Why are those long in-app game ads always misleading/showing a completely different game than what it actually is. Why would a company choose, marketing-wise, to put money and effort into an add that doesn’t represent its product at all?
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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.
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.
The most effective tactic available is to make good ads and bad games.
Due to market saturation, you can make a good game and it may not bring in any more revenue than a bad game, but you can crank out a dozen bad games in the same time it took you to make one good game.
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.
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.
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
Why?
To make money, of course. Is this a trick question?
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.
There should be a button on each game’s page in the app store that allows users to vote that a game’s advertising is misleading. The developer would have no means to counteract these votes. It would simply be a form of people giving your game a specific number of stars, or community-made genre tags in Steam, and people could vote if they agree. You’re merely reporting an opinion, and the opinion should stick for a certain number of months before rolling off.
For example, a game would have “1.3 Stars. 68% of people feel this game’s advertisements are misleading.”
If a game stayed too high for too long, an internal review would be warranted, to consider taking the game off the store.
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