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.
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.
What are you on about? Why does any dev in the mobile need to deal with companies like this?? Unless you’re looking to work for Niantic, EA, Ubisoft/Gameloft etc you can just self publish and that’s what people do daily. Lots of self published games and apps exist and more are available every day.
I am concerned with the larping you’re doing here. Why are you trying to scare people ?
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.
Just fucking get “Yeah You Want Those Games” on Steam.
Btw, I love the ones where they actively acknowledge that many of the ads are fake “Why does everyone say this game is fake? I’m playing it right now.” or “See, we’re going to walk through the game in order to prove it’s real…” proceeds to make overly generic commentary that proves nothing
And I find it amusing this game Envoy: The King’s Return has been a puzzle game and an RTS, and it seems the voice over keeps getting confused… because after the generic voice over for Envoy sometimes says “Let the battle begin!”, after showing it as a puzzle game.
It’s important to realize that this isn’t a game, it’s 20 seconds of animation that looks like a game. There would be a lot more work designing levels or an algorithm to send enemies etc.
The actual game is designed to be as addictive as possible so you become a whale spending money on it. The advertising is designed to get you to download the game. Two different jobs.
Also, easier A/B testing and targeting if you can just advertise different games to different people but funnel them all to the same end game.
If the math worked out that people who saw the real game downloaded it and ended up paying more money, they would advertise the real game. Guess the math doesn’t work.
The ads also have obvious mistakes in the gameplay. That’s to deliberately induce frustration in the viewer, who thinks they would be able to do better.
Can’t cite sources, just want to reaffirm. Kept running into that concept when researching game design, advertising, psychology.
Its also an old trick of greengrocers. They put a sign up advertising “tomaetoes” People come in to correct them and end up buying stuff
This is a >11 minute video, which winds around the truth, but ultimately the creator trying to reason about what’s going on… But his conclusions end up being incorrect. Don’t waste your time.
These videos are made to gauge interest in game ideas by making up ads, and the seeing what engagement is like. If people will click on an ad to download a game, they don’t know if that game is real, but their clicking says they are interested. And if it’s successful, the game may incorporate the idea as mini game, within their existing gams, and see how it pans out in actual game play.
This is idea testing, it’s not deceit trying to hook you up into their existing game by baiting you with something else. That might be a secondary side effect but this is not the primary goal.
This creator is totally misreading this.
They cover A B testing part in the video.
They also cover the marketing disconnect from the game devs.
I’m not sure how you came to the conclusion that the video misread it.
I also don’t care how you came to the conclusion so misread me all you want.
