Ottomateeverything @ Ottomateeverything @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I'm a software dev and have worked with some of these companies. It's kind of sad because I liked the idea of mobile games and working with them was a bit like seeing the devil behind the curtains. I dreamt of making cool little games based on fun and unique ideas and quickly learned it's all a huge well oiled machine chugging through market data to find the most effective money extracting methods they can come up with.

For every bit you think these companies are grimey money chasers, I promise you it's at least 5 times worse.

That's not true. Ads are covered in tracking data. For every one person who posts a negative review because a game misled them, there are literally tens or hundreds of thousands who clicked on it, saw it was not the same game, and never posted anything. For every one person who clicked, there are literally hundreds or thousands of people who didn't. And they have all this data.

One data point posting a negative review on a game is much less impactful or meaningful to them then the literally hundreds of thousands of data points telling them whether their idea is going to be downloaded and successful or not. The complaining reviews are tiny drops in the bucket relative to the troves of engagement data they get on the ads being run.

They cover A B testing part in the video.

It's not A B testing.

They also cover the marketing disconnect from the game devs.

It's not really a "marketing disconnect"

I’m not sure how you came to the conclusion that the video misread it.

Because I have been involved in the industry and know what these ads are for. The video is blaming things like trying to swindle people into downloading a different game, false advertising, misdirection, and is blatantly calling it "lying" in the title. That it's trying to pit people into mini games to get them hooked on the outer game. That's not what these ads are for. At all.

He's claiming they know what people want but don't want to build it.... But they are building it?

I came to this conclusion because the video is just blatantly wrong.

These ads are made to test popularity of game ideas before they bother to build the whole thing as a standalone game. He's reading into what he's seeing. I have worked with these companies and know their exact reasoning and it's not what he's claiming. He's just wrong.

I like Upper Echelon, but this take is just misinformed and wrong.

Some of the responses here dance around the truth, but none of them hit the nail on the head. This is a bit of an artifact of how the mobile industry works and the success rate vs profitability vs the way ads work on mobile.

Yes, hands down, this is not an effective advertising strategy. Many of these game companies are very successful so it's not because they're stupid. It's because these ads aren't advertising campaigns.

These ads are market research. The point isn't to get you to download their game. At all. The point is to figure out what people will engage with.

These ads are all game ideas. Mobile game ideas are a dime a dozen million. They're easy to come up with, cost a lot to build, and many don't monetize well and therefore aren't profitable. Because of that, it's very expensive and unsustainable to build games and test them and see what succeeds.

Instead, companies come up with ideas, build a simple video demonstrating the idea, and put up ads with those videos. They then see how many people engage with the ads to determine how many people would even visit the download page for that game. Building a quick video is much much much cheaper than building a game. This is the first step in fast failing their ideas and weeding out bad ones.

Essentially the companies have lots of ideas, build lots of simple videos, advertise them all, and see which ones get enough engagement to be worth pursuing further, while the rest get dropped entirely.

But those ads need to link somewhere. So they link to the companies existing games. Because they're already paying for it. So why not.

But building a whole new game is also expensive. Dynamics in mobile gaming are very odd because of the way "the algorithm" works. It is actually extremely expensive to get advertising in front of enough people that enough download it that you have any meaningfully large player base to analyze at all.

So the next trick is these companies will take the successful videos, build "mini games" of those ads as a prototype, and then put that in their existing game. This means they can leverage their existing user base to test how much people will engage with the game, and more importantly, eventually test how well it monetizes. Their existing users have already accepted permissions, likely already get push notifications, and often already have their payment info linked to the app. It also means they don't have to pay for and build up a new store presence to get eyeballs on it. Many of the hurdles of the mobile space have already been crossed by their existing players, and the new ones who clicked the ads have demonstrated interest in the test subject. This is why many of the ads link to seemingly different games that have a small snippet of what you actually clicked on.

If these mini games then become successful enough, they will be made into their own standalone game. But this is extremely rare in mobile. The way the store algorithms and ads work make it pretty fucking expensive to get new games moving, so they really have to prove it to be worthwhile in the long run.

So yeah, most people look at this the wrong way - it does actually go against common sense advertising, but that's because it's not actually advertising. It's essentially the cheapest way for companies to get feedback from people that actually play mobile games about what kinds of games they would play.

It's not advertising. It's market analysis.

It is insane. It's also incorrect - that's not what's happening here.

There is a market of "games that were ads people liked that never got made" though - so you wouldn't be the first.

This is a >11 minute video, which winds around the truth, but ultimately the creator trying to reason about what's going on... But his conclusions end up being incorrect. Don't waste your time.

These videos are made to gauge interest in game ideas by making up ads, and the seeing what engagement is like. If people will click on an ad to download a game, they don't know if that game is real, but their clicking says they are interested. And if it's successful, the game may incorporate the idea as mini game, within their existing gams, and see how it pans out in actual game play.

This is idea testing, it's not deceit trying to hook you up into their existing game by baiting you with something else. That might be a secondary side effect but this is not the primary goal.

This creator is totally misreading this.

This is entirely fabricated and opinionated bullshit from Forbes. There is no evidence that this is actually happening and the headline is extremely clickbait. Many other sites have covered this and I can't find any other than Forbes that take it this way. This is an opinion piece based on a response from a fucking chat bot despite that response semi conflicting with Google's official outline of the feature.

Google has announced an AI chat bot function for Bard. You can open a new conversation directly with Bard and in that conversation data is not encrypted and will be sent to Google. There is no evidence of it "reading through your history" or that future chats you have with actual humans are going to be collected or unencrypted.

If you read past all the "breaks" and such, the author themself even falls back on this:

For its part, Bard says “Google has assured that all Bard analysis would happen on your device, meaning your messages wouldn't be sent to any servers. Additionally, you would have complete control over what data Bard analyzes and how it uses it.”

Let me rephrase that. The author is quoting a fucking response from the BARD CHATBOT and then further extrapolating what the fucking chat bot said. This is not Google. This is A CHAT BOT.

All of the privacy changes posted by Google themselves do not outline anything more than your conversations with Bard being uploaded. But the author tries to then argue about bards own response he got.

But I suspect we’ll see that on-device assurance watered down in practice. It will make sense to provide a more seamless interface between a smartphone and the cloud.

The author is saying he's scared. And that Google will dance around a loophole its chat bot mentioned. But this is his own opinion about what he thinks will happen because of a response he got from an AI.

This is fucking ludicrous fear mongering.

Libre Office is a good replacement for Office/Word, but it is much heavier than WordPad.

Yeah.. Agreed. I just don't think you need to be tech savvy at all to get through the process.

Shame on Google where shame is due, but I don't think this is it.

There are actual risks here. You could end up here without realizing what you're doing. The action itself is kind of scary so any messaging around it is inherently going to be scary.

That said, Google is much more open about allowing these doors to remain open than their competition. And they don't have nearly as much fear mongering about these things than their competition. Sure, it would help their bottom line too, but this one actually has some credibility. But you could say that about almost any decision - that doesn't mean it's "obviously an attempt to...."

Let's burn Google at the stake for lots of the shit they do, but this ain't it.

I strongly disagree. You can literally just search like "xxx app free" and find a link to download it and click "open". I wouldn't consider that tech savvy at all.

The IRS should be calculating what we owe.

They do. That's why you occasionally get bills saying "hey you miscalculated by 70 bucks." They already do the work, they just still make us do it too for.... Reasons.

There are no "woke" companies in America. Just one's who believe that messaging and coming off that way would be financially lucrative. At the end of the day, they're still companies in a capitalist country, and are just chasing the capital.

Their point is that that's only moderate by today's standards. It wasn't 20 or 30 years ago. But like they said, "MODERN" republican

How does it affect kids in school? They should be receiving a bunch of letters describing having to worry about one of their peers showing up to their school with a gun and fucking shooting them. They literally have to fear for their own lives and safety in order to receive an education. How else does the second ammendment affect fucking children?

Valve allows basically everything that's not outright illegal

While true, and I agree it's the right thing to do, some things like this and the Rittenhouse game are in a weird murky gray area where one could argue that it's inciting violence etc. And if that someone is a lawyer, they could convince a judge/jury that it is illegal.

I agree that they should allow anything that isn't illegal, but people say this like it's black and white, and legality very much is not black and white.

the more likely they'll do something stupid that ends with them in prison or dead

That would quite possibly also entail them killing random innocent people or indoctrinating more. No thanks.

"Why spend thousands of dollars on paying someone to fix it when we can pay them hundreds to spend an hour writing a dialog box?" - Some storefront owner

It's probably all the new generation of programmers/management - you would think they would listen to the lessons passed down but.... Nope.

It sucks, Halo was a big part of my highschool years and now it feels like a really shitty money grab.

This is just modern gaming. You could replace "Halo" with almost any sizeable game from that era, and you'd have the same thing - none of them remain except to be husks of their former selves, enslaved to a large money harvesting machine.

OSRS is one of the very few exceptions to the rule, and that only came about after having spent years as a money grab before realizing people actually wanted the original back.