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???
Do you think this will eventually poison the well? Eventually if you have the market research data with a really strong positive signal so much so that you actually want to make a standalone game, could you end up with a boy who cried wolf scenario? Like if you try to market your new game that actually has the cool mechanics and features you dreamt up, would you eventually have no one believing it any more?
As they say, there’s a sucker born every minute. The mobile market is gigantic. Like, bigger than the rest of the gaming industry combined big. Activision-Blizzard-King makes more off the mobile company part, King, than they do from both Blizzard and Activision. That’s more from mobile games than from CoD and WoW combined, two of the most golden of geese in gaming history. I think there’s just too many people in the mobile market to have any noticeable impact on the customers of your specific games.
There might be a case to be made for long-term damage across the market, but even then, you’re talking easily a billion users with more joining all the time.
I think a good comparison would be to Amazon and those drop-shipping sites that sell cheap junk from China. For every one customer burned, there’s probably a dozen more gobbling up the low prices and “sales.”
To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. What I’ve gathered is that while they may be dumping lumps of money at these campaigns over the analysis’ lifetime (like, hundreds of thousands to a few million dollars), they’re not spending nearly as much as they would on the actual released product and it’s lifetime (likely millions or tens of millions). Because of this, even if they do, they’re only “poisoning” a fraction of their end-target player base… The mobile market is fucking huge. And a lot of these companies are gargantuan.
The other thing is I don’t think most people understand what’s really happening. Many people will be like “I clicked an ad and it went to the wrong thing” and move on. They also may not even remember the game by the time it releases. Except for some of the heavily heavily repeated ones. And even if so… Would you try again eventually? If they repackage the same idea in different art assets and theming or names, would you even know?
I think this also points to something else that I’ve thought a bunch about that is semi related… Are they just poisoning mobile game ads in general? Have people run into this so much that they don’t even trust ads anymore? I know that at this point I just generally don’t believe any of them and I click things less than I did before… Are other people following this same trend? Is that aversion uniformly distributed or is it going to start clogging up the data and undermine the actual purpose of these ad streams?