Game Theory: Are Your Mobile Games ILLEGAL?

experience an epic world where everything is epic look at that city over there epic look at that epic dragon epic combat that epic stick that villager over there romance them for an experience best described in one word epic epic epic so go find a warrior You can do whatever you want in this world, what are you waiting for? Your epic adventure awaits you in

your

pocket. Click to download it today. Oh wow, that looks great, epic. In fact, I just have to go here and download it. Hello Internet, welcome to

game

theory

. shows that like most content on youtube it is ad supported but that doesn't mean we have to like it, for example if you've spent a lot of time using the

mobile

version of youtube you've probably seen ads for

mobile

game

s like this and this my dad is the boss of nothing and this sometimes i just want to bury my head in my hands and shout out ads that are not only ridiculous but also totally misleading as to the actual content of the game oh yeah you're probably smart enough for the ads they don't work on you, very good job first of all, but if you were attracted by the promise of a simple logic puzzle game and you actually downloaded the product, what you would get wouldn't be a quality gaming experience, it would be a big surprise. here's the ad here's the actual game it's the combination of tiles with city building elements absolutely nothing like what the ad promises one thing would be if these nasty ads were everywhere ok i get it calm for

your

game but it's different story with the ads for a completely different product oh wait wait wait no no sorry not a completely different product.

Those mini

games

, as they call them, with their completely different art and gameplay style from the rest of the other 99 in the game, they happen, they do from time to time. They appear as daily bad dreams that you have to make sense of in order to get a couple extra gold or whatever, in fact, one of the theoretical team members here, Alyssa, actually plays garden landscapes and home landscapes and can tell firsthand that I only got these things twice in the entire game, how long have you been playing this game, Alyssa, long enough to get to level 965?

There you have it, no, the only bad dream I need to understand today is how this is all legal, why do mobile gaming companies do this or maybe better? The question is how can mobile game companies do this? Shouldn't this type of misleading advertising be

illegal

? What is really going on here with these ads and why is no one doing anything to stop it? Let's take a look at the panorama of recent years. Deceptive mobile game ads come in many forms at their laziest. It simply takes gameplay footage from a completely different game to pass itself off as something that is not accepted.

For example, the new mobile game, you can do whatever you want and yes, that's literally the name of the game and if that doesn't tell you something about the creative bankruptcy of some of these companies, I don't know what it does. To me, this It just sucks that they try to optimize their game title so they can appear at the top as search results for anyone who went to the app store and typed in new mobile

games

. I played it and I have to say no, I couldn't do anything. Anyway, I wanted to know which one was a better game to play.

If you pay attention for more than two seconds to the trailer for this game, you'll probably notice that, even though it's intended to be an ad for a mobile game, the gameplay footage has a mouse cursor. That's because the images were taken from a city-building game for PC called Banished, which by the way is an incredibly relaxing way to pass the time if you're stuck indoors and long to answer the call of nature by creating a colony outside. in the wild, but apparently one of the things you can do in the new mobile game, you can do whatever you want, includes very obviously stealing footage from a game to promote something completely different.

Then there's the browser game Dragon Wake, a title that somehow does the impossible and manages to be even more generic than the new mobile game, you can do whatever you want, it's a game that used footage that looked like this to market a game that was more like this, and this is not a simple case of gaming. Using a cutscene or cinematic that diverged from the actual game, the footage here is not part of the game nor was it created by a marketing team affiliated with Dragon Wake, it was taken directly from the trailer for a completely different product called Project Waking. which it should be said has nothing to do with Dragon Wake despite the similarity of the titles, so if you saw this ad and thought, I'd love to play that game, don't be discouraged, as cy Games is actually preparing that game for release in uh.

TBD, but again, another example of a mobile game ad directly stealing footage from another game to promote itself, but then we get to the next level of galactic brain state instead of copying someone else's task they've done to create completely new ads that don't. they look like existing games including the game they are advertising these are their key ads they steal loot or give suffering people a very obvious solution to their difficult ads and it looks nothing like the game they are tricking you into downloading and The most ironic part of this is that the game in the ads is so simple to make, why wouldn't you include that in the game?

Oh wait, someone finally did it. It's called Hero Rescue and it's full of ads. Well, maybe we shouldn't. giving them too many points for originality because all the mobile game companies seem to converge on the same fake game design, a series of compartments separated by barriers that challenge you to match a person with a pile of gold without being burned to death by lava in the way. or the hundreds of variants with things like fish or kittens and if you're wondering why all these mobile game companies converged on the same advertising concept, it can actually be explained through biology, it's just evolution, convergent evolution, to be honest.

More specifically, convergent evolution is how you will have two animals from completely different parts of the animal kingdom that appear to develop similar characteristics, like how bats as mammals diverged from birds on the family tree before they developed wings and yet many generations Later, those two different branches evolved. Wings that work pretty much the same way now for comparison, if you have mobile game advertisers all over the web throwing ideas against the wall to see what sticks, they will eventually converge on the few ideas that actually work well. engage users, and if you think throwing ideas against the wall to see what sticks sounds like an ineffective way to do marketing right, this isn't just a common technique in online marketing, it's practically the default practice in This point, commonly known as AB testing or split testing, the idea is that, rather than relying on a designer's intuition about what would make an ad attractive, you take two very similar ads, perhaps with a slightly different wording or a slightly different color scheme, and you see which one will be more attractive when you run it. both at the same time to see which one gets the most clicks, choose that one and then continue iterating back to the days when youtube had annotations.

Is anyone old enough to remember that at this point we would run ab tests on the channel all the time to see what would make them click more if they go back to older videos. I would assume that a lot of that evidence is probably still there. This is how we learned that the left side of the screen is stronger than the right side and that the top of the screen is stronger than the bottom and that dogs are stronger than cats and that two arrows to the link on the description is the best number of arrows to use big things, small things, all tested as well as we.

It could, with the rudimentary tools that YouTube gives you, it's fun, it's science, and ultimately little optimizations like that, when added up, go a long way toward helping your channel grow, but when we're talking about gaming companies mobiles, we cannot be talking about just two ads. on the scale of thousands here we have an American flag different colors the blues different messages above then you would send two identical ads with different colors maybe thousands what can make people react remember there is so much noise on your phone what is that what makes it work. Now I stop looking.

That 60 Minutes interview was with a political consultant who worked on the 2016 presidential election, where both candidates' campaigns spent a combined $81 million on Facebook ads, allowing them to try a lot more. in terms of volume, but the basic principle is the same, just as evolution is not a designed process but rather a series of random mutations that gradually stumble towards what works best. The ads can be repeated in the same way, only a lot. faster because now you're doing it at the speed and scale of the Internet and let's be clear, this is really about what can make people react.

They're trying to get people involved. They capture your attention. They get you looking long enough so you can just click. the button to install their application and they are not just looking for a player, these companies are looking to hook the whales, the powerful players who will become addicted to the game, the ones who will spend the most money within the game. Basically, we use it as targeted advertising for a specific type of player. They are powerful players. People who spend the most time spend the most money on in-app purchases. They simply add what they know will appeal to that specific type of player.

Whatever the reason, this type of animation and gameplay concept is incredibly catchy for advanced players and creating a 5 second animation to play on a Twitter ad is much cheaper than creating an entire game to try to ride the wave. from this. popular trend, but this cannot be a legal right, advertise a completely different product than the one you are selling, no matter what happens with the truth and advertising, I mean, if I am ever sponsored in any way, I have to declare it above down and sideways and yet these companies get away with stealing images or completely misrepresenting their games, how well if you want to know the answer to that question, ask the FTC, the federal trade commission, who also you might know as the governing body responsible for the rules around disclosure of endorsements for influencers.

According to the quote from the FTC website, when consumers see or hear an advertisement, whether on radio or television over the Internet or elsewhere, federal law says that the advertisement must be truthful and not misleading. . Well, so far, the bad news or, more importantly, the loophole enforcing these rules for misleading mobile game ads will probably not be very high on your list again on the same information page of the FTC. The FTC looks especially closely at advertising claims that may affect consumers' health or their wallets, given that people who download a mobile game rely on misleading advertising.

The ads are not experiencing any negative health outcomes and in most cases, they are not even spending money to install this free app. The FTC likely has much bigger issues to fry, for example, products with false disease prevention claims, a complaint that says: Hello, I caught a highly contagious virus because this mask did not meet filtration standards that, according to the advertiser, it would probably rank much higher than, hey, I spent five minutes installing this mobile app and it wasn't like what the ad showed me when you look at the mobile gaming apps the FTC has gone after, they usually involve ads that make false claims such as your phone has a virus, tap here to remove it, this was the case of an ad targeting millions of Android users, the product turned out to be unavailable It was actually a virus scanner, but in It was actually a ringtone package that billed users $9.99 a month, and of course the company selling those ringtones was supposed to give automatic refunds to people who were attracted to misleading advertising.

Another case where a cider app was sued for counterfeiting or false advertising match.com, which became a target of FTC scrutiny due to the fact that they would have fake profiles on the site that would send messages to users who could only be read if you pay for a subscription. Humanity is the worst for itself if you look at it. through complaints about misleading advertisements that have ledTo real actions by the FTC, they all have one thing in common: the fact that these deceptive ads cause people to spend money on something that was a fake product or that was not what it claimed to be, however, these deceptive mobiles Game ads seem to miss the point.

Mobile games do have in-app purchases, but chances are that by the time you start paying money for imaginary currency in that match-3 game, you're already past the point of giving up. count, hey, wait a minute. this is not the game I saw in the ads, it's much harder for people to claim that when they bought gems or silver in the game after playing it for 30 minutes they didn't know what they were signing up for, they did. and they spent money anyway the ftc won't care if it seems like mobile games get away with blatantly false advertising more than any other type of product on the market.

Yes, you're not wrong, it's probably because they operate with a business model that somehow protects them from these types of claims. It's hard for people to claim that they were actually being counterfeited the moment they hit the buy button. The deceptive ad is not trying to get you to pay money, it is simply trying to get you to do so. install a free app that will then try to sell you in-game items when you've spent some time in the app to find out what kind of game it actually is that you just downloaded. There's an old saying about how it isn't.

illegal

if you don't get caught and while that is certainly not true, there is a lot of truth in the statement that a crime that is not prosecuted might not be a crime after all if you are blatantly breaking the law and there is no one trying to stop you or punish you. , why should you stop soon? these misleading ads for mobile games that violate the law is probably the wrong question.

Rest assured, yes, these ads are misleading and not truthful in the slightest, which is probably in serious violation of FTC policy, but until legal action begins, expect to continue seeing these ads every time you open an ad-supported app. , but hey, that's just a

theory

, a game theory, thanks for looking also as a quick addendum here at the end of 2020, home landscapes and garden landscapes, two of the games most synonymous with that key style of advertising in the that were banned. the UK exactly what we were talking about today, misleading ads and now ads have to include disclaimers, like not all images represent the actual game, so it's not a big change, but they are small steps.

I guess it's a crazy world out there, folks, be kind to each other. Don't lie, subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and we'll see you next week.