this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
543 points (97.5% liked)

Asklemmy

43855 readers
1702 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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???

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world 29 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[โ€“] peter@feddit.uk 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Generally they're not malware

[โ€“] DrMango@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Not malware, just ad revenue generators. Although I guess this depends on how widely you define "malware" since many of them are probably scraping, at a minimum, usage statistics while you play and possibly also device data and who knows what else.

You get 1-2 minutes of gameplay in between each ad and all of the "levels" are probably generated once by a program (rather than a human actually designing the level layout/challenges) to minimize startup costs. I'd be willing to bet that if you traced the ownership structures for the types of games the OP is talking about you'd find a handful of megacorps owning hundreds of them and just reusing assets and programming as well.

Then of course there's the sinister preying on your psychology in subtle ways to keep you invested just enough to sit through the ad the play the next level.