You probably have seen those ads where the player's character shoots at enemies and objects on a 2D road. The player deliberately makes incorrect choices to entice you to play the game, but the ad is fake and the game is a pay-to-play base-building a la Clash of Clans.
So what are those ads? If I were to guess, they are games thrown together in 15 minutes in a game engine like Unity just to make the ad. Would I be correct?
about fake game ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73hySQV_T8o
or if you don't click reddit links: "We wanted to test if scam game ads work, so we made one." by Corridor Crew.
It's not specifically related to the fake door shooter ones but it's entertaining and riffs on fake ads in general.
There’s something extremely ironic about Corridor Crew creating clickbait as content.
A lot of mobile ads have been moving to an "interactive" format where you actually play a "demo" of the fake game, which is certainly more than just an animation (but not by much). I imagine these are done in Unity or similar.
I haven't watched the video yet, but I am surprised they would use Blender. A game engine like Unity is de-facto Blender with narrow use cases and live user input. I'd imagine a specific tool would get the job done faster than a general one.
oh, worth noting those guys are VFX guys and use Houdini.
best tool is usually the one you're familiar with.
I'd use blender myself because of the same reason, I don't usually boot up a game engine unless there's going to be code involved in what I'm doing. But that's largely to do with how I learned rather than belief that I do things in an objectively better way haha.
Same man, I adore Unreal Engine and abhor blender so much I rather UV map textures in UE than in blender.
Easier to just make a single animation in blender.
Like the advert is not a game. It's literally just an animation. Why spend effort on setting up characters, animation states, ect when you can just key it.
I sincerely doubt there’s no real game, many of these Ads are playable, I suspect there’s just a couple of companies reskinning the same basic mechanics over and over again.
that one depends on the ad. Many of these ads contain no internal logic on how they play out. (I'm looking at topwar here as the main offender) where the onscreen swipes have hugely different behaviour for the same action.
That said the ads are most commonly not made by the same people who make the games, hence part of the reason why the real gameplay doesn't resemble anything in the ads at all.
the ones with playable ads do usually have some basic html5 based crappy cookie cutter game that they throw on top at the end. I don't know much about how much of the % of all ads those are these days as I haven't really touched much to do with phone apps recently.
You are right, a lot of these ads are games with logic, they are not videos. They're not made in Blender (although some art may be.) They're created with HTML5 / javascript game engines like Phaser and Cocos Creator. There are companies like Playable Factory that do nothing but create these playable ads for other companies.
They use Unity3D since it's faster to make such prototype than in Blender and you'll get interactive version, so you can easily record multiple ads.
Furthermore, mobile games actually include this 'fake' gameplay into the game. They knew you clicked the ad, so they give you what you've clicked for. They even have ads with 'fake streamers' that 'expose fake games' and they tell you that this game really plays like the ads.
You'll get what you wanted, but game slowly moves towards base building, microtransactions and lootboxes.
The real problem with microtransactions is how effective they are. You'll get even 1000% more revenue by changing monetization from buy2play to F2P with in-game store.
Lastly, both Google Play and Apple's Appstore have paid advertising, so the apps that have the highest income per download will get the most visibility.
Who Makes Fake Mobile Game Ads?
They apparently make millions from these fake ads.
Yeah, the "thrown together in 15 minutes" part was a joke on my end. I'd imagine they have whole teams spending hours perfecting the ads.
I still don't get it. The gameplay in the ads should be fairly easy to implement, especially since a lot of assets have to be created for the ad anyway. If you earn millions, why not pay some company a few thousand dollars for implementing the promised gameplay and make it legit?
Edit: If you're trying to sell a game that doesn't really exist, Google will be unhappy about the chargeback fees. Adverts will get little screen time. You could make money by integrating spyware, but Google hates that because it gives the platform a bad name and because it devalues the user data they harvest themselves.
Google will be unhappy about the chargeback fees.
Charge-back fees? Nobody bothers advertising paid phone games anymore.
It's all about funneling you into a free-to-play, pay-to-win, always-online, hurry-up-and-wait money sink.
Those games are so much more profitable than fun little casual puzzle games, that they don't want to give you the game you want. Even if you're pissed off about it, they'd rather have you try their profitable game.
Evidently. An Evony ad got me a while back. It featured pull the pin style physics puzzles and I was quite annoyed to find I’d wasted time downloading a base builder(or is it grand strategy, I really didn’t spend much time before uninstalling it).
From what I heard they make multiple of those fake ads just to drive traffic and clicks to their mobile game. Then they retains the ones that performs the best. It's pretty much fraud. Most I see of them are chinese made games.
Moreover, the person “playing” the game in the ad is always the worst player. Like, bro, one side says “x25” and the other says “/100” why pick the divide bro, WHY DO YOU ALWAYS PICK THE DIVIDE.
That's also on purpose. They intentionally do bad in the hopes you will try it, just to prove you are better.
I know, I know. It just gets my goat because of the amount of time I’ve been forced to watch that dickhead moron do a let’s play of the easiest game I’ve ever witnessed.
It’s a shame because some of the games seems like they could be a decent time waster, if they’re not stuffed with freemium jank and ads for other games
Well... maybe you could do better ;)
It's like in real life when somebody is trying to assemble a thing, and there's a mounting urge to grab it out of their hands and do it yourself.
(Even if you don't know how to do it either.)
On a seperate note, a game like that might be fun for at least a couple of minutes, has anyone actually made one?
Someone, feeling our collective annoyance, finally decided to make a collection of them for real: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2348100/YEAH_YOU_WANT_THOSE_GAMES_RIGHT_SO_HERE_YOU_GO_NOW_LETS_SEE_YOU_CLEAR_THEM/
haha that's crazy
Multiple people have.
For most of those ads there is at least one game that has that as its mechanic. (Not necessarily the one the ad is FOR however.)
They may not be very deep and they are infested with ads but they exist.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.atknsyl.weaponmaster&hl=en_US for example
Most web games sites have a game like that. It’s so obvious which side to pick that it’s hardly a game. Beware the ads https://www.freegames.com/game/Bro-Race-Count
idk but the words ive uttered from disgust with them makes me want to attend confession
Technically it is in the game, it's just a very small unimportant part.
It's simple really: it gets clicks.
Most ad networks have various ways of paying/getting paid for running ads, but essentially the formula figures out how likely someone is likely to click through to the store, how likely they download, how likely they do in app purchases, etc.
With all that data, A/B tests, etc the perfect combination of factors combine to make fake ads. Fake gameplay with assets that kinda look like the game works better based on data than true to form gameplay ads, and a game with that fake gameplay mechanic doesn't earn as much long terms as your standard match 3 or strategy game. This can change as trends do, but overall it's true at the moment.
Also keep in mind the target audience could be different. I have maybe downloaded a single mobile game based on an ad, and otherwise refuse to interact as best I can. other people will click and install anything shown to them (especially kids on mom's phone/tablet)
so the short answer for seeing less of these ads? get people to stop clicking, installing, and playing the games advertised.
EDIT: I didn't really answer the part of your question of what they are in terms of how they're made by bad.
Most are videos done in whatever video editing software, with the gameplay portion probably made in some quick prototype in Unity or some other engine if it doesn't exist at all in the game. Some can be created fully in video animation software, but that's excessive.
if the Ad is interactive like a micro-game then it's whatever can be made smaller enough to run as an ad on a network. Unity Tiny or something similar to old flash type things, maybe.
I used to work with mobile ads, and they didn't even use the game engine for the 2D stuff, it was all outsourced to vendors who used video software as far as I am aware, never touched the actual game project, was only given some art assets. The marketing team rarely touched the game engine, let alone programming sections just for an ad never happened. It was easier to do it all in video or in whatever 2d/3d software.
As for why, there was a lot of watching what other ads were doing and copying them. The theory was that if the competitors were funding it for long campaigns, it must be working. I personally have never clicked on a mobile game ad on purpose, but have clicked accidentally a lot when trying to get rid of an annoying ad or trying to click the little skip/X button. I always wonder if those ones do "well" just because people click on them trying to get rid of them, not because they actually are working.
I'm currently playing one, Last War survival. It's predominantly a clash style base building/war game designed to suck money out of you. Those shooter mobile ad views are part of the game, mostly as side levels to accomplish. You get 100-200 of those levels. It's weirdly addictive
That's the point. To me any game that is purposely built to strive of addiction is a bad game.
tbh no real need to involve a game engine, just a few looping animations in blender.