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???
I play D&D with a guy who plays one of these games. It’s so strange. It’s clearly cheap junk, it has absolutely awful reviews everywhere but he just… plays it casually and talks about it like it’s any other major multiplayer game.
It’s weird but I guess he likes it so, who cares? I’m guessing that these studios spend an incredibly low amount of development, a good amount on misleading marketing, and coast by with a moderate playerbase of a maybe a couple thousand people
Probably because there is a nugget of quality and a whole lot of nuggets of attention attraction built into the game. Check out Vampire Survivors sometime, it’s free on Android and it doesn’t have ads (unless you go out of your way to click the button that says “view an ad”). And it was developed by someone who had previously worked at a casino.
It’s the same reason somebody relentlessly checks Twitter, it triggers the same dopamine receptors.