While playing games on my Android I occasionally see ads for a game called “Puzzles & Survival”. Your character starts at the outbreak of a zombie plague, and has to move from room to room evading zombies while solving puzzles on the fly to obtain weapons, body armor and allies while getting through locked gates before the zombies catch up with him. It looks absolutely fascinating; except…
that is not what the actual game available for download called “Puzzles & Survival” is about. The actual Puzzles & Survival is a world building game where you prioritize allotting resources to building up your redoubt. When you’re not doing that you fight some set piece battles that are all the same except for the hit and attack points of your team versus those of the zombies.
Why do they do this? I really wish I could play the ad version of the game.
Most games (and here I mean by pure numbers, not necessarily by popularity) are barely more than skinner-box cow-clicker pay-to-win scams these days, so it’s not surprising that their advertising is as dishonest as their business model.
There are also misaligned incentives in the company making and promoting the game. That ad got you to download the game, right? I bet the guy who made the ad is getting rewarded for that, and who cares if you only played it long enough to realize it wasn’t what you wanted. Retention is someone else’s department, and there’s always another sucker.
The one I wonder about is a game I’m always seeing advertised here on the SDMB. At least, I think it’s one game, but there are three completely different kinds of ads for it. The first type of ad doesn’t even name the game at all, but just refers to “Auto Fighting!”, and shows a cartoon warrior at various stages of his career, starting with being in diapers with a wooden sword, up through being some sort of demonic-looking thing with spiky armor. The second type of ad calls the game “Hero Wars”, and shows a picture of some ridiculously-simple puzzle where you’re trying to get a cartoon warrior to some treasure (hint: Don’t dump the lava on the warrior). The third type of ad is also labeled “Hero Wars”, and shows the cartoon warrior facing what’s presumably supposed to be some sort of difficult moral dilemma.
I’m pretty sure I can guess what the actual game is about (or mostly, not about), but what I wonder about is, why do the AUTO FIGHTING! ads not specify the name?
I’d say the majority of mobile game ads I see these days show gameplay that have nothing at all to do with the actual game.
The reason why they do it is simple. Developers mass-produce games that are clones of each other, only tweaking something slightly to make it not completely identical. Of course players are bored of playing the same thing over and over. It’s very easy to make a 15 second ad show any kind of gameplay you want, so you come up with something compelling to rope a person in.
You hope that once the mark goes through the trouble of actually installing the game, they’ll be invested enough to play it and hopefully shell out some cash through microtransactions to get past your paywall or avoid some inconvenience or grab a cosmetic, etc.
It’s nothing more than the age old bait-and-switch fraud that retailers have done throughout history.
yeah playrix makers of the "—scapes " recently got in trouble for having "deceptive ads " that showed some badly animated ads where you had ot lead the ubiquitous butler through these traps …
Well people complained that they were misled and the EU yelled ta them about it so … They put in the crappy little ad games in the game its self …so every 4 or 5 levels you get a little maze/trap game that looks and controls like shi= and its a “dream” and has nothing to do with the actual game
Huh, and here I’d assumed that what was in the ads was the one game that they kept remaking with different titles, and thought it looked boring as Hell. If the games are actually something else, maybe they should consider putting whatever that something else is in some of the ads?
Yes, the Hero Wars ads are a pain. I can think of 3:
The “pull pins in the right order” mentioned above
[with 3 pins there are only 6 ways to do it, but I could see a good game with more pins]
The one where the hero starts off with a strength value, then fights something [with lower strength] and gets stronger (= the sum).
[again, “which number is bigger” isn’t a hard puzzle, but I could see a game where there are multiple weak opponents and having to skip some/have some sort of limited movement to make it a good puzzle]
The “hook up air tubes” one
[possibly could see a decent game here as well]
I’ve noticed these too. Didn’t download any, because I saw the reviews saying the game is totally different to the ads. It’s really strange, there must be a gap in the market for a game that actually reproduces the puzzle-type gameplay shown in the ads.
If you want to play an actual “pull the pin to solve the puzzle and rescue the hero” game, “Hero Rescue” is an actual game in that genre and it isn’t bad. It’s mindless and not terribly challenging but still satisfying in a way. It’s free but runs an ad every time you fail.
I got sucked in by one of the scapes games ads. The puzzles looked like they could be mindless entertainment. After I downloaded it it turned out the game was a candy crush clone with occasional breaks for the puzzles. It got deleted after a week when I realized the game play wasn’t moving towards more puzzles and they weren’t getting more complex.
Don’t forget the character collection and leveling games like Pokemon but with worse skins. For what its worth that’s my addiction a Star Wars reskin of Pokemon.
ETA: It’s slightly flaky, as the same sequence of pin pulls can sometimes result in different things happening. And I just had one time where I both won and lost a level (it literally displayed both the “Next” and “You Lose” buttons on top of each other). But this kinda adds to the fun.
ETA2: When you rescue the princess, he plays the same animation as unlocking a chest, the effect being it looks like he’s fingering her
I assume the theory behind those ads is they get people to click on them out of frustration. “That is so easy! I can’t bear watching it done wrong!”
That’s assuming the justification goes beyond “we’ve seem a lot of data that the click through for this type of game add is higher than other types of ads and we don’t care if people come into the game unaware of what it’s actually like. We really only want volume so we can sucker in those rare morons who will pay to not wait two hours for their next store brand candy crush fix.”
