The Insidious World of Fake Mobile Game Ads
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- Опубликовано: 6 июн 2024
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Wallstreet Journal Vid: • Meet the Man Who Has S...
Let's Go Whaling: • Let’s go whaling: Tric... 
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society if mobile game ads werent misleading as fuck
Sadly there are still a lot of bad things in this world. Luckily we can remove some, and sadly some are impossible.
real💀
@@Nik1_ we just need world peace, get rid of global warming, and make plants taste like meat.
that seems good enough
The fake gameplay in most mobile game ads with fake gameplay still looks awful, even if the actual game is usually even worse.
I'd rather say society if ownership of companies was not based on just having money
Because come on, THAT has to be the problem(since the more money they have, the more companies and the more OF those companies they can own, and the more money they make, until the US collapses because that's the only thing keeping this bitch afloat)
Mobile game peaked on early 2010s. Now it's nothing more than a shitfest
Hot take: mobile games were NEVER good. Phones shouldn't be gaming devices.
@@DarthBiomech Smartphones are small computers with touchscreen controls and portable consoles are just small computers with button controls, so there is no reason they should not be gaming devices outside of subjective opinion.
@@DarthBiomechThe Room series, Galaxy on Fire, the Infinity Blade series, Asphalt 8, and Monument Valley were all excellent games.
@@DarthBiomech BASED
@@alaeriia01 They could have been even 100x times better if they were PC or Console titles.
I think the key to these ads is that they show a very simple game concept and they show the player playing it badly. When the guy goes through the divide by 3 instead of multiply by 2, you groan and have this instinctual urge to download the game and play it correctly.
If you allow me a bit of arrogance, only mentally challenged people get that urge and follow it. I think it’s instantly obvious insulting bait to anyone with a brain
Yes I have thought this many times myself and downloaded a couple games only to delete them after a week or so. And never spent a penny on these 😅
@@Randyplaysguitars bro it’s such an insulting bait don’t fall for it
So ÷3 isn't good?
I saw that too. Even in this video you can see the player deliberately screwing it up where a 5yo would've done better. It's a clear psychological ploy.
Fun fact, the Whales term comes from Casinos and Gambling. So yeah all of these publishers are saying that their games are just Gambling machines
Yeah, I was watching Casino, with Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci, and a lot of terminology they use is similar to mobile game terminology
Except casinos do, actually, on occasion, pay out an actual cash prize (yes, on the whole, the house *always* wins, but...). Mobile games don't. Ever.
@@Sorrelhas Strike that, reverse it. As Mobile Games use use the terms of Casinos. They've been around longer
There's a game called "YEAH! YOU WANT "THOSE GAMES," RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET'S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM!", which is based on these fake mobile ads.
published by the same publisher for edf, funnily enough.
Could you provide a link somehow?
@@mattevans4377 🤣
Also try Arrow A Row
@@tyrannysend you mean archero?
Theres a good side to the "lets go whaling" presentation - insider information into how mobile game companies try to manipulate you
I genuinely liked that presentation. The dude realizes it's shitty ethics at the start by saying he'll put ethics aside
These people disassociate from the people that are playing their games, seeing only the bottom line @@MakusinMeringue
It's kinda the same logic as "if you know how to defuse a bomb you know how to build a bomb". Knowing what tricks these developers use to get you to spend absurd amounts of money on their free to play games could make you less prone to falling for those tricks. If you were prone to falling for those tricks in the first place though. Personally, I'd like to think I'm not one of those people who could be tricked into spending lots of money of a free to play game. Yeah sure, I bought some lootboxes and shit for Overwatch, but my total expenses for Overwatch are probably less than 200€, which I'd say is fine considering that I play the game since the first public beta. So 200€ over the span of 8 years is less than what I would've paid if I were into FIFA or Madden an bought every new iteration for full price every year.
@@blackm4niacThinking you're immune to something is exactly how that something gets you
I used to think I was too smart to be scammed, until I was almost scammed
@@Sorrelhas I mean, Musk has got to be the best example of that, RIGHT?
namco actually published a game where its entire gimick is that its gameplay loop consists entirely of mobile game ads it's called "YEAH! YOU WANT 'THOSE GAMES,' RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET'S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM!" it actually hasn't performed particularly well partially because it costs ten dollars and because ive never seen a single advertisement for it. I do wonder how well it would have performed if it had been given the proper marketing.
What game?
What game
Yall that literally is the name of the game
@@dudemp4 holy shit you're right
I really have been wanting to play it but just not for that price..
I’ve seen that let’s go whaling video- the idea that mobile game studios have psychologists on payroll to figure out how to get you as additcted as possible is so perverted and evil. Deeply haunting stuff
Yeah its legit horrifying. Like abusing the human condition for profit lmao
@@htwo1 Ya'll new to capitalism?
@@ThersNoFudgeHere THIS!
Its up to us plebs to educate ourselves and try to spot and avoid these pitfalls. Supermarkets do it, banks do it
The whole $14.99 instead of $15 is a great example of using psycological tricks to get ppl
Every company has these people, supermarkets are laid out in a certain way to get you to spend more money
It’s everywhere just look at ads for burgers or kid’s toys. It’s all trying to lure you in. And it’s working.
It's so easy to forget these videos have background music, but then you hear the one tune you recognize instantly and go 'Oh right! These have music'. I mean the moment I heard 'The fire is gone' by Heaven Pierece Her I instanly got all my focus on trying to hear if it actualy is it or if I'm hallucinating it.
lol i had the same effect and in this exact moment scrolled down to see this as the top comment
Rain world OST is banger aswell!
for me it was the celeste theme at the end
Wat? Never heard of him/her, and I never bothered to check it.
bro i thought ultrakill was open for a sec and checked steam
To be honest, whaling is a fitting name. Whaling was a good trade two hundred years ago, lots of money, so it fits perfectly with this scenario
And it also was recklessly destructive and immoral, similarities just keep piling on, don't they?
@@DarthBiomech Yeah, it's kind of poetic to be honest, I guess history does repeat itself.
@@mrvomit101 Hopefully, because the whaling of old was made illegal. Just like the modern iteration should be...
I literally got this exact advertisement trying to watch this video. Bruh.
SAME bro😅
My wife has an addictive personality. When we got her first credit card she put $1000 on it in less than a month from micro transactions on those stupid basebuilding mobile games. She didn’t even realize she’d done it. I had to shred the card and spent years helping her learn self control. She had me to protect her from herself, I can only imagine how spending like that on a mobile game could’ve destroyed her finances and life if she didn’t. These “games” are insidious!
I have an addictive personality too, but I ironically was saved from falling into this trap by two things: one, I'm very patient and am willing to wait for things to happen because I have other means of entertaining myself and occupying my time, and two, the base builder game I had on my phone ended up taking up so much space that I was ultimately forced to delete it anyway. (getting an SD card didn't help because the game couldn't read your profile data from an external hard drive)
Another reason why these false advertisements aren't illegal (such as the Top War ad) is because they are advertising something free. If the app costed even a cent, they could get sued. But the app is free, so if they ever face legal action, they can say "oh well we didn't even make them pay, so it's not really scamming." That's how Top War survives to this day.
So, it’s a loophole and should be illegal on principle, it’s just lawmakers have been asleep at the wheel.
@@tappydani9378I bet perfect utopian Europe is making laws to save everyone and be the bastion of humanity
@@tappydani9378 Yeah but well think about this. All big corporations are either Chinese or American. So if for example USA says to these companies that are based on USA hey no lootboxes and microtransactions and such these companies will tell them hey man you know how much money I pay on taxes because of these things and how many employes I have because of these? Do you really want to loses all these tax money and fire so many employees? So this is why they do nothing. They just say well TECHNICALLY they are fine. Probably.
@@tappydani9378 The problem is that they've done you no harm. What would you be making it illegal for? Did they steal your money?
@@owlobsidian6965 Predatory business practices exist. It's not somehow ethical just because they're not literally robbing people at gunpoint. In any story with the deal-with-the-devil type of trope, is the shady devil-esque guy blameless because he technically gets consent by coercing others to sign his disingenuous one-sided contracts?
Evony is also the game that had those "play with me my lord" horny banner ads.
We've come a long way. What a time to be alive!
Wasnt there a game when some woman wanted you to penetrate her armor or something like that?
yep I remember those.
EVONY has been around since MY college days, as far back as 2007 or 2008.
It is the same game, build up a city on timers and insane waits and only being able to achieve lv.10 if you pay or conquer an NPC city.
I spent a long while in the free mode and realized there was no real point to the game anymore.
oh sure it's gotten a face lift in the last 15years but it still hasn't changed. No reason to every play it.
Oh and in the global chat, you have to pay for 'horns' just to post.. and once out of horns, you can no longer chat..
They make you PAY to CHAT, for all the F-SAKEs.. *sigh*
The ads for these games show such braindead games i dont even know how anyone would find them fun
people just like playing braindead stuff
People built different. Some don't care about this game, some do. Some see the bait, others don't. This is just how this works
The bait seems fun .. my brain is small..
like one of those old flash games, you play it for ten minutes and you're done with it
People are tired after work and want to turn their brains off
This is the internet version of used car salesmen tactics. Disgusting
I won't disagree, but at least when I buy a BMW M1, even if it's shoddier than expected, is still an M1 and not a Smart Car shoe box in disguise lol
My favourite "game" of these is Hero Wars, because they also started using that treasure hunting game ad where you pull pins to get to the loot, but then they gave you that ad for the one with the towers and the numbers where you have to have a higher number and it adds and it's basically just maths and when that one ran its course they have just gone COMPLETELY off the deep end with their ads. I don't even know what "game" they are supposed to be, these ads are just unhinged insanity. They all feature the hero character and then some kind of woman, usually that blonde princess, but there is also one with a boobtastic Medusa and just... she eats malnourished versions of the hero and shits out their bones, but then one of the heroes in the queue has a higher number than her and chops her head off and... what in the blazes is going on here?
Hero Wars is a classic that doesn't get talked about too much 😂
It's just a Travian clone, an idle city builder, where you have to wait for exponentially longer times for upgrades to finish, so that you are forced to pay real money unless you want to wait for days and then weeks for upgrades (which at the beginning only took seconds) to complete. Who would pay money after realizing that the game has nothing to do with the ads, baffles me...
There was one ad of that that was so long and had like four cycles of these number games one after another and it felt like some kind of divine comedy bs with the constant descent lower and lower
I played that ''game'' too. I found out that to complete the main parts of the ''game'' you'd have to sink in at least £5000. It's utter madness.
When I first saw it, I thought it was actual malware, and refuse to click on it to this day
3:35
You became the thing you swore to destroy.
To defeat evil, he had to become an even greater evil.
This reminds me when I used to work in telemarketing. People used to ask me who was actually dumb enough to buy something over the phone. The truth is that it didn't matter that not a lot of people bought the product. The process to cancel the product was tedious/confusing enough that the few customers who actually bought it, kept it for years and years. Maybe even decades.
What's really frustrating is that I am a base/city builder player. Those games are my bread and butter! And from the very start of Mobile gaming, these people have turned my favorite genre into literal hell. They even took some of the most loved series and turned them into disgusting money farms. Anno Online, Dungeon Keeper Mobile, Settlers online and sooooo many more...
Same I loved them. I don’t know why someone doesn’t make a fun one and just charge really cheap like the others but make it so all upgrades are maybe 5 bucks in a month and they would make a killing. They all go for the same strat of landing whales. It’s odd
These Evony ads have *not* been discontinued years ago - I've endlessly seen variants of these Evony ads, here in Northern Ireland, throughout this year, last year, etc. They're very much still active.
As a previous lover of mobile games during their hay days, this era saddens me.
There are many, many good games releasing on mobile even now, but they are mostly paid games that are ports of ones already on other platforms though.
It's unfortunate that companies have figured out that it's not worth making a free mobile game unless you can squeeze money out of it. This is why it's overwhelmingly gacha games and pay-to-win games masquerading as old casual style games.
@@AirRice brawl stars is not bad and it is free
Bro just play Epic Battle Fantasy 5
Hay lol
When you realize how tiny the mobile games market is when you subtract all these non-games that are just trying to reach into your wallet
But the crazy part is that the mobile industry makes up the overwhelming majority of gaming industry profits. And they all make their money by doing this stuff
I get it, but we don't count real life casinos as part of gaming, so maybe these mobile games should be seen as separate as well. I have a feeling that people who genuinely play these kinds of games are not the type who would spend their time on proper games instead
@@Thornskade I would argue that more applies to the whales. Most paying players would be more like me in that they only spend a little money and have other interests and hobbies outside the game that make them more willing to let the free/slow way of doing stuff run its course in the background.
I would like to correct your math: whales are usually not the top 2% of all the players, but 2% of paying players. Assuming that POP (percent of payers) is around 2-5% of all the installs, you get just ~1000 whales out of 1M installs. It's my job to calculate all that stuff in such games after all (:
The rest is correct, good job!
What a world to live in
2% of all players seemed in fact too much
I would like to expand the comment a bit. Saying that 2% of payers are whales is technically correct, but it works differently. Each company decides what players they call 'whales'. It could be the one who spends more than $1K per month or $5K or $500. The threshold is set by the company and USUALLY it's top 1-3% of payers so you can ALWAYS say that 2% of your players are the whales. Like the government can say "we don't have poor people" if they set the bar of being poor to $10/month of income.
I remember Valve themselves hosting a talk about how profitable TF2 became the moment they added lootboxes.
They tried to slide adding them as an option for people who couldn't afford buying weapons and hats in the store - instead of, you know, *lowering the store prices.*
I'm surprised Valve doesn't have the same mark the Bethesda got for horse armour for inventing lootboxes.
It's alright though, Valve has different stains on their reputation.
@@lunaticlizzie4525*cough cough* bots *cough cough*
@@lunaticlizzie4525only recently tho. Which is weird cuz pretty sure a few years back I was wondering why people consider Valve as this saintly corporation
the introduction of trading fixed that though
I also remember when Overkill tried to add cases to Payday 2 once. In the game you could find Safes with some stuff and Drills that you can purchase to open them. The problem is that sometimes the drill will break and you would get NOTHING in return. Since Overkill promised not to add microtransactions to Payday 2 and the drill breaking was just unfair, the community got SO pissed that Overkill had to remove that feature so their only option left to get money from Payday 2 is DLCs
The funny part is that the games in the ads are more fun and more addictive than the real game, in addition to also having a great potential for microtransactions, so it doesn't make any sense to always opt for fake ads that take you to a copy of Clash of Clans
It's just called being lazy, and sticking to known methods.
The thing is if your already having fun then you don't need the microtransactions so the point of these games is for you to be forever almost having fun with the actual fun being just one microtransaction away.
@@ThomasstevenSlater So Arknights creators did their Gatcha wrong.
You have so much fun, you even sometimes feel bad playing for free... Then you remember there are whales paying for you so everything is fine.
Todays smartphones are more powerful than PlayStation 3
Mobile players meanwhile:
I think about this a lot. I guess the problem is, even though phones are orders of magnitude more powerful than the computers I've gamed on, the form factor is the bottleneck. Tiny, passively cooled rectangle that only has a touch and gyro for input
The way is buy a Switch or a portable PC
@@pedrobeckup456 I own a Steam Deck, but still it's not the same.
As a game designer giving a list of qualities to _avoid_ when trying to make a good game is a actually really helpful thanks Htwo
fuck the mobile game companies
I’ve always thought the difference between a good game company and a bad game company is that a good one makes money to make games and a bad one makes games to make money. The quote is from somewhere.
the guy from the "let's go whaling" presentation (and the room he's presenting in) seem familliar to me for some reason
I genuinely thought I was hallucinating when I heard the ultrakill and celeste main menu music play halfway through the video
I have spent money on a mobile game. A one time payment of $1.99 to remove ads from my favorite mobile game, forever. SO worth it.
I just started watching the video and I so nearly clicked the "Skip Ad" button on one of the examples you were showing.
These guys: we shall rely on whales to make money
Vladimir Jovanovich: I will make nsfw version of my game to fund my main project
Can you please elaborate? I'm hooked by that strategy
@@DrPeeper you make nsfw games with the characters of your main game
You use money from these games to fund your main project
@@PineappleDealer37 that is an interesting tactic ngl
I'm looking the name up and I can only find info on some serbian basketball coach
@@Sorrelhas he made the game Occidental Heroes
The amount of times I've seen someone use the "it's cheaper than a movie" comparison to justify another dumb choice is too damn high.
Moral of the story is that without enough government regulation, companies will not hesitate to employ the most predatory, exploitative, and unethical practices imaginable.
That guy who spent $70,000 on Evony needs his phone destroyed and internet access taken away for the good of himself and humanity
What do you mean by "predatory" in the context of gaming company controversy? I don't get it.
"Predatory" in this context is a synonym of "aggressive", "pushy"@@davidarvingumazon5024
@@davidarvingumazon5024 making it as addictive as possible, and incentives purchase, some kind of people felt satisfaction buying something, moreover if that something is improving his experience on an entertainment, my friends and i are few of them, i cure it by spending money to build PC and buying PC game instead, though the side effect are bunch of games that i would probably never play
Wrong, enforcement is the issue, not lack of regulation. False advertising is already illegal, but this isn't being taken seriously by the courts.
When I got a RUclips account, the first thing I did was block a bunch of mobile game ads that kept popping up before practically 3/4 of all the videos I was watching. Boy am I glad I did!
Definitely one of the most unforgiving parts of those ads as a gamer is them clearly playing the game poorly to try to motivate the player to download the game because they think they can play it better.
Alternative strategy: click & interact with EVERY ads as randomly as possible,
- first because they may pay their ads based on click rates and not prints
- and second because a lot of random noisy data is less exploitable efficiently than less but coherent data
Imagine a botnet doing this for you. Yes, that's how you toast someone's campaign ;)
Yeah I got hooked on a game called Landlord for about 5 years. I spent about £1000 over that time, stupid of me really.
But... I did end up selling my property to someone for about £800 when I finally had enough and saw that I was being scammed to high hell
Sometimes I click on it.
To take me to the "report ad" button hidden somewhere and .. report the ad. For being a lie.
sometimes works.. sometimes don't..
I normally don't watch videos talking about stuff like this, as I don't really care. I'm in the camp of "I see through this, I won't fall for it, and I can resist the addiction long enough to get out of it."
But you made this one damn interesting to watch, so you got me.
Good video, good job. 👍
I like how now some of these ads will be like "Trying out so called 'fake games.' Nope it's a real game." Like thanks for letting me know it's fake right off the bat. Great advertisement.
I love those, if you pay attention the person playing the game isn't actually playing
10:48 I am ashamed to be Finnish right now. I don't know if that guy is Finnish, but that place sure is.
@hoovysimulator2518May I add the upcoming Road to Vostok.
The transparency in the dev logs is amazing.
@hoovysimulator2518Noita is also one game developed by Finnish people, atleast im pretty sure everyone developing it is Finnish. Then Cruelty squad too and maybe Baba is you is Finnish made as well? I think I remember that game being somehow mentioned with a Noita developer or something.
it's also like a GB for no reason at all.
mostly alot of high res artwork with rather bad compression if I'm not mistaken.
Another real key factor is, IMO, those ads depict a game that would not hold attention. Sure, the pull pegs/avoid danger/get loot games might be fun if well designed as a full game, but a large number of fake game ads depict an RPG-ish setting, with the gameplay literally being 'click on a number lower than yours and win, and die if it is too high', That would get tedious quickly.
Another thing is that even if you never spend money on a game your presence gives the people who do spend money a punching bag to use their power on, further encouraging continued engagement
there's also a lot of smaller games that deliver exactly the game that's being advertised but it's bare bones and always full of ads with every level
Really love your video. You spoke out of my heart. I want to see more videos like this from you
the presentation of this video and your professional tone and script is very impressive, i dont know how this is only at 20 thousand views
0:55 trusted component starts playing
around 4:40 breathing hyometer starts playing
A little bit of insight into why this happens: The marketing is done by a completely different company with minimal communication.
Evony adding the minigames is basically an example of the devteam catching up to the expectations the marketing team set up.
my mind drew a blank and when a screen recording of the advert popped up, i actually tried to hit the skip ad button. I hate the internet
Same here bro.
Found one ad today for a mobile game with ghosts of tsushima gameplay
I'm the one who man who, as a child, used to play subway surfers and fruit ninjas as a kid, on my tablet, and I don't even play them anymore!!! But I'm glad that I don't go out of my way to play those "games".
Good analysis. I play f2p games but my budget is $0-5 per game total. Mostly zero as the more manipulative the game the less I feel like rewarding them. If they start walling too much I just uninstall it. 'Aint nobody got time for that'
good video.
Its a topic that crossed my mind here and there already as well.
Confirmed some of my thoughts but I also learned new things, thanks
They also make the visuals and gameplay look as scuffed as possible because they want to attract the most amount vulnerable people and children.
It's similar to sketchy adult ads. The designers of those ads even said they were told to making it look as if the target audience made it.
I see that ad on almost every video, I tell youtube to block it and it says 'you shouldn't see this ad again' over and over again... I hate that ad.
Great video glad somebody took the time to break this scam down
2% of mobile gamers being whales is way too damn much.
11:05 also ain't no way someone with a name like that is Finnish.
PC gamers on the other hand...
@@constellar6330 what's the % for pc players? I really hope its no higher than 5% at most.
@@aarepelaa1142 The percentage of pc gamers that are whales?
@@constellar6330 PC gaming has a way healthier relationship between studios and gamers. Players expect to pay for games, and thus the studios have a more reliable source of income and don't have to target whales.
@@ch1ppychipp yeah that what else could it be? Looked it up for a whopping 10 seconds and couldnt find a number higher than 2%
Once got an ad for a game that didn't even exist in my recommendations. "Crimson Angel", didn't even bother clicking on it because I recognized two of the images pasted together on the thumbnail as inventory screens from Diablo and Grim Dawn with even recognizing several of the items slotted with the Grim Dawn one. Had the description of "you fights or losers".
Also pretty sure there's a fake one in the sponsor section right now. "Phoenix Contract" also says "Flames of Destiny", looks like a screenshot from Wartune.
I don't generally play mobile games, but in general most youtube ads are so annoying, that even if I saw one for a product I was already planning to buy, I would make sure to buy it from a different company that doesn't advertise on youtube.
I found a few games that look exactly as advertised but they're still money making scam. This one game in the add showed a guy washing rugs, so I installed it, and while the first level was not washing rugs but laundry, the next level was rug washing. What's the catch? First, for every upgrade in the game either get enough in game money from people that come to wash their laundry, or watch an ad or buy some tickets with real money. Also, every 2 or 3 minutes of gameplay you get an ad of at least 15 seconds. Uninstalled it after less than a day, couldn't deal with so many ads
I feel another loophole to this whole "advertise a game that doesn't exist" is that they technically didn't sell you anything. Since the ad is free, it's not like if you download it and complain it's different your entitled to your $0 back.
What's sad is that these mobile games, that at least required some effort, aren't the worst kind in the mobile stores. There is a recent surge of literal gambling and betting apps and they are advertising all over the internet, RUclips is one flooded with this kind of stuff.
Really great video!
South Park has a great episode on this called "Freemium Isn't Free" talking about how shady these games are. Definitely worth a watch.
The first game where I encountered the new age of mobile gaming was Clash of Clans in 2012. I still have that iPhone 4 in a drawer, it has Angry Birds and Tiny Wings installed on it from when I bought them for $.99 each... No ads, no gems, just the games.
You sure those ads got discontinued? Cause I saw one literally last week.
This is a great video but i cant help but feel like ive heard your voice so then i clicked on your channel and i was like OMG ITS THE ZOMBIE TIDDY GUY subbed
Thanks for the info
The reason why they get away with it is because they're free games. Even though some people do spend money on them, by the time you've spent money on the ad, you've probably already realized this isn't what you signed up for.
10:34 these moments in your videos are what made me subscribe. Telling it exactly how it is, and calling out this evil shit, with absolute passion.
If a product is free you're the product. No company gives you something for free unless they expect to get more from you than the product costs.
I don’t DL any game that contains IAPs unless it’s ONLY to remove ads. If an app comes with IAPs bundles of gems or whatever that cost £99, they’re telling you one thing, you’re going to need them.
i never played a mobile game for my entiere life and i won't start after having watched this video 😂 nice work, very instructive piece of content.
thanks for the upload
Even if you don’t pay, you can still be helping them. Active player numbers, word of mouth… I used to be addicted to some games but I never spent a dime. So many hours I’ll never get back. I’m more careful now. I don’t want to fall down that rabbit hole again.
Weird how 5 brain cells are shared between six people🤔
ye thats me sat with my other 5 brain cells
I've never downloaded a mobile game in my entire life. The phones I've had throughout my life were never powerful enough to run any mobile game without draining the battery within minutes or getting the phone so hot that it turns itself off. I actually do have a phone now that could probably play a mobile game without those issues, but I don't have enough space for any games because most of my space is taken up my music files.
I never play these kind of games, nor have I even click on one of these advertisements. But I get spammed by them no matter how many times I block them. It's BS, I want the block option to work correctly, I hate these advertisements.
Dude you are so close to 100K I really hope you make it :)
Funny thing is that alot of people are tricked into downloading but not alot of them continue to play it cause it's a total sham, hence why they never show amount of players playing the game.
I remember seeing an ad for Evony , i wanted to play a single player city builder, and the ad made it look like the game also had some basic logic puzzles ... the game is not about city building really, it's one of those games where you have to keep conquering and getting your armies out on the field with little tactics involved. The city building part of it is just interesting at the start, when the upgrades for the next keep don't take 3-4 days to complete.
Cheers ! 🍻
I disagree with the ads saying its a fake game not running for years as soon as you dont use ad block on youtube you will get them
RUclips wants you playing these spam games more than shopping at your local stores... imagine.
And this is exactly why ADBLOCKER NEEDS TO EXIST RUclips.
After a studio I was working at was gobbled up by a mobile studio, I got some firsthand insight into the insidious nature of those city builders.
Like, one cash cow game that was raking in north of 80 million a month had a „design team“ of one dedicated gameplay designer and five monetization/marketing experts.
So glad I escaped that hell….
I NEVER put any credit info in google and apple.
The first step to protect yourself is not setting the card in any store.
Thank you for covering the fact that whales are addicts and are being preyed upon by malicious actors who know what they're doing and don't care about the damage, they just need to see their line go up.
I blocked Evony on Twitter because I was sick of seeing their ads. I never downloaded it (obviously)
Immediatly after the video finished i got a mobile game ad on it.
Good thing reverse 1999 is more kind hearted by being story focused
Gonna comment here for engagement. Great video!
Haven't seen an ad for a mobile game in 10 years but I see they didn't change that much
That last section hits hard because I know that I have addict brain. I'm self-aware enough that I'm able to notice when those thought patterns pop up and see them for what they are but that doesn't change the way my brain is wired. Thankfully, I also get bored quickly, so no game has been able to permanently hook me. But I have played several live-service games and mobile games and I can literally feel that part of my brain light up whenever I see an enticing deal in the cash shop and I'd be lying if I said that there haven't been times where I went through with it. I generally don't regret those purchases because at the time I am enjoying the game, but I can still recognize that the game was manipulating an aspect of my psyche and that that is predatory.
If I had a ton of disposable income, I can't confidently say that I wouldn't become a whale. Though I don't think I'd be a very loyal whale, because again, I get bored quickly and want to play lots of different games. These days I actively try to stay away from mobile games and drugs and gambling and everything else potentially life-ruiningly addictive because I know I can't trust myself around those things.
The irony of getting one such ad on this video...
*sighs* Another video about casual games, misleading puzzles, that WSJ video, that Finnish presentation, loot box, etc. - at this point, people are literally just copying and pasting each other at the same topic without actually asking developers and consumers of these games.
Also, I like how you only used Fate/Grand Order as the only fleshed and live server game that is actually good and popular, right beside casual and the same base building games that are quite unknown, because FGO is classified differently, belonging to a sub-genre of games that people in the "west" can't comprehend their minds on. And you should dive deep on that.
Great video as always, knew the ads were fake but had no idea it was THIS scummy
Ah yes. "Freemium. It means free, but not really"
~ South park