Ottomateeverything @ Ottomateeverything @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Sounds like you've got the right mindset and sounds like you have your head on your shoulders. Best of luck!

You might be right though.. whatever kind of sea of games I think itch is, the mobile sea may be a lot worse.

It definitely is. I think it's really hard to comprehend how much garbage is floating around mobile app stores. In recent times, it's gotten to the point where if you release a new game, even people searching for your exact game name might not find it just because of how much stuff they have to sort through and how much they have to "suppress". It's hard to tell how much stuff you're really up against in those stores because it's so hard to even see a portion of it. There's just so much and everything relies on algorithms and recommendations.

Mobile games are also mostly played by hyper casuals, and the space is dominated by dopamine hit money extractors, so people that don't want that basically left, and everyone that remains is expecting it. If you don't think you fit into that model, I would also recommend itch or steam because the user bases there will likely match your target audience better, and there's less stuff to compete with there.

Yeah, I hate that this is the state of mobile gaming. And it's seeped into other game spaces as well. I find it really sad and pathetic, but once big money crept in, it feels like that's all most games are. It's basically just pushed me harder towards indie games, and luckily that's easier to find and discover these days.

Thank you!

As I mentioned in other comments, I'm a software dev that's worked with companies that were doing this, that were talking to other mobile game companies that were doing this. I hate to say "trust me bro" but, this stuff isn't something they're like happy to publicly advertise so it's not like it's written up somewhere, AFAIK.

Because no matter how "easy" you think it is to build said game, it's always easier to build a video. You don't have to make the whole thing. You don't have to use unity. You don't have to have actual mechanics. You don't need save states. You don't need an app store listing. You don't need other screen shots.

But no matter what, when you release the game, you're going to want to make these ads. So why not just make the ad, then run it, and see if it's worth it?

As simple as you think it is to make these games work, it's always cheaper to not do the whole thing and just do a subset. Hell, even making the game and just only doing one level and not making any controls is easier and would still be more than enough to make the video.

The number of people that see it as a scam game is nothing next to the target audience when it's released. It's a drop in the bucket. So it's well worth the savings.

I'm not sure exactly what use of "expensive" you're getting at, but my primary point was that it's more expensive to build the full game than it is to develop a 30 second video of it. I don't cite actual numbers because this is being done by absolutely monstrous companies with millions of dollars to throw around and smaller companies that only have advertising budgets of 5 or 6 figures. It's also being done for larger scale games like RPGs and smaller scale games like the water drop puzzle stuff.

But we're talking about 30 second videos, and building 30 second videos can be done by a single artist within a month, maybe a couple months if we're being generous. This is like, maybe like a 30k investment. And you can get reasonable data out of like 50k in advertising.

But there's no way in hell your developing these games on an 80k budget. Most of these games are built by multiple engineers, multiple artists, multiple designers, multiple managers, and multiple marketing people. You can't pay a single one of them on 80k.

These games generally cost millions and millions to build. A single million dollar ad campaign will give you TONS of data. The other thing is that's work that has to be done anyway so you don't lose anything by just doing it first to see if it works before building.

If you have a more specific, question, I'm happy to try to outline something else or give numbers based off my experience. But these happen at many different game scales and it's just hands down cheaper to do a subset of the work.

Firstly, this is easier said than done.

User reports are a dangerous step to take, because once they prove they do it, any company can just review bot their competition claiming it's fake.

They could technically police their own ad networks, but most of these networks are not Apple's so they can't. They'd have to just hire people to go play games to get ads to click on to then take down games.

And then what's the point? Apple is just money chasing like every other company, and most of the huge game companies do this. They'd be shooting themselves in the foot and hurting their own revenue. As much as they like to tout that they protect users, that's something they like to say because it serves them. At the end of the day, their own best interests are far more important to them.

I don't remember having seen any actually successful lawsuits about this. There have been a few about the fake sale price thing etc, but I haven't seen anything about these ads for games that don't exist. Happy to admit I'm wrong if anyone has any proof, but as far as I'm aware, that's never happened.

These games do end up adding mini games of the advertised game, but that's not because they're trying to cover their ass. It's because the ads are for games they're considering making, and if the ads do well, they know people will click to the store page. The next step is to build it as a mini game inside another game to get more data on engagement with the actual gameplay mechanics to see if people would actually play and keep playing the game. It's much cheaper and more efficient to do that as a smaller part inside an existing game instead of building a whole new stand alone game. If they mini game does well, they may move it standalone, but if not, it may just stay as a part of the larger one depending on how much it costs to maintain there.

While all these "tricks" and "engagement" chasing things are true, that's just mobile gaming in general these days. It has nothing to do with whether they ran "fake ads" or not. Most successful mobile games are stuffed full of loss aversion, fomo, "time saving", and "fake sale" monetization.

They're not making fake ads to get you into those systems. The games just do that and the ad you clicked was trying to see if you were interested in the game in the ad. Even if the game you were linked to doesn't match.

Yeah. All of this rings really true. I find it really sad because not long ago it felt like a lot of games cropped up from small indie groups. Hell, many of the big names now like blizzard were formed by small groups of friends. But it feels like in the 2010s, big entertainment money got involved and now it's a festering cesspool.

Is it though? IANAL, but I feel like this is, at the very least, a gray area.

You can't purchase anything. The ad didn't say anything except maybe "play now", and there is a game and it may even contain a mini game of sorts that's kinda the ad.. The "harm" is like 3 seconds of your time. The "product" doesn't not do what it says because... It doesn't exist....

I dunno. Maybe it is. I feel like this is one of those things where "we all know it is" but "legally they probably wiggle their way out of the legal definition, and what are people going to do? Sue them for 5$?"

Not that I agree with it, don't get me wrong. I think we all know it's fucking scummy bullshit. But I'm not sure you'd win a court case over it and what harm you could argue it caused you etc.

Of course! Glad my arcane knowledge of a shitty industry could be... Helpful? :)

Yeah, this makes me so fucking mad as a player but like.... It actually works super well so I can't blame them.

Mobile gaming is full of shitty elevator pitches and super high failure rates so it just kinda.... Makes sense.

But I still hate it.

It seems like mobile ads are extremely incestuous. Game A advertises games B to M, which in turn advertise all the others.

In many ways, yes they are. Especially if you like inside individual genres. But mobile games also have so so many players and a rotating player base. Even old games can still attract new players etc. But yes, they are pretty incestuous.

But that's the market. It's unlikely to see massive growth like it has in the past. Mobile games have become so common that they've pretty much saturated the market and rotate players around. The same idea could kind of be said about things like movies or theaters, but the business still works.

The games themselves probably all work on a freemium model, but even given the whale dynamics there, it seems unlikely that the games produce enough revenue to offset literally billions of ads.

Whale dynamics are a huge part of this, and the spenders on these games absolutely do produce enough to pay for the ads. If they didn't, the companies wouldn't be running them.

Let me put it this way - I've seen companies run games all the way through the process from "fake ads" to a fully released game... And then shut it down because the players "only" end up spending 2-3x what it cost to acquire them through advertising. 3x their investment is seen as a failure because of the cost to build them. That's how important it is to them that they run these fake campaigns so they can bail on the failures early. And their targets for successful games land in 3-8x the advertising budge to be successful. Though exact ranges depend on genres and the "longevity" of a player and lots of other things.

I'll also add, as expensive as you might think running ads is, actual development is significantly higher. Ads will likely be run for a long time on a successful game, but the advertising for 6 months is way cheaper than spending 2 years with engineers, artists, designers, QA, and management all on the project. If they can spend 200k on advertising in 6 months to gauge interest, that's only costing the salary of like 2 engineers, so it's highly worthwhile. Most mobile game "success" rates are well below ten percent.

Also, how exactly does your analysis square with the fact that I've seen the exact same game ads for years? It doesn't really make sense to advertise 5 years for such throwaway products.

To be honest, I can't answer this one with confidence. I've seen multiple companies using the strategy I outlined, so I know it's pretty common. I also know that those companies were copying the strategy from other companies in the space. So I know it's prevalent. But that's not going to be every single ad you ever see.

I'll point out a couple things:

How exact is exact? Are you sure it's the exact same video down to a T? They may be floating multiple ideas at a time, and games can live in this "fake ad" state for multiple years while they iterate on it. Everything from different sound effects but the same video, different visual themes, running cuts of players doing well vs poorly, changing individual words in the messaging, etc. They then test these against each other to see which do better. I've seen some run for a while, but I've never felt confident it's actually exactly the same.

And if that's the case... Is it possible someone saw that and ad was fake but thought it was a good idea, and now a different company just literally copied and posted the same video?

Second, this may just be a "market analysis" learning vehicle. They may never intend on building the game. For example, if a company is thinking about game A, they may run ads, see it doesn't work, kill the project, and start considering game B. Now they already have data on how game As ads ran, and they can use their original ads as a "control" and try different variants to see what does better, and then use that data to determine how to best advertise game B. Or they may test game B against game A. Then they might see that it's doing worse than A, and try something else.

Third, some of this may be chasing measuring "seasonality". Game genres trend back and forth over time. They may use an old ad they put together to test the waters now to test the water again.

Fourth, I'm not totally convinced these are always studios running the ads. These might be publishers that never intend on building the game, but are trying to find info on what types of games are trending and what genres they should be invested in. Or they might be the advertising networks just running bullshit ads to gauge how much they should bid for ads in a particular genre. Or maybe it's some giant joint venture like Tencent who owns tons of studios and is gaging what they should be recommending their studios work on.

Data is extremely valuable. In many forms. And many people will pay for that data. And this type of data is such an accurate gauge of actual user behavior because it is literally actually current user data.

True. Entirely agree.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure. What I've gathered is that while they may be dumping lumps of money at these campaigns over the analysis' lifetime (like, hundreds of thousands to a few million dollars), they're not spending nearly as much as they would on the actual released product and it's lifetime (likely millions or tens of millions). Because of this, even if they do, they're only "poisoning" a fraction of their end-target player base... The mobile market is fucking huge. And a lot of these companies are gargantuan.

The other thing is I don't think most people understand what's really happening. Many people will be like "I clicked an ad and it went to the wrong thing" and move on. They also may not even remember the game by the time it releases. Except for some of the heavily heavily repeated ones. And even if so.. Would you try again eventually? If they repackage the same idea in different art assets and theming or names, would you even know?

I think this also points to something else that I've thought a bunch about that is semi related... Are they just poisoning mobile game ads in general? Have people run into this so much that they don't even trust ads anymore? I know that at this point I just generally don't believe any of them and I click things less than I did before... Are other people following this same trend? Is that aversion uniformly distributed or is it going to start clogging up the data and undermine the actual purpose of these ad streams?

but why go the roundabout way of surveying?

I would not call this "roundabout". Is it weird? Yes. But I actually would actually argue it's less roundabout than alternatives. What alternative would you propose?

I suspect most people would say "well why not put out a survey to users and ask...." but that comes with multiple known faults. 1) People's answers are not always genuine, and they can't always accurately forsee how they would react, which is a common problem in data gathering. And 2) How do you collect and sample those users? Sure, you have your existing player base, but what happens if your game is in a different genre and your player base wouldn't be the same?

I suspect that the second point is the bigger reason things shifted this way - ads are common in mobile games and mobile games are trying to sell to people already playing mobile games. Your audience is already reachable through ads, so why build a new system when one is already in place, being built by someone else so you don't have to do any work but make the ad?

But to circle back... When you ship your game, you're going to advertise it, and you want people to click on those ads, because that is how you get users. By putting out ads before you've built the game, you're literally sampling by using the exact system you will be using when you ship. And you're going to get data on whether users actually perform the behavior you want - to click the ad.

I fucking hate this, but to be honest... It's actually a perfect parallel... They're measuring exactly the end goal (efficacy of the ads) before they've built the product. It's actually pretty genius and lucky it works out. It's fucking evil, don't get me wrong, but it is actually a perfect gauge.

Any alternative, imo, is actually more roundabout.

isn't it counterproductive to lose users this way?

What users would they be losing? People already playing their game aren't going to see ads, click them, see they have it installed, then quit. So they're not losing existing users. They can't be "losing" users for a game that doesn't exist yet.

You could argue that the negative reviews on your original game will hurt it, but this process is usually done when they have a steady existing game. And those don't last forever. Once they've peaked, they've "served their purpose" in the companies eyes. And these negative reviews are way less impactful on successful games that have thousands of reviews already. And, the game probably isn't growing so they don't care. And they're relatively rare and the "hate" is far less impactful than knowing whether your next game is worth investing in.

You could also argue "well they're upsetting potential players they would have when the game releases" but they run these at "relatively small" fractions of their intended target audience, and the mobile player pool is gargantuan. On top of that, by the time the game comes out, people likely won't remember the ad, and they very likely won't remember it was a bait. And they may even change the art style or theme for release, and just leverage the same mechanics etc.

I can't believe I haven't seen this until now.. That's quite funny. They sold a pretty decent number of copies too 👀

I hate to be discouraging. I wanted to do the same up until these interactions. Depending on what is a livable wage for you, or if you're doing it on the side, it could still be possible. But I'm in high cost of living areas in the US and it seems totally unfathomable to me. I watched companies spend literal millions of dollars on just advertising to gauge interest in games they then shut down because they couldn't make the game profitable enough to pay for the ads and their bills etc.

There are definitely success stories, and you can definitely get games released and get players. But I just want to point out that many of the games are simple and just have absolutely astronomical amounts of money behind them. Mobile is fucking crazy and I feel like it's much harder for smaller devs to get their name out through typical advertising channels.

IMO, which is mostly just guessing based off what I've seen, I'd think your time is better spent finding small communities that may be interested in your game and posting about them, as opposed to buying ads etc. Indie dev subreddits and other gaming communities have propped up successful games before, and it may cost you more time and effort, but it just looks extremely hard to compete on the mobile ads playing fields against these huge companies these days.

Yeah, pretty much this exactly. I can confirm almost everything listed here does get tracked and thrown in the mix, but in some ways it is a little more complicated. For example, eye tracking is a bit tin foil hat, but I'm sure some companies go that far.

For most game devs, the rabbit hole isn't that deep because of ad mediation networks.

For example, most company posting the ads really only see "how many people saw my ad" and "how many people clicked my ad" and "how many people downloaded the game after clicking". They often also have a say in "target demographics" etc but the data they get back usually doesn't dig much deeper unless they build tracking of your in game behavior etc. That's not to say the other stuff isn't tracked, but most of the other bits are not tracked by them. T

This stuff is all outsourced. There are entire advertising networks built around this stuff. Google has their own. Facebook has one. Unity has one. And there are plenty of others. Those companies are definitely looking more closely at things like individual user behavior and which ads get interaction etc and then make profiles of their users and decide what ads to serve them next based on their behavior with the ads they've been shown.

And because this is such a huge industry, there are then mediation networks built on top of that. Things like AppLovin/Ironsource and AdMob then build "mediators" that hook into advertising networks so that a game dev just asks to show a video ad, the mediator software asks all the advertising networks to bid on a the opportunity, and then it sells the game devs slot to the highest bidder. And THESE pieces of software are also tracking how the player interacts in order to justify their own pricing on the slots.

This shit is literally a fucking behemoth. Unity made a huge acquisition/merger with IronSource who's sole purpose is to bid out advertising slots. They were a multi billion dollar company just playing fucking middle man to other middle men. That's how insanely large this business is.

This is way worse than TV. It's way more fine grained. And not only do the advertisers get more data out of you, but these ad brokers get even more data out of you, and then these ad bidding mediators get even more data out of you.