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Does anyone understand the point of advertising a game doing something that, after downloading, it does not do?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
It seems like if what you're showing is what you understand they find appealing and fun, then surely that's what should be in the game. You give them that.
But instead, you give them something else that is unrelated to what they've seen on the ad? A gem matching candy crush clone they've seen a thousand times?
How is that model working? How is that holding up as a marketing technique???
Some of the responses here dance around the truth, but none of them hit the nail on the head. This is a bit of an artifact of how the mobile industry works and the success rate vs profitability vs the way ads work on mobile.
Yes, hands down, this is not an effective advertising strategy. Many of these game companies are very successful so it's not because they're stupid. It's because these ads aren't advertising campaigns.
These ads are market research. The point isn't to get you to download their game. At all. The point is to figure out what people will engage with.
These ads are all game ideas. Mobile game ideas are a dime a dozen million. They're easy to come up with, cost a lot to build, and many don't monetize well and therefore aren't profitable. Because of that, it's very expensive and unsustainable to build games and test them and see what succeeds.
Instead, companies come up with ideas, build a simple video demonstrating the idea, and put up ads with those videos. They then see how many people engage with the ads to determine how many people would even visit the download page for that game. Building a quick video is much much much cheaper than building a game. This is the first step in fast failing their ideas and weeding out bad ones.
Essentially the companies have lots of ideas, build lots of simple videos, advertise them all, and see which ones get enough engagement to be worth pursuing further, while the rest get dropped entirely.
But those ads need to link somewhere. So they link to the companies existing games. Because they're already paying for it. So why not.
But building a whole new game is also expensive. Dynamics in mobile gaming are very odd because of the way "the algorithm" works. It is actually extremely expensive to get advertising in front of enough people that enough download it that you have any meaningfully large player base to analyze at all.
So the next trick is these companies will take the successful videos, build "mini games" of those ads as a prototype, and then put that in their existing game. This means they can leverage their existing user base to test how much people will engage with the game, and more importantly, eventually test how well it monetizes. Their existing users have already accepted permissions, likely already get push notifications, and often already have their payment info linked to the app. It also means they don't have to pay for and build up a new store presence to get eyeballs on it. Many of the hurdles of the mobile space have already been crossed by their existing players, and the new ones who clicked the ads have demonstrated interest in the test subject. This is why many of the ads link to seemingly different games that have a small snippet of what you actually clicked on.
If these mini games then become successful enough, they will be made into their own standalone game. But this is extremely rare in mobile. The way the store algorithms and ads work make it pretty fucking expensive to get new games moving, so they really have to prove it to be worthwhile in the long run.
So yeah, most people look at this the wrong way - it does actually go against common sense advertising, but that's because it's not actually advertising. It's essentially the cheapest way for companies to get feedback from people that actually play mobile games about what kinds of games they would play.
It's not advertising. It's market analysis.
This is brilliant for them. They basically take the elevator pitches from the concept phase of design and toss them at players to see what sticks. Don't even have to get to the point of a vertical slice to playtest, just a conceptual animation of gameplay.
Yeah, this makes me so fucking mad as a player but like.... It actually works super well so I can't blame them.
Mobile gaming is full of shitty elevator pitches and super high failure rates so it just kinda.... Makes sense.
But I still hate it.
Absolutely, I hate it, too. It's like how the more I learn about advertising, the more disgusted I become as I discover that it's all just malicious psychology to push the buttons in your brain to get you to do what they want, but it's still brilliant psychology that they've honed after more than a century of practice. I hate it, but I can't deny it works.
This is a great answer but do you have a source for it? I'm not doubting you; I've just never heard this explanation before so I'm really curious about it.
As I mentioned in other comments, I'm a software dev that's worked with companies that were doing this, that were talking to other mobile game companies that were doing this. I hate to say "trust me bro" but, this stuff isn't something they're like happy to publicly advertise so it's not like it's written up somewhere, AFAIK.
As an old game dev, this is so depressing. All hooked up dopamine addicts needed to be bled their money as fast as possible.
Nice writeup though!
Yes, this seems to be the goal for most of the companies. That's really awful, I don't have enough words to comment on how much I hate that after playing one of those games for several months because I got addicted to it. Not a cent did I pay, though, let them fuck themselves
Yeah, I hate that this is the state of mobile gaming. And it's seeped into other game spaces as well. I find it really sad and pathetic, but once big money crept in, it feels like that's all most games are. It's basically just pushed me harder towards indie games, and luckily that's easier to find and discover these days.
Thank you!
An RTS with a backstory like red alert, even a rpg wirh a good story...
Last one I enjoyed was Knights of pen and paper :-)
this makes so much sense, how do you know all this?
I'm a software dev and have worked with some of these companies. It's kind of sad because I liked the idea of mobile games and working with them was a bit like seeing the devil behind the curtains. I dreamt of making cool little games based on fun and unique ideas and quickly learned it's all a huge well oiled machine chugging through market data to find the most effective money extracting methods they can come up with.
For every bit you think these companies are grimey money chasers, I promise you it's at least 5 times worse.
ooph, I just started trying to make a mobile game in Jan 😬
Make it a good one. Then tell me about it, because I know I'll never find it on the play store.
I hate to be discouraging. I wanted to do the same up until these interactions. Depending on what is a livable wage for you, or if you're doing it on the side, it could still be possible. But I'm in high cost of living areas in the US and it seems totally unfathomable to me. I watched companies spend literal millions of dollars on just advertising to gauge interest in games they then shut down because they couldn't make the game profitable enough to pay for the ads and their bills etc.
There are definitely success stories, and you can definitely get games released and get players. But I just want to point out that many of the games are simple and just have absolutely astronomical amounts of money behind them. Mobile is fucking crazy and I feel like it's much harder for smaller devs to get their name out through typical advertising channels.
IMO, which is mostly just guessing based off what I've seen, I'd think your time is better spent finding small communities that may be interested in your game and posting about them, as opposed to buying ads etc. Indie dev subreddits and other gaming communities have propped up successful games before, and it may cost you more time and effort, but it just looks extremely hard to compete on the mobile ads playing fields against these huge companies these days.
As somebody who almost got a degree in animation to go work at the big AAA companies, everything you've said in this thread about the industry has been right on the money to the view I got that made me bail out in college. There's plenty more that can be said about working in the industry, but suffice to say they play in their own cesspool, and unless you've got serious financial backing, it's not worth trying to compete.
Even speaking of just the indie scene, don't go in expecting to make anything on a game. Many of the indie studios you see on Steam will never go on to make a second game because their first never became profitable and the company went bankrupt. Even plenty of the more popular indie games will never make back what they cost. There's those one in a million games like Lethal Company, but you should do it because you like making games, not because you expect to quit your day job.
Yeah. All of this rings really true. I find it really sad because not long ago it felt like a lot of games cropped up from small indie groups. Hell, many of the big names now like blizzard were formed by small groups of friends. But it feels like in the 2010s, big entertainment money got involved and now it's a festering cesspool.
Accurate, though I would say that the rot started earlier than that. Most of the companies we know and love were started and run by people who just liked making games. But those people have long been replaced by money extractors. I think it really started in earnest around the early 2000s, but it took a long time for it to start to show. There's also the fact that we look back and forget about all the shovelware from decades past. And that's not even getting into the working conditions, which easily goes back to the 80s.
The indie scene today is the strongest it's ever been, thanks to the rise of digital distribution and access to game dev tools. We live in a world where little indie teams can get their games released on Nintendo digital storefronts and there are websites dedicated to just indie games. Social media has made it easier than ever for small creators to gather large followings of dedicated fans. But at the same time, the gulf between the indie scene and the big companies has never been wider. I can't think of a single time where an indie team has gone on to create a new AAA studio.
It's frustrating to watch both as a gamer and as somebody who once dreamt of joining that industry.
Yeah, I think you're totally right. I didn't mean that it started in 2010s, more that it was basically the norm by then and it's a giant cesspool now. But looking back, my wording wasn't super clear on that distinction. I do think it was around in the 2000s, but its gotten much worse with time.
I'm also super frustrated as a gamer, but to your point, thank god the indie scene is running strong.
I've been mostly making games for fun and am fairly risk adverse so am planning on sticking with a stable job and making games in my free time.
It's discouraging, but it is reality. I still want to try, but definitely not putting more than one egg in this basket.
I'll admit I'm knowingly doing the following haha
hopefully it'll at least be a positive experience and I learn something from it
You're only about a month in, aim to release on somewhere like itch.io instead of a mobile store. Join some dev communities and game jams and the like. Building up a following like that is a million times easier than trying to get noticed in the sea of SEO games in an app store.
I've been doing itch and jams for a little bit, even managed to win one once. I've learned a lot but can't shake this feeling that I'm just making free games for itch. You might be right though.. whatever kind of sea of games I think itch is, the mobile sea may be a lot worse.
It definitely is. I think it's really hard to comprehend how much garbage is floating around mobile app stores. In recent times, it's gotten to the point where if you release a new game, even people searching for your exact game name might not find it just because of how much stuff they have to sort through and how much they have to "suppress". It's hard to tell how much stuff you're really up against in those stores because it's so hard to even see a portion of it. There's just so much and everything relies on algorithms and recommendations.
Mobile games are also mostly played by hyper casuals, and the space is dominated by dopamine hit money extractors, so people that don't want that basically left, and everyone that remains is expecting it. If you don't think you fit into that model, I would also recommend itch or steam because the user bases there will likely match your target audience better, and there's less stuff to compete with there.
If true it's kind of a dumb idea. I downloaded one of these that looked good many years ago, didn't end up being the game, I deleted it immediately and haven't clicked on a single one of these since. A few of them even looked like fun concepts but fuck it, it's probably not real. Seems like their market research is going to be heavily skewed by people once bitten, twice (or forever) shy.
That's just the thing they want. You know that 99% of the ads are fake, but if you enjoy one enough to click it anyway, on the off chance it's real, that data is extra valuable because you've watched a thousand ads and clicked on one so that's the one they know to focus on.
Yeah, but I'm not clicking on ads in 2024, I'm gonna Google anything I think is interesting or check its reviews in the play store. I treat all ads like potential one click viruses. Plus I see them so rarely, like if I'm doing a crossword or something, that I'm just waiting for the little x to appear so I can get back to my game. Who's clicking on ads?
The simple truth is that you're in the minority. Most people aren't quite so diligent about avoiding them.
The real question for me is: where is the money coming from?
It seems like mobile ads are extremely incestuous. Game A advertises games B to M, which in turn advertise all the others. So ad revenue can hardly be a significant source of income for the industry as a whole.
The games themselves probably all work on a freemium model, but even given the whale dynamics there, it seems unlikely that the games produce enough revenue to offset literally billions of ads.
Also, how exactly does your analysis square with the fact that I've seen the exact same game ads for years? It doesn't really make sense to advertise 5 years for such throwaway products.
In many ways, yes they are. Especially if you like inside individual genres. But mobile games also have so so many players and a rotating player base. Even old games can still attract new players etc. But yes, they are pretty incestuous.
But that's the market. It's unlikely to see massive growth like it has in the past. Mobile games have become so common that they've pretty much saturated the market and rotate players around. The same idea could kind of be said about things like movies or theaters, but the business still works.
Whale dynamics are a huge part of this, and the spenders on these games absolutely do produce enough to pay for the ads. If they didn't, the companies wouldn't be running them.
Let me put it this way - I've seen companies run games all the way through the process from "fake ads" to a fully released game... And then shut it down because the players "only" end up spending 2-3x what it cost to acquire them through advertising. 3x their investment is seen as a failure because of the cost to build them. That's how important it is to them that they run these fake campaigns so they can bail on the failures early. And their targets for successful games land in 3-8x the advertising budge to be successful. Though exact ranges depend on genres and the "longevity" of a player and lots of other things.
I'll also add, as expensive as you might think running ads is, actual development is significantly higher. Ads will likely be run for a long time on a successful game, but the advertising for 6 months is way cheaper than spending 2 years with engineers, artists, designers, QA, and management all on the project. If they can spend 200k on advertising in 6 months to gauge interest, that's only costing the salary of like 2 engineers, so it's highly worthwhile. Most mobile game "success" rates are well below ten percent.
To be honest, I can't answer this one with confidence. I've seen multiple companies using the strategy I outlined, so I know it's pretty common. I also know that those companies were copying the strategy from other companies in the space. So I know it's prevalent. But that's not going to be every single ad you ever see.
I'll point out a couple things:
How exact is exact? Are you sure it's the exact same video down to a T? They may be floating multiple ideas at a time, and games can live in this "fake ad" state for multiple years while they iterate on it. Everything from different sound effects but the same video, different visual themes, running cuts of players doing well vs poorly, changing individual words in the messaging, etc. They then test these against each other to see which do better. I've seen some run for a while, but I've never felt confident it's actually exactly the same.
And if that's the case... Is it possible someone saw that and ad was fake but thought it was a good idea, and now a different company just literally copied and posted the same video?
Second, this may just be a "market analysis" learning vehicle. They may never intend on building the game. For example, if a company is thinking about game A, they may run ads, see it doesn't work, kill the project, and start considering game B. Now they already have data on how game As ads ran, and they can use their original ads as a "control" and try different variants to see what does better, and then use that data to determine how to best advertise game B. Or they may test game B against game A. Then they might see that it's doing worse than A, and try something else.
Third, some of this may be chasing measuring "seasonality". Game genres trend back and forth over time. They may use an old ad they put together to test the waters now to test the water again.
Fourth, I'm not totally convinced these are always studios running the ads. These might be publishers that never intend on building the game, but are trying to find info on what types of games are trending and what genres they should be invested in. Or they might be the advertising networks just running bullshit ads to gauge how much they should bid for ads in a particular genre. Or maybe it's some giant joint venture like Tencent who owns tons of studios and is gaging what they should be recommending their studios work on.
Data is extremely valuable. In many forms. And many people will pay for that data. And this type of data is such an accurate gauge of actual user behavior because it is literally actually current user data.
There are about 3 companies that dominate 90% of the mobile games market and these ads are extremely cheap to produce
Also there is tons of money in mobile gaming, just look at Blizzard, their highest revenue brand is Candy Crush
It's also illegal (False Advertising)
Is it though? IANAL, but I feel like this is, at the very least, a gray area.
You can't purchase anything. The ad didn't say anything except maybe "play now", and there is a game and it may even contain a mini game of sorts that's kinda the ad.. The "harm" is like 3 seconds of your time. The "product" doesn't not do what it says because... It doesn't exist....
I dunno. Maybe it is. I feel like this is one of those things where "we all know it is" but "legally they probably wiggle their way out of the legal definition, and what are people going to do? Sue them for 5$?"
Not that I agree with it, don't get me wrong. I think we all know it's fucking scummy bullshit. But I'm not sure you'd win a court case over it and what harm you could argue it caused you etc.
If it's not punished, is it really illegal?
But that game in the screenshot looks like it's a thing, I saw a video of it. Like somebody could make that in Unity in a week or so.
Why not release Bridge Blasters or whatever the fuck it's called, and then when it's a surprise hit, put a ton of resources and all your worst money grubbing microtransactions into Bridge Blasters 2 DX Extreme. Then when people see that advertised, they'll go "oh Bridge Blasters, I remember that, I'll give that a go", rather than going "huh, another scam game. fuck that".
These guys are doing agile better than any team I've ever worked with...
the market research aspect makes sense. but why go the roundabout way of surveying? isn't it counterproductive to lose users this way?
I would not call this "roundabout". Is it weird? Yes. But I actually would actually argue it's less roundabout than alternatives. What alternative would you propose?
I suspect most people would say "well why not put out a survey to users and ask...." but that comes with multiple known faults. 1) People's answers are not always genuine, and they can't always accurately forsee how they would react, which is a common problem in data gathering. And 2) How do you collect and sample those users? Sure, you have your existing player base, but what happens if your game is in a different genre and your player base wouldn't be the same?
I suspect that the second point is the bigger reason things shifted this way - ads are common in mobile games and mobile games are trying to sell to people already playing mobile games. Your audience is already reachable through ads, so why build a new system when one is already in place, being built by someone else so you don't have to do any work but make the ad?
But to circle back... When you ship your game, you're going to advertise it, and you want people to click on those ads, because that is how you get users. By putting out ads before you've built the game, you're literally sampling by using the exact system you will be using when you ship. And you're going to get data on whether users actually perform the behavior you want - to click the ad.
I fucking hate this, but to be honest... It's actually a perfect parallel... They're measuring exactly the end goal (efficacy of the ads) before they've built the product. It's actually pretty genius and lucky it works out. It's fucking evil, don't get me wrong, but it is actually a perfect gauge.
Any alternative, imo, is actually more roundabout.
What users would they be losing? People already playing their game aren't going to see ads, click them, see they have it installed, then quit. So they're not losing existing users. They can't be "losing" users for a game that doesn't exist yet.
You could argue that the negative reviews on your original game will hurt it, but this process is usually done when they have a steady existing game. And those don't last forever. Once they've peaked, they've "served their purpose" in the companies eyes. And these negative reviews are way less impactful on successful games that have thousands of reviews already. And, the game probably isn't growing so they don't care. And they're relatively rare and the "hate" is far less impactful than knowing whether your next game is worth investing in.
You could also argue "well they're upsetting potential players they would have when the game releases" but they run these at "relatively small" fractions of their intended target audience, and the mobile player pool is gargantuan. On top of that, by the time the game comes out, people likely won't remember the ad, and they very likely won't remember it was a bait. And they may even change the art style or theme for release, and just leverage the same mechanics etc.
Thank you very much! These answers are very insightful.
I think these points brought the point home on why some of their decisions seem absurd for me:
Of course! Glad my arcane knowledge of a shitty industry could be... Helpful? :)
Incredibly insightful.
I really enjoyed reading about this awful shit, it makes a ton of sense though.
Do you think this will eventually poison the well? Eventually if you have the market research data with a really strong positive signal so much so that you actually want to make a standalone game, could you end up with a boy who cried wolf scenario? Like if you try to market your new game that actually has the cool mechanics and features you dreamt up, would you eventually have no one believing it any more?
As they say, there's a sucker born every minute. The mobile market is gigantic. Like, bigger than the rest of the gaming industry combined big. Activision-Blizzard-King makes more off the mobile company part, King, than they do from both Blizzard and Activision. That's more from mobile games than from CoD and WoW combined, two of the most golden of geese in gaming history. I think there's just too many people in the mobile market to have any noticeable impact on the customers of your specific games.
There might be a case to be made for long-term damage across the market, but even then, you're talking easily a billion users with more joining all the time.
I think a good comparison would be to Amazon and those drop-shipping sites that sell cheap junk from China. For every one customer burned, there's probably a dozen more gobbling up the low prices and "sales."
To be honest, I'm not entirely sure. What I've gathered is that while they may be dumping lumps of money at these campaigns over the analysis' lifetime (like, hundreds of thousands to a few million dollars), they're not spending nearly as much as they would on the actual released product and it's lifetime (likely millions or tens of millions). Because of this, even if they do, they're only "poisoning" a fraction of their end-target player base... The mobile market is fucking huge. And a lot of these companies are gargantuan.
The other thing is I don't think most people understand what's really happening. Many people will be like "I clicked an ad and it went to the wrong thing" and move on. They also may not even remember the game by the time it releases. Except for some of the heavily heavily repeated ones. And even if so.. Would you try again eventually? If they repackage the same idea in different art assets and theming or names, would you even know?
I think this also points to something else that I've thought a bunch about that is semi related... Are they just poisoning mobile game ads in general? Have people run into this so much that they don't even trust ads anymore? I know that at this point I just generally don't believe any of them and I click things less than I did before... Are other people following this same trend? Is that aversion uniformly distributed or is it going to start clogging up the data and undermine the actual purpose of these ad streams?
They’re not wrong, they’re just assholes.
Damn
Your whole guess is incredibly well written and it’s also entirely wrong. Wanna know why? You’re about to feel really foolish.
You see the picture OP posted? Most will recognise it because regardless of theme (sometimes a long soldier fighting army other times it’s a person against a horde of undead etc) it’s an archetype that many of these ads use (others are the puzzle game with water, the rpg where you outfight or outfuck etc). Those archetypical fake games have been doing the rounds for literal years, some close to a decade. If they were prototypes or seeking audience interest they would exist by now or they would be much more varied. They don’t and they aren’t.
No, what you’re actually seeing is an artifact of the financial rewards a lack of interest and imagination can render if your audience is large enough - these ads aren’t selling the games they portray, they are the central player to a bait and switch strategy to farm people into generic games that harvest clicks, user data and money from the unsuspecting tech ilterate. These ads are not market research because those who publish already know their markets extremely well and they know down to the second what enough of the audience will do when faced with these bait and switch games.
That you attribute such grandiose cleverness to this scam is pretty sad.
Yeah, I don't feel foolish at all. I've explained this in other comments.
In summary:
I'm not claiming literally every instance is exactly what I'm describing, but it is a very common pattern.
Many of these ads are slight variations to test which performs better.
Many of the "which performs better" are run against long standing ads they've had to learn about how to advertise. They may never intend to release the games being advertised. They may know the ad does well, but they built a prototype game and it didn't monetize, so they'll never finish it or already killed it. But that doesn't stop them from running the same ad but with a different visual theme to see which visual theme is more popular right now.
Some of these ads are not run by dev studios but by advertisers or publishers.
Markets are not static - interest in themes, visual styles, and game genres are all extremely "seasonal" and keep changing. They do not "know their market extremely well" because interest keeps shifting. Companies will constantly run ads just to gauge what genres they should be thinking about and to track trends over time. IE, they may run the same exact strategy game ad for many years straight to determine the long term stability of strategy games. Without caring about the specific game idea in the ad itself.
I don't feel foolish, nor do I think it's "clever". I just know from first hand experience that this is how the market works.