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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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
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.
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.
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.
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
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