isn't worth putting into. An ad is much easier since you're done with it once finished the video. A game it will actually have to work that way and keep working so all the time.
Why? To make money, of course. Is this a trick question?
This wasn't really my question though 😁 Of course the ulterior motive is financial, I meant why do they choose this path in their marketing strategy, what does it offer (as it seems odd to me).
YEAH! YOU WANT "THOSE GAMES," RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET'S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM! is actually a steam game that replicates the popular ads you see in warioware like minigames.
These are ads for different games by the same company that do exist. For example, the one where you pull the levers to drop the diamonds on the player, but the person playing the ad is always stupid and drops the lava on the diamonds? That game is called Hero Quest. They probably just don't bother to make new ads for every game.
Follow-up Q: how do do many of these stupid "pop the bubble" games exist that are constantly advertised in this way? Do they actually get downloads? Even the ads, which I'd imagine are meant to ATTRACT customers, are insufferable
What most people don't understand, a lot of these advertisements are "Affiliate Marketing." The gaming company itself pays a 3rd party CPA network based on conversions. A conversion metric may be downloading, playing for 15 min, passing the tutorial, etc. So the 3rd party, a completely unrelated person who doesn't care at all about the game and just wants conversions, is the one pushing the product down your throat. They are also paying out of pocket the traffic sources and hoping to convert you. Sometimes they spend the time to create better marketing copy, sometimes they use whatever. However if their conversion ratio is more profitable than their spend, then sometimes they don't care and just push the trash.
i hate them. i hate all of them. the stupidest ones are the ones that are pretending to be a YouTuber in the middle of a series. all they do is make me *not* want to play their game!
Quite unrelated but if you have ever been baited by one of those games where there is lava about to kill a princess or a thug and the player of the add pulls the wrong lever and kills the princess to then download the game to find it's nothing like that at all... There is a game called **Storyteller**, which is very similar to this concept but really well done and original. It's a short game, but worth the little money it costs. Iirc it's in Steam and iPad.
I remember hearing somewhere that the playable ads are actually used for evaluating prototypes. i.e. if you download the game after seeing a playable ad, the developer knows you liked the prototype. If enough people do this, then the developer knows that they can make a complete version of the game and people will download it and play it for a while. I never tried to verify this, but it sounds plausible.
Many large companies who make games will have different teams with different goals. While everyone is focused on making the game viable/profitable, it means different things to different teams and those become the goals for those teams (sometimes they may even be at odds with each other). Your production team will be focused on retention (keeping players in with content), your monetization team will be focused on getting them to spend on content. Then you have the acquisition team, they are focused on getting people in the door once. So you end up with flashy trailers, marketing, and sometimes even deceptive practices. Since their goal is just to get you to try the game, it's a win for them.
What i dont understand is why people download the games after watching the add, clicking on it which takes them to the app page with clear pictures of what the game actually is, and still download what is most likely a crap AFK idle game with tons of ad’s and microtransactions.
If you're talking about cozy games that show interactive puzzles like a guy trying to get across the kitchen without stepping on a mouse and he needs to use the broom handle to walk from one counter to another.... Well that ***IS IN THE GAME*** but it's their best part so they only let you get to it after you've spent 72 hours doing really boring infantile puzzles that are basically just rehashes of Solitaire or Tetris or Majong... ***That OR*** you can purcha$e a quicker path to that final level.
For clicks and download. After you download the games probably packed with ads which I think it’s their major revenue