BY SEAN WHITE
STAFF WRITER
Mobile games, whether you like them or not, are the most profitable way to create a game. Particularly nowadays, since the market has been flooded with so many low-quality, ad-filled games that the only way to find good ones is to download a lot of them. This has created a market that favors the producer more than the consumer. One of the side effects of this is the large amounts of ads that are being spread to maximize playerbase, which means that people will look at the ads in the game being advertised, so more money for devs. We are going to try and look at how mobile game ads went from the masterpieces that rivaled Apex Legends animations, to whatever you call this.
The best place to start would probably be the start of mobile games in general. Mobile games started with the Game and Watch technically, but true phone games didn’t start until Snake was ported to the Nokia. After this, it was mostly just ports of games from the TI-(insert number here) until 2008, when Steve Jobs released the App Store. After this, a base price for mobile games was established at $0.99, but games were ad-free. Nothing much happened, except for every company that had a phone trying an app store, with the only successful one being the Google Play Store. After this was the first major advancement in mobile game advertising – the release of Angry Birds. While this was the normal way on the app store, on Google Play, Rovio took advantage of two new features. The free to play option, and the in-app purchase option. The way the game worked on Android was you could play the game with ads – at that time normally for TV shows and such – or pay an $0.99 purchase to remove ads. This revolutionized the mobile game market, allowing people to create games for a larger audience and still make profit. After this, a lot of classic games arrived, including Temple run, Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride, and Wrestling Revolution 3D. One of the most important games for ads was Clash of Clans, due to its high quality, almost movie-like ads. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from here.
Mobile game ads stayed the same until around 2013 with the public opening of Voodoo, a mobile game company that was made to create “hyper-casual games.” This company is essentially a trend-chasing content farm, known for creating a big game that will probably reach the top charts for about a week, before being taken down by some near-identical game with a different skin. One thing they did was advertise their games everywhere, and use people’s egos to their advantage. This was the start of the trend of the “can’t reach pink” era of ads. This is also when developers noticed that it would give them more money to just put out a lot of ads, and put almost as many into their games. After this, people started to notice the mobile market was full of helix jump clones. This, combined with Slither.io’s mobile release, started the .io mobile games craze. These game’s ads are characterized by “only x% of people can win” ads, along with fake online. What these games would do is they would give you a short “matchmaking time,” which was often just the game loading because it wasn’t optimized in the slightest, and then have you go against a group of CPUs, who would all behave the exact same and have generic usernames. This was particularly annoying since to sell the fake online, they would often make it where you had to have an internet connection, so you couldn’t just turn off wifi to remove ads, you just had to buy an IAP that only worked half the time. You can tell if it has fake online if the game works fine after turning off the internet. This craze has not ended, but other games have just overshadowed them.
After this madness, the mobile ad market slowed down for about a month, until we started to get the ads we all know and hate. This is when developers started to use the A/B method of advertising. Essentially, you take two things, in this example, we will use a picture of a dog and a cat. You send out both to a sample group, in this case, the internet. If more people click on the picture of the dog, you then keep that photo and remove/phase out the cat, and vice versa. You will even see mobile games doing a tournament of ads. In advertising, you can often see this on Twitter. You may get one of the puzzle ads with the pins that you pull, but your friend might get that ad, but with one less pin. If they click on their ad, but you don’t, you may be more likely to come across their ad later. This created a system where you will have a computer pumping out a lot of ads, and the ones that work more are ones that challenge your pride and ones that spark your curiosity. That means you get the can’t reach x ads (see above) and ones that are just weird.
These ads are best exemplified by the Mafia City ads, and the strange gameplay ads. Mafia city ads are the ones where you have a person that has a thing above their head that says lvl _____ _______ and they are just living their life as a criminal, then they spot the boss in a bad situation. The person is given two options, then they choose one and become the boss, or become really close to the boss. Another example is the ads that show someone doing something really stupid like pouring oil on a fire in an attempt to put it out. Worth noting is that these ads rarely reflect the true gameplay, and technically violate FCC laws, but they just don’t have the time or resources to care. The strange gameplay ads are shown best by the stairway to heaven ads, which I encourage you to do further research on.. There is also an entire other genre of ads, but those ones are too NSFW for a school article. Just note that they are somehow weirder than everything else I have talked about. Also, you have the trend-chasing ads, like the ones that came out at the peak of Squid Game’s popularity. Those ones were just a person playing a terrible version of Red Light, Green Light from the show, and the player was always 456. At the moment this is shown by the poppy’s playtime, but those games are too recent to have enough information on.
In conclusion, mobile games are in a very bad state as a whole, but the ads are extremely bad even compared to the games themselves. There is still hope for the industry, but it will require people to stop downloading the bad mobile games that reach the top charts, and instead install good, ad-free/rewarded ad based games. Below there will be a basic list of sources, some of which I did not reference for this article but are helpful anyways, but this is a very broad topic that I would suggest looking into.
https://www.techspot.com/article/2355-about-in-game-advertising/