It seems like if what you’re showing is what you understand they find appealing and fun, then surely that’s what should be in the game. You give them that.
But instead, you give them something else that is unrelated to what they’ve seen on the ad? A gem matching candy crush clone they’ve seen a thousand times?
How is that model working? How is that holding up as a marketing technique???
Okay the real question, is there a good version of this game genre?
The ads are for testing game concepts, if an ad have enough engagement the game is made.
That doesn’t feel right. Most of the time the game is something incredibly simple, like counting or moving blocks around, and the ad is showing someone playing it incredibly poorly. Like too poorly to be real, like they can’t count to a number like six or can’t move the triangle in a circle hole. I’ve always felt that’s supposed to frustrated the viewer, who will then want to download the game to play it correctly. But by then they realize it’s not even the same game that’s in the advertisement.
Anti-user features are a major thing. People are dumb enough with technology you can get away with openly screwing over your “customers”. The antifeature in this case is “it’s not actually the advertised game, it’s a cheap pay to win thing”.
Presumably, people download this thinking it’s cool, and then end up playing it anyway and whaling for the “developers”, who may literally be four people, one of which reskins existing games, while everyone else does sales and marketing.
When I was pitching games to publishers, this was how they would test game ideas to see if there was interest. You essentially sent them a few minutes of gameplay or faked gameplay ideas and they would create these ads.
