all right today once again we're talking about Mobile gaming because I started to see a bunch of false advertising on YouTube lately perpetrated by a bevy of different game companies and apparently nothing ever gets done about it actually no it's far worse than that apparently the mobile game industry is determined to false advertise there's a rotating trend of borderline falsified ads that are created deliberately to be as close to the line of Flatout false advertising as possible even when they don't actually need to do that AO mobile game companies are belligerently intentional about being as
deceptive as possible to their customers even when there is no legitimate reason most people who watch YouTube have probably seen some of those ads there's a lot of them out there but what people may not know is just how bizarre the system actually is let's use an example I'll start with something less egregious in order to demonstrate but rest assured it gets worse from there this is Hero Wars according to their store Page trailer and according to the ads you see online plastered everywhere it's a basic number matching puzzle game of sorts that effectively shows
someone being really stupid and failing in order to make you think wait but I could do that that seems fun and also pretty easy with me so far yes okay good the game seems fine on the surface but here's what the actual gam playay is this is obviously very very different and requires us to ask a simple question why is a high-profile mobile game Hero Wars is currently sitting at 100 million downloads Plus on the Google Play Store alone why is a very high-profile mobile game relying on what appears to be false advertising the answer
to that is actually very interesting on an industry level but the basic version is that it's not completely false advertising it's only mostly false see the ad itself doesn't show core gameplay nor does the trailer the actual content you will be playing and pay for is completely different but the advertisements and the trailer showcase a miname that actually does exist inside the main application when you download Hero Wars you get to play a couple of levels of this number puzzle game but pretty soon those levels are gone and all you have is the normal game
this leads to a pretty obvious downtrend in their customer reviews which is very obvious on the Play Store and wherever else you can download it but it's a calculated loss for them because they succeeded in getting a bunch of downloads which ultimately converts into paying users at least some of them do that's a really tame example of the phenomenon so how about we step it up a notch this is xhero save animals from dinosaur games this one isn't nearly as popular only has about a million downloads only a million that's actually still pretty high but
the entire game according to the icon the instore advertisements and gameplay screenshots appears to be a puzzle remove screws detach boards etc etc once again those elements exist in the most minimal capacity possible but after a couple of levels it turns into something completely different I don't have gameplay for this one but we can just scroll down and read the actual description quote AFK and idle system set your superheroes training while you're away they will be more powerful gain new skills when you get back the battle will never stop even when you log off end
quote Yeah it's one of those idle combat games which blew up I don't know maybe a few years ago and took over the mobile space Here's another example from the same company epic Heroes save animals with that same tagline save animals yet again this one is also dinosaur games obviously and has 10 million downloads on Android this time but it's exactly the same thing customer reviews obviously reflect that the description does as well and it's another bait and switch offering that contains maybe 5 minutes of the advertised gameplay before becoming something else entirely here's another
one this time from glaciers entertainment 100,000 downloads basically the exact same advertising technique but it's not a puzzle game it's something to do with hero summoning with blatant false advertising I could go on and on and on and on but you probably get the point this is where it gets interesting obviously the industry has a decisive Trend but why why is it normal to create a tiny snippet of a mini game and then just transparently bait and switch the advertising with enormous amounts of money when I say enormous amounts of money I mean it according
to a report by apps flyer gaming application ad spend has reached nearly 27 billion doar in 2023 alone accounting for rapid growth rate it's on track to reach absurd figures in subsequent years and one of the core foundational elements of all of it is false advertising why the explanation for that is actually really simple yet simultaneously kind of depressing mobile games have discovered a new formula see for most video games I'm talking traditional AAA franchise offerings or even Indie PC titles from small Studios for most video games the advertising formula works like this create a
product advertise the product and Target customers who might be interested in what the product actually is now to be clear this can absolutely involve deceptive practices think back to something like Anthem or the division and how those games were portrayed at the likes of e3 those were particularly egregious examples but you get the point the basic Foundation still exists where the product you make has to be advertised for what it is rather than something completely different you can't make a third person looter shooter just as an example and then play footage of the Sims to
get customers it just it wouldn't work however in Mobile gaming for some reason there's no easy way to say this it does actually work see instead of the normal system where you create something and then Market that thing to people who might like it for what it is mobile games have shifted to a completely new structure basically on an industrywide level where they create something then create a sliver a tin sliver of something else and then Market that something else to the stupidest people they can find what happens well most people realize it's fake and
move on but some of them get sucked in with addictive practices flashy dopamine hits and predatory monetization thereby feeding money back into the system and perpetuating a cycle where the mobile market no longer makes games and markets them to customers instead they make a fragmented miname inside a vehicle product and Market that it's actually legitimately an industrywide Trend and I I can show you precisely why remember that weird tagline save animals yeah that was for X hero and epic Heroes by dinosaur games but what you'll find is that the tagline save animals is from an
entirely different set of fake ads where you would draw this little thing around a doge icon and save it from a bunch of bees who were going to sting it they had wacky music and it was everywhere for a while because the fake advertisements are an industrywide Trend want proof this is hero Clash from glaciers game which is still using that same fake ad campaign that a different company was using before them based on a sliver mini game this is what the actual game looks like but as I said the point here isn't to make
something creative and find the Right audience who might be interested the goal is to make something as predatory as possible and then find the dumbest people you can and serve them ads for a splinter fragment of a game that you made purely so you could deliberately false advertise the interesting thing is that one of the industry's biggest culprits here play rck actually had a ruling against them by the ASA the advertising standards Authority in the UK it wasn't a big decision mind you but I think like seven people submitted complaints and the ads got struck
down because they were beyond the pale and showcased gameplay that was only playable 10 times maybe ever in a game with nearly 6,000 levels in response Play rcks Just increased the number of playable levels for the Min game slightly and move them closer to the beginning of the game but this perfectly demonstrates my point mobile game developers are intentionally misleading Their audience they know what the audience wants to play but deliberately refuse to actually make that product only making enough of it so that their ad campaigns won't be suspended from the Play Store they then
trick Their audience into engaging with that game because odds are some of these idiots will ultimately spend money and they can pursue a brand new technique or they just make a central payment funnel of sorts and then conjure up a rotating set of addictive advertisements for a product that basically doesn't exist in order to populate the central payment funnel most of the biggest names in the entire industry now do this top war Garden Scapes puzzles and survival and some offenders are more egregious than others obviously but the hilarious thing is that these ads end up
spreading like a disease across the industry evidence being something like the save animals Trend where other companies were picking it up even though it wasn't them that came up with it or it had nothing to do with their game one company finds a thing that works and suddenly half of the top downloaded apps in the Play Store are all save the Doge games which only have five levels of that puzzle system and then become something entirely different the crazy thing is that this probably won't change one of the most successful examples of this practice in
the past couple of years at least is called Royal match and the figures that we see publicly are astronomical the thing is All Those ads where you save the king yeah that content doesn't exist in the game and yes it's not nearly as bad as some of the other culprits out there in the industry but it's a central pillar behind why the mobile game industry is actually built on Deception now and no one does anything about it the deception Works in order for agencies like the FTC to seriously consider action there has to be harm
to customers but the sneaky formula that mobile developers have pioneered is one where the app itself is free and the gameplay technically does exist in the application so where's the harm any reasonable viewer won't be harmed right they will see and uninstall and there's disclosures so who cares but these companies aren't targeting the reasonable customers they are targeting the people with addictive personalities who get easily sucked in from a deceptive ad to a predatory product what's truly insane when you think about it like big picture is that the mobile game industry has basically evolved from
being product driven to purely advertising you don't have to make new games in order to get downloads you just have to make new mini games inside and then advertise those cut costs on the dev side increase profit reroute the money back into more and more addictive or deceptive ads and new stabs at an addictive mini game right a SLI product inside the main product and go until you find a hit rinse repeat if you get caught just up the amount of levels that you allow players to experience the miname that you got caught for false
advertising and keep going because the system works and it showcases perfectly how far the mobile game industry has fallen sure it could have been cool maybe in some alternate version of reality but in the world today mobile games have become some of the most deliberately deceptive products in the entire software market and the trend is only getting worse hilariously there's a hefty amount of high value fines that could theoretically be handed out by Regulatory Agencies if they wanted to put in the leg work these companies have no shortage of cash on hand right they're just
like a pinata waiting to be whacked and they deliberately skirt the line as close as humanly possible with like every single Campaign which means there are probably quite a few Publishers that could be slapped with a penalty a big one especially considering the sheer volume of AD spending that they throw at platforms like YouTube but sadly that doesn't seem to be happening and it also seems like the lack of immediate financial consequences for end users on a basic installation makes the FTC hesitant to get involved because they don't really have a really strong framework regardless
it seemed like a good topic to discuss and I wanted to make a video because I've been seeing these ads everywhere lately and clearly a lot of people are frustrated I mean there's even like a change.org petition and obviously that's going nowhere but man people have seen this and they're frustrated with it with good reason anyway that's it if you want to support the channel there are links down below primarily locals patreon and channel memberships much better than AdSense by by the way as well as some other stuff cybercity product affiliate list merchandise etc etc
but I'll cut it there and stop rambling as always thank you all for watching and have a nice night [Music] [Music]
