Social media is full of ads for “free” (I suppose the business model is either pay-to-win, or ads, or data mining, or a combination of all three) mobile phone games. I never download these games because I don’t want junk software on my phone, but I’ve noticed that in many cases, the comments to the ads are full of people who downloaded the game and complain that it is very different from what it looks like in the ad; in many cases, it’s not just that the graphics are worse, but that the actual gameplay is an entirely different one.
How is this viable? I realise, of course, that the companies behind the games don’t care about their reputation among disappointed players. But you would think that if a company has an idea for a gameplay that looks interesting enough in an ad to make people download the game, then they might as well actually create the game, rather than an entirely different game.
I have a couple of games on my phone, and I’ve long been curious about just how this financing model works. The games are free, so if course they have ads, but the ads are almost exclusively for other games that are touted as being free (or paying players money, but we all know that’s a scam). Where does the actual cash money come from in this scenario?
One possibility is that the actual software people are downloading may contain malware; it’s probably easier to create an animated ad for a fun-looking game than it is to create the actual game, and its probably also easier to bundle in some trojan or something with a rudimentary game based on knockoff code.
That’s true even if there is no malware. The good-looking ad gets people to download it. Maybe almost everyone deletes it after seeing how crappy the real game is, but there are still a few people left over. And the game is most likely adware itself, and makes you sit through a few of them before you even realize that it’s a bait-and-switch. They’re also likely filled with microtransaction garbage that hooks some small number of people.
There is a ‘game’ that I keep seeing - it is a long track going away from the player, with ‘opponents’ advancing to the player, some of them you have to shoot down oncoming opponents [like lots of them, zombies or whoever] and you can move to the left and the right for targeting, and periodically you go through either the left gate or the right gate to get more arrows/bullets/whatever the hell one is shooting. One variant is you are a bipedal being, and you are running along the pathway, and you add or subtract body mass by what you do. Sorry for being vague but I don’t play this kind of game, so I don’t really pay attention. There is another version where you have a line of bottles above and below, like a dozen bottles, each has different stripes of ‘sand’ and you are supposed to pour one color into another bottle until all the bottles only have 1 color of sand in them.
Sorry, these sort of games don’t appeal to me, so I really only vaguely can describe them. But they can probably have the front end reskinned fairly easily to make it look like a bunch of different games.
That the one where the idiot makes a bunch of really bad decisions to make the suckers think “Garsh! I coulda done a lot better than that! This game’ll be a cinch to win!”?
Are you telling me that the game with the mother and child, kicked out of her own home by a cruel husband now living with his young chippie, where mother and child move into a snow covered farmhouse, and you the player have to decide whether to build a fire or cover this windows, is FAKE! That it doesn’t even play like that? Or the king trapped in a hole with liquid metal pouring down on him? I can’t save him?
Eh.
I really should buy mahjong, instead of using the free version, so I don’t have to see these ads!
As for the OP, good question. I often wonder at the “business model” that do things like this. I’m astounded, continually.
Sure, it’s easier to make an exciting-looking ad than to make an actual exciting game. But what gets me is when the ad itself looks like an incredibly stupid and boring game. Like, there were a whole bunch of games a few years back all called <something>scape (Farmscape, Cityscape, etc.), and the ads all showed someone traversing a narrow passage and coming to obstacles. Like, you’re crawling through an air duct, and you come to a fan in the air duct. Your options are to use a pillow on it, use a wrench on it, or just keep on crawling through it. Think carefully about which one is right! (spoiler: It’s the wrench).
Except, from what I’ve heard, even that stupid, inane game that would be super-easy to program isn’t the actual game, which was somehow even stupider.
Might be a shitty network of crappy games, all mainly spruiking each other. But amongst all the free drek, there is a microtransactional game, and that’s the cash cow.
I once looked up one these junk games as it explictly stated that this is what the game looks like, not like all them others. I thought “Liar!”. And sure enough, many complaints of “This ain’t the game”. To which the developer literally c&p the same response over and over, basically saying “Is too!”. Scam written all over it.
all those "scapes " are match 3 decorating/building games made by the same company Playrix who were in f act were sued by the EU for false advertisement because the game didn’t include anything from the ad
So what playrix did was include the crappily animated interactive ads in the games as “dreams” they still had to pay fortune tho
The ads I’ve always hated are the ads that sex up games … especially the new "sugar daddy games " there’s ads for one that literally makes it look and sound like softcore porn and the scenes are nowhere in the game (although the game itself is pretty close to the edge) there’s like 10 k bad reviews for it
Sure, but again, why? If they thought there was an actual market for crawling-through-a-tunnel games (and there was apparently at least some, or nobody would have clicked on the ads), why not spend the five minutes it would take to create a crawling-through-a-tunnel game? And if they didn’t think there was a market for that, then why make the ads at all? Meanwhile, there clearly is a market for match-3 games, given that a few of them are super popular… It’s probably an oversaturated market, but it’s something. So why not make ads for that? Either of those would make sense. But what doesn’t make sense is making the actual game (slightly) more difficult to create (match-3 games are easy to program, but crawling-through-a-tunnel is even easier) and more popular, but then making an ad for it that looks like an easier-to-create but less-popular game.
And yeah, the sex ads are annoying, too, but at least those make sense. Sex sells, and it’s easier to make a single still drawing of a scantily-clad lady to put in the ads than to make any actually-sexy gameplay (which would, at the least, include animations).