Phone Game Ads are Disgusting

 

So I have these two apps in my phone called Torima and Arucoin and the idea behind these apps is that you gain points by walking around and then you can exchange points for amazon gift cards and crap like that.  It sounds stupid but having it chug away passively in my pocket while I commute to work or just generally go about my day has proven pretty useful.  For example when my PS3 controller bit the dust I was able to get a new one on Amazon free of charge using the gift credit I had accumulated.  Also, I've had Astral Chain on the Switch sat in my backlog for a fair while now and that's also a game I got for free via going to work every day.

Within these apps you can watch ads to get bonus points.  My routine usually is that at the end of my day I'll fire up a movie or an episode of some drama on Netflix (it's Peaky Blinders at time of writing) and I'll cycle the ads while I watch for those extra points.  Usually I'm not paying attention but sometimes these ads catch my eye and I just cannot believe how completely evil some of these companies are to try and get you to play their game.

They come in three types.  The first type is pretty harmless and it's just an advert for the game but usually accompanied by some over exaggeration of what the game play actually involves.  These usually take the form of some color matching game that will having you rescuing a character from Saw-esque peril but the actual game is just the color matching with none of the peril.  Fine, whatever, a little deceptive sure but if you get excited for Bejewled clones and you downloaded the app after seeing that type of game, at least you are getting that type of game.

The second is probably the least common but I do see it on occasion although usually on Instagram adverts rather than via Torima but they do occur in both places and that's adverts for games that steal footage from "real" games.  The worst example I caught of this was an ad for some phone strategy game that was based around Romance of the Three Kingdoms. 

An example of a real one made by Koei

If you've ever played one of those games like Sangokushi or Nobunaga's Ambition it was essentially the same thing as that but heavily watered down to accomodate for being played on a phone and for the kind of player that plays a lot of phone games.  The advert for the game though used footage, without permission I assume, from one of the later Dynasty Warriors games.  Advertising intense battles with thousands of troops and then the game itself is just menus with PNGs of anime generals.  A deceptive way to pull you in and probably waste your time.

But the absolute worst are the types of game ads that tell you that you can earn money when you absolutely cannot.  The game in the banner of this post, Evertale, is the absolute worst offender of this.  Evertale sort of also falls into the second category where it advertises a sort of creepypasta version of Pokemon which is just completely divorced from what the game is actually like

But I think that strategy of marketing has stopped working because in recent weeks the game advertises that it gives away 10s of 1000s of yen every week to it's players.  I have not downloaded Evertale since it looks like trash but I can GUARAN-FUCKING-TEE you that they aren't paying anybody, I would be surprised if the option is even in any of the menus.  I did a quick google to see if you could earn money via the game and it nothing about it came up, just one YouTube video calling it "the biggest scam nobody is talking about"

But Evertale isn't the only offender here, there are a TON of these ads that advertise shitty tetris clones, color sorting games or Solitare that tell you that you can earn money by playing.  The adverts usually all go the same way where there will be a person trying to buy something at a resturant or store and when they go to pay they don't have enough money.  Upon this realization they will pull out their phone, play one round of Tetris or some shit and then have 100 bucks in their PayPay account.  I will have to admit that one day my curiosity did in fact get the better of me because while I didn't think I'd be getting 100 bucks, some extra change to play Tetris on the train would have been nice.  However upon even just glancing at the menus the options for earning points or payouts aren't even a thing, so of course it was a quick deletion.

For me, someone who's doing pretty well in life looking for extra beer money for doing stupid bullshit, it's whatever.  Glance at it, realize its fake and move on, nothing lost but a few minutes on my commute.  But there are plenty of people who don't have it like me, who are desperate to put anything in their bank accounts to get by who you COULD potentially decieve and convince to download and waste hours on and that just doesn't sit right with me at all.  Even if there were miniscule payments it wouldn't bother me so much but the fact that these people advertise games with cash money only for the features to be completely absent is disgusting and evil.  It boggles my fucking mind that these companies that host these ads for mobile applications don't have some kind of rules on just flat out lying to customers.

Phone ads being awful is something that's pretty well documented online, with this post I'm essentially stating the obvious.  However I feel that the scammier, more deceptive side and it's potentially damaging effects on people who are desperate for any kind of supplemental income are glossed over in favor of "lmao funny gangster game meme ad".  False Advertising is a thing you get sued for, so how these phone game companies aren't being obliterated is beyond me. 

Phone's are pretty powerful nowadays, you could do some potentially pretty good things with them for gaming but while the market is flooded with shit like this they will always be looked down upon as a platform full of low quality titles for brain-dead twats.