No, it's much easier to make a short animated ad than even a simple original game. The purpose of any such game is to serve you up ridiculous amounts of ads. The actual game is a ripoff of a free tutorial with assets stolen from one of the 300 other games exactly like it, all of which are also just vehicles for ads. They figure anyone who will download a game from an ad and play the game even though it's different will watch the ads in the game because they'll put up with anything, and maybe click on the ads because they already clicked one.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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Sounds like my little cousin lol. He'll literally play a mobile game till the first ad, click on it and install that, and then play that until the first ad
The ads are made by a separate ad agency. Their goal is to do whatever they think will grab the most attention - not what faithfully represents the game. They likely don’t have access to any game assets at all.
What’s amazing is that it seems like it works. If it didn’t, they wouldn’t keep doing it.
those are for little kids with the attention span of a squirrel and old people with alzheimers who forgot what the ad was about right after they clicked it.
It’s because the game that gets a lot of installs for cheap (simple, hyper-casual) is not the game that makes a lot of money (deep power based meta progression, complex).
In other words: It is more profitable to cheat and get a few paying customers than to try and be honest in marketing.
Everyone is trying to buy users for less money (cost per install) than they bring in (average lifetime value) which is insanely difficult. The market is very competitive and just few top games / companies get a lions share of the money.
Source: I work in the mobile game industry
The game I'm talking about was a free download
They're talking about cost to the developer, not cost to the user. Creating, marketing, and distributing a game all cost money.
It's not illegal to bend the truth, and since governments have been getting bought out by rich fucks with no ethics (or are comprised of rich fucks with no ethics by now), there is less than no incentive to enforce truth in advertising laws even where they still exist.
Especially in sectors like video games where the people getting ripped off aren't rich themselves.
Yeah but I don't get the purpose of lying. Why not just actually create the game they're advertising? If they can make the ad, can't they make the game?
Nope, the ad video is just an animation, nothing actually functions. Making a functioning game is MUCH harder to do, and requires MUCH more time and money. (Relatively speaking)
It's the difference between creating a movie set that looks like a skyscraper vs. creating an actual skyscraper. Creating a mock up of something is always going to be much cheaper and easier than building the actual real thing
In this atmosphere they can absolutely get away with it because there are so many bigger problems that aren't even getting attention.
I'd like to reference the gift card scam so many people dealt with in the early 2000s. You buy a gift card at a store with real, cold hard cash and it would expire after 6 months-2 years. No matter how much was on that gift card, it was null and void after a finite amount of time.
Legislation finally went through after way too long, and finally businesses had to honor gift cards for a much longer period of time.
I'd love to think one day they'd put a kebosh on advertising like this but unfortunately I'm very certain it will go on un-addressed for far too long. Our current society favors caveat emptor over caveat venditor.
This trend has been around for a while, so evidently it works pretty well despite everyone I've encountered thinking it's dumb