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???
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.
Yeah, advertising is one of those things where it superficially looks awful. Then you study the details, and it only gets worse.
Ah yes, the 'ol fractal of horror
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
Here’s a video of a guy doing just that: https://youtu.be/zRDhiN50Vo0?si=mMnc8ieKbCxcLcSY
TLDW: He manages to make a working game, but doesn’t think it’s all that much fun.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/zRDhiN50Vo0?si=mMnc8ieKbCxcLcSY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.