I’ve seen some adverts for a simple computer game and would like to know what it’s called.
The game features a narrow walkway. The player controls a Warrior firing up the walkway at various opposition.
Early on there are barrels with labels offering rewards (like an extra Warrior or better armament.)
Each barrel has a number on, which is the number of times you need to hit the barrel to claim the reward.
Later hordes of humanoid opponents appear and they need to be fired on before the Warriors are overwhelmed.
This sounds like one of those mobile game ads where the game doesn’t really exist. The flow of the ad you describe matches how those go, especially if it was a bit risqué.
If it’s a real game, I don’t know it. It sounds like the millionth Vampire Survivors clone. None of them are better than Vampire Survivors.
Aside: I’ve never understood why these games are advertised this way. If you think that customers will like a game like that, then make a game like that (it would be really easy to do so). If you think that customers won’t like a game like that, then don’t advertise it that way. If someone sees one of those ads and thinks “Hm, that looks fun”, and then installs the app and it’s completely different, won’t they just immediately uninstall it?
With that I’ve seen a screenshot of the ad and it isn’t a Survivors clone. You might want to keep an eye on Kingmakers though. It’s got the same theme, but may actually be good.
I’ve been wondering that as well. I’m not a gamer, at all, so this is purely speculation. But I’ve been working on the assumption that the people that play these games are aware of it and okay with it. That is, the know actual game won’t look anything like the ads.
In fact, for a while, I was wondering, based on all the ads, how people were coming out with these games so quickly when, based on all the ads, they appeared to be somewhat complex games. Then a youtuber made a joke about games looking nothing at all like the ads. Wish I could find it. In my head, it sounds like a joke from Ryan George’s channel.
Some probably will, just like some people don’t watch clickbait videos. But enough people will be enticed to at least try it since they’ve gone to the trouble to install it, and then they can use the addiction loop.
Plus there’s a pretty wide group of people who have no idea how to uninstall an app on their phone, let alone remove the app from their Facebook or whatever. So they get the thing they really want: access to that person’s data and contacts.
And, finally, the people savvy enough to do this stuff are more likely not to even install it in the first place. So there’s that Nigerian-Scam-style selection bias.
They’re not. It might be complex to create one of those games from scratch, but nobody ever develops games from scratch. There are a bunch of library packages you can get, many of them free, that already have pre-built routines for a lot of the things you’d need for most computer games. Most of these games, both the one you see in the ad and the actual game itself, could be cranked out by an amateur in an afternoon.
Oh, and many will play at least a few ads before you get to see the game, so you can get some ad revenue even from those who uninstall immediately. And you’ve already given them access to data on your phone to even get that far.
Heck, maybe they can even string you along to make you think you just haven’t gotten to that part yet for a bit – though that one is just pure speculation, as I’ve not seen it myself.
I think most of it is just making click-bait ads so the real game trends higher on the popular apps lists. An absurd number of games are released every day and discoverability is everything.
There is a replica game with the same mechanics as described in the OP. Last War: Survival does the same thing but with cartoon zombies. It’s okay but gets bogged down by a ton of ads between levels.
I found an interesting article talking about this issue, which shows several examples of games that use fake advertising. Perhaps one of them is what the OP recalls seeing.
Multiplayer online game notorious for highly sexualized ads that have nothing to do with the actual game. There’s a Wikipedia page.
It’s the same principle as e-mail spam. They try to suck as many people as possible into trying the game, and if even only a small percentage stick with it they come out ahead. They don’t care that many, many more people will be irritated at them over it.
But they don’t need everyone trying the same game, and making the actual games the ads appear to be would be nearly as easy as making the ads themselves. And if they made the game people were looking for, a larger percentage would stick with it.
A lot of these games (like Evony) do have gameplay as shown in the ads, but only as a minigame you might run into once or twice. The core gameplay though is something completely different.
From the ASA ruling on the makers of Evony:
They said that the ad showcased actual gameplay and mechanics, directly engaging the player in strategic thinking and action. They considered that this was different from previous ASA rulings on misleading gaming ads where there was a mismatch between the ad and the gameplay.
The ASA considered that consumers would understand from the ad that the game mainly featured a puzzle solving element that involved shooting targets, while having to avoid obstacles, such as the rolling barrels.
We therefore understood that the game featured a puzzle similar to that shown in the ad, and that it was one of a number of different puzzles.
However, we further understood that Evony was not primarily a puzzle game. It also included player versus player, player versus environment and city-building aspects, with the city-building element being the game’s core gameplay. Although players could choose to play only one of the aspects of the game, such as the puzzles, they were not able to progress through the storyline without engaging with all elements. If players did not level up in the core gameplay, they were eventually locked out of the puzzles.
For those reasons we concluded that the ad did not reflect the game’s core playing experience and was therefore misleading.
