Why do so many money-making games use Trump in their ads?

The Game Room
#1

Lately I’ve seen ads for games about making money that feature Trump or a parody of Trump. It’s only a few, but the only similarly frequent theme is the ’ my score vs. mom/rookie/dad/etc. score’*.

Trump is a very controversial figure right now, so why would a game developer (an industry which is insanely competitive with lots of companies forming and closing down every week) risk alienating vast swaths of their potential audience like this?

I can’t imagine there are Trump fans who will play a game just because he’s featured in it (or something that could be him, anyway). However, I do know quite a few people who won’t have anything to do with a product that shows Trump in a positive light (or even non-negative).

Please, leave the politics out of this discussion. Let’s just accept that a lot of people think he’s one of the worst humans ever ( the circles I tend run in), while others think he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.

*where they show a split screen with a game in each (one is like level 99 stuff, and the other is like level 1-10)

#2

I haven’t seen any such ads. With the demographic information advertisers have available to them nowadays, it’s possible that they’re only showing these ads to people who they think will be receptive to them (and if you’re not receptive to them, that might just think that they goofed in your one individual case).

In any event, many people, including many of Trump’s opponents, still associate him with making a lot of money, so it makes sense to associate him with a game about making money. And most other folks associated with making money aren’t nearly as recognizable: Would you recognize a caricature of Warren Buffet, or Bill Gates? But it’s really easy to draw a recognizable caricature of Trump.

#3

I would suspect they’re all really cheaply made games meant to capitalize either on those who like Trump (the sincere ones) or hate him (the parody ones). Trump is popular, and a lot of games now are shovelware fly-by-night stuff. If they don’t attach something popular to it, no one would ever even play the game at all.

In other words, the inclusion of Trump is an indicator of negative quality, but it makes their garbage stand out in a sea of garbage.

And, while money making games don’t appeal to me, I will admit I got a lot of pleasure out of seeing people play that game where you are supposed to protect the President from being shot with a very short time limit. It was a crappy game, but it required multiple failures for you to figure out what to do, and I found that fun to watch someone else play.

#4

Oh, and

[Moderating]

Since this is about games, I’ll move it from CS to the Game Room.

#5

I’ll just chime in to say I’ve never seen this before either. Which leads me to believe this isn’t nearly as widespread as the OP assumes.

#6

Trump is an easy figure to parody, thus people would use him in an ad for some humor. It would be light enough humor so pro-Trump supporters wouldn’t take offense in it, while also drawing in people who would be against Trump who gravitate towards anything with even the lightest amount of parody of the President. There were a ton of BUILD THE WALL TRUMP games on Steam during Trump’s campaign that were clearly satirizing him but did it gently enough I could see people from both sides buying the game out of pure curiosity.

#7

It’s also possible that now that he is President, they can use his image for free. Whereas prior to being elected he would have definitely wanted licensing fees for using his image.

#8

I gather Trump Reloaded is not far off.