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???
The only feedback theyre getting is “stop lying about what is in your games”
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.
Incorrect. If you even slow down scrolling to look at the ad you’ve already given them feedback; how long you looked, if you scrolled back after passing it, how long did you look, did the camera track your eye movements/where do you look; did you play the ad’s audio, did you click, did you download, how long did you look for the mini version of the game, did you play the game your downloaded instead; how long, did you delete it afterwards….and once their app is on your phone: who are you, where are you, what apps do you use, how many contacts are in your phone, how often do you text, how often do you. Use data, what is your WiFi called, what websites do you visit, do you have and phone customizations like an enhanced keyboard; based on browser tracking they can get from other companies associated with your tracking profile : age, gender, behavioral analysis as of late.m; favorite shows favorite animals, do you have any pets, do you have children, are you pregnant, how much do you spend a month online or on FB marketplace or Play store or Amazon
And what kind of clues can they sus out based on the million of data points they got JUST BECAUSE YOU SCROLLED PAST AN AD in order for them to make a product that will be directly addictive to you and people like you, in order to extract money from your obsession; to exploit the dopamine backdoor in your monkey brains in order to take the value you generate for yourself and take it for themselves.
Just. Because. You. Scrolled.
For anyone who is wondering, this is why online ads are SO much worse than TV commercials.
Yeah, pretty much this exactly. I can confirm almost everything listed here does get tracked and thrown in the mix, but in some ways it is a little more complicated. For example, eye tracking is a bit tin foil hat, but I’m sure some companies go that far.
For most game devs, the rabbit hole isn’t that deep because of ad mediation networks.
For example, most company posting the ads really only see “how many people saw my ad” and “how many people clicked my ad” and “how many people downloaded the game after clicking”. They often also have a say in “target demographics” etc but the data they get back usually doesn’t dig much deeper unless they build tracking of your in game behavior etc. That’s not to say the other stuff isn’t tracked, but most of the other bits are not tracked by them. T
This stuff is all outsourced. There are entire advertising networks built around this stuff. Google has their own. Facebook has one. Unity has one. And there are plenty of others. Those companies are definitely looking more closely at things like individual user behavior and which ads get interaction etc and then make profiles of their users and decide what ads to serve them next based on their behavior with the ads they’ve been shown.
And because this is such a huge industry, there are then mediation networks built on top of that. Things like AppLovin/Ironsource and AdMob then build “mediators” that hook into advertising networks so that a game dev just asks to show a video ad, the mediator software asks all the advertising networks to bid on a the opportunity, and then it sells the game devs slot to the highest bidder. And THESE pieces of software are also tracking how the player interacts in order to justify their own pricing on the slots.
This shit is literally a fucking behemoth. Unity made a huge acquisition/merger with IronSource who’s sole purpose is to bid out advertising slots. They were a multi billion dollar company just playing fucking middle man to other middle men. That’s how insanely large this business is.
This is way worse than TV. It’s way more fine grained. And not only do the advertisers get more data out of you, but these ad brokers get even more data out of you, and then these ad bidding mediators get even more data out of you.
This is why you should install an adblocker on the network as well as your machine & browse with JavaScript in allowlisted mode (enable remote code execution if & only if it is required—which it often is for web apps, but web pages should work without via progressive enhancement).