Mobile gaming adverts are incredibly misleading and weird
I remember getting my first IPod Touch years ago and immediately finding an abundance of free to play, high quality games available from the store.
A lot of these games were fully fledged gamed with no adverts or and microtransactions.
Oh boy how times have changed.
- Mobile games earned $49 billion in revenue last year
With the monumental amount of money mobile games earn, it's no surprise that new companies are popping up and wanting a slice of the pie. Unfortunately it means that a lot are using deceptive marketing to try and garner attention.
It seems to be a common theme to create a clickbait ad showcasing a very brief look at the gameplay.
There's a lot of ultra simple mobile games which I like to call "Hypercasual games" - These are designed to be games that you can just load up and play for 5 minutes for a bit of fun. They are usually packed full of ads and they conveniently give an option to remove the ads for a small fee.
Flappy Birds is a very popular example of this - The developer was bringing in $50,000 per day in revenue before he took down the game.
These terrible ads have caught a lot of media attention - various YouTubers have dedicated videos on them, and there's a great sub Reddit named r/shittymobilegameads which showcases a lot of these ads.
I hope there's some change in this industry but no one seems to care really. A lot of these adverts are highly unethical and designed to lure you into their game which often doesn't look like it was advertised. At least for now, we can vote with our wallet.
What mobile games do you play?
Author:
Connor Flintoft