I saw this game “Homescapes” that looked fun and relaxing to me.
In the FB ad, it show a guy in a scene. Underneath the scene, you’re given a choice of three tools to best fit the situation. Basically, you pick which tool that will save the protagonist from mortal peril.
The thing is, when I actually started playing the game, it was NOTHING like that. Instead, the protagonist is just a guy who wants to remodel his parents home. And even that turns out to be a “match the blocks” game.
I play Angry Birds 2 and I have seen ads for Homescapes, Gardenscapes and something called Township that make them seem like at least 10 different games.
Yes this is a new, complete bullshit approach to advertising for games.
Show a game that looks interesting but doesn’t exist, so the customer will download it. Then once you play it bears no resemblance to the game in the ad.
It’s a bad trend that I hope backfires completely. I have a personal rule that if I try out a game that has gameplay not resembling its ads, I delete it. That tells me that the marketing folks realize that the game is trash with no real entertainment value and is forced to lure people in with a lie. It’s a waste of time to give the game a chance knowing that.
I suspect that the real intention is to trick people into downloading their game just to gain some permissions and do some data mining. They don’t really care if it’s launched once and deleted straight away, they already got what they wanted.
Hero Wars on Facebook turned out to be very different, too.
The advertisement had it looking like a puzzle game-- pull this lever, take this thing out to loot the gold without getting lava dumped on you. In practice, it’s just an RPG, and a crappy one at that, because it basically plays itself. You don’t get to choose your targets, and you can’t heal.
I’ve played gardenscapes and seen the ads and to me, the only thing is they dont mention the match 3 aspect of it anymore
But yeah theres a final fantasy mobile game where you had to play it for 30 seconds to get through the ad only to see along the bottom “not representative of actual gameplay”