No, it's much easier to make a short animated ad than even a simple original game. The purpose of any such game is to serve you up ridiculous amounts of ads. The actual game is a ripoff of a free tutorial with assets stolen from one of the 300 other games exactly like it, all of which are also just vehicles for ads. They figure anyone who will download a game from an ad and play the game even though it's different will watch the ads in the game because they'll put up with anything, and maybe click on the ads because they already clicked one.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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Sounds like my little cousin lol. He'll literally play a mobile game till the first ad, click on it and install that, and then play that until the first ad
The ads are made by a separate ad agency. Their goal is to do whatever they think will grab the most attention - not what faithfully represents the game. They likely don’t have access to any game assets at all.
What’s amazing is that it seems like it works. If it didn’t, they wouldn’t keep doing it.
It’s because the game that gets a lot of installs for cheap (simple, hyper-casual) is not the game that makes a lot of money (deep power based meta progression, complex).
In other words: It is more profitable to cheat and get a few paying customers than to try and be honest in marketing.
Everyone is trying to buy users for less money (cost per install) than they bring in (average lifetime value) which is insanely difficult. The market is very competitive and just few top games / companies get a lions share of the money.
Source: I work in the mobile game industry
The game I'm talking about was a free download
They're talking about cost to the developer, not cost to the user. Creating, marketing, and distributing a game all cost money.
This trend has been around for a while, so evidently it works pretty well despite everyone I've encountered thinking it's dumb
those are for little kids with the attention span of a squirrel and old people with alzheimers who forgot what the ad was about right after they clicked it.