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???
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.”