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???
Some of the responses here dance around the truth, but none of them hit the nail on the head. This is a bit of an artifact of how the mobile industry works and the success rate vs profitability vs the way ads work on mobile.
Yes, hands down, this is not an effective advertising strategy. Many of these game companies are very successful so it’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because these ads aren’t advertising campaigns.
These ads are market research. The point isn’t to get you to download their game. At all. The point is to figure out what people will engage with.
These ads are all game ideas. Mobile game ideas are a dime a dozen million. They’re easy to come up with, cost a lot to build, and many don’t monetize well and therefore aren’t profitable. Because of that, it’s very expensive and unsustainable to build games and test them and see what succeeds.
Instead, companies come up with ideas, build a simple video demonstrating the idea, and put up ads with those videos. They then see how many people engage with the ads to determine how many people would even visit the download page for that game. Building a quick video is much much much cheaper than building a game. This is the first step in fast failing their ideas and weeding out bad ones.
Essentially the companies have lots of ideas, build lots of simple videos, advertise them all, and see which ones get enough engagement to be worth pursuing further, while the rest get dropped entirely.
But those ads need to link somewhere. So they link to the companies existing games. Because they’re already paying for it. So why not.
But building a whole new game is also expensive. Dynamics in mobile gaming are very odd because of the way “the algorithm” works. It is actually extremely expensive to get advertising in front of enough people that enough download it that you have any meaningfully large player base to analyze at all.
So the next trick is these companies will take the successful videos, build “mini games” of those ads as a prototype, and then put that in their existing game. This means they can leverage their existing user base to test how much people will engage with the game, and more importantly, eventually test how well it monetizes. Their existing users have already accepted permissions, likely already get push notifications, and often already have their payment info linked to the app. It also means they don’t have to pay for and build up a new store presence to get eyeballs on it. Many of the hurdles of the mobile space have already been crossed by their existing players, and the new ones who clicked the ads have demonstrated interest in the test subject. This is why many of the ads link to seemingly different games that have a small snippet of what you actually clicked on.
If these mini games then become successful enough, they will be made into their own standalone game. But this is extremely rare in mobile. The way the store algorithms and ads work make it pretty fucking expensive to get new games moving, so they really have to prove it to be worthwhile in the long run.
So yeah, most people look at this the wrong way - it does actually go against common sense advertising, but that’s because it’s not actually advertising. It’s essentially the cheapest way for companies to get feedback from people that actually play mobile games about what kinds of games they would play.
It’s not advertising. It’s market analysis.
This is brilliant for them. They basically take the elevator pitches from the concept phase of design and toss them at players to see what sticks. Don’t even have to get to the point of a vertical slice to playtest, just a conceptual animation of gameplay.
Yeah, this makes me so fucking mad as a player but like… It actually works super well so I can’t blame them.
Mobile gaming is full of shitty elevator pitches and super high failure rates so it just kinda… Makes sense.
But I still hate it.
Absolutely, I hate it, too. It’s like how the more I learn about advertising, the more disgusted I become as I discover that it’s all just malicious psychology to push the buttons in your brain to get you to do what they want, but it’s still brilliant psychology that they’ve honed after more than a century of practice. I hate it, but I can’t deny it works.
This is a great answer but do you have a source for it? I’m not doubting you; I’ve just never heard this explanation before so I’m really curious about it.
As I mentioned in other comments, I’m a software dev that’s worked with companies that were doing this, that were talking to other mobile game companies that were doing this. I hate to say “trust me bro” but, this stuff isn’t something they’re like happy to publicly advertise so it’s not like it’s written up somewhere, AFAIK.
Makes sense. Thanks!
As an old game dev, this is so depressing. All hooked up dopamine addicts needed to be bled their money as fast as possible.
Nice writeup though!
Yes, this seems to be the goal for most of the companies. That’s really awful, I don’t have enough words to comment on how much I hate that after playing one of those games for several months because I got addicted to it. Not a cent did I pay, though, let them fuck themselves
Yeah, I hate that this is the state of mobile gaming. And it’s seeped into other game spaces as well. I find it really sad and pathetic, but once big money crept in, it feels like that’s all most games are. It’s basically just pushed me harder towards indie games, and luckily that’s easier to find and discover these days.
Thank you!
An RTS with a backstory like red alert, even a rpg wirh a good story…
Last one I enjoyed was Knights of pen and paper :-)
Age of Empires Mobile (the real one, not a scam ad illegally using Microsoft’s assets) is probably going to release later this year! More info due to come out in a livestream on 23rd Feb.
You almost had me there ;-)
But let’s see how they might crapify it, and where’s the story in it, is it a good one in the original?
You almost had me there
Not really sure what you mean. I wasn’t trying to get you at all, it’s completely sincere.
where’s the story in it, is it a good one in the original?
It’s an RTS, so not really a story-based genre. The community is mainly based around competitive multiplayer and fun casual multiplayer—either against AI or in vision scenarios. But the campaigns have generally been good, albeit very different from game to game.
AoE1 campaigns had almost no story to them, just a brief explanation of a period of time and set-up for the mission.
AoE2 campaigns focus on a particular notable figure from their respective culture, with voiced introductions and wrap-ups to each mission providing characterisation in addition to explaining the set-up.
Age of Mythology is in my opinion the best, as they took various myths from the 3 mythologies the game is based on and wove them into their own unique story with in-game cinematics and voice acting.
AoE3 does much the same, but it came across weird because of the ostensibly historical nature of the game not meshing so well with an entirely fictional story.
AoE4 came out very recently and is similar in scope to AoE1, jumping across centuries showing snapshots of a civilisation’s rise and fall. But it has incredible production value with narrated introductions superimposing historical details over real-life modern footage of the relevant sites, in addition to brief in-game narration of the type AoE2 also shares.
What will AoE Mobile’s campaigns be like? No idea. It was first announced in October 2022 at AoE4’s 1 year anniversary along side the Age of Mythology definitive edition game, but later this month will be the first time we’ve gotten anything official about it since then.
Sorry about that, I just thought an rts with maybe a story, woot! But it’s not out yet, and then I remember it’s microsoft and well sorry if I made you feel bad.
Spent time on AoE back in the day, but C&C and Red alert blew that out of the water IMO, maybe I should check out the later versions :-)
I did plat some age of mythology IIRC, maybe I should check that out again…
Cheers and thank you for your long post!
this makes so much sense, how do you know all this?
I’m a software dev and have worked with some of these companies. It’s kind of sad because I liked the idea of mobile games and working with them was a bit like seeing the devil behind the curtains. I dreamt of making cool little games based on fun and unique ideas and quickly learned it’s all a huge well oiled machine chugging through market data to find the most effective money extracting methods they can come up with.
For every bit you think these companies are grimey money chasers, I promise you it’s at least 5 times worse.
ooph, I just started trying to make a mobile game in Jan 😬
Make it a good one. Then tell me about it, because I know I’ll never find it on the play store.
I hate to be discouraging. I wanted to do the same up until these interactions. Depending on what is a livable wage for you, or if you’re doing it on the side, it could still be possible. But I’m in high cost of living areas in the US and it seems totally unfathomable to me. I watched companies spend literal millions of dollars on just advertising to gauge interest in games they then shut down because they couldn’t make the game profitable enough to pay for the ads and their bills etc.
There are definitely success stories, and you can definitely get games released and get players. But I just want to point out that many of the games are simple and just have absolutely astronomical amounts of money behind them. Mobile is fucking crazy and I feel like it’s much harder for smaller devs to get their name out through typical advertising channels.
IMO, which is mostly just guessing based off what I’ve seen, I’d think your time is better spent finding small communities that may be interested in your game and posting about them, as opposed to buying ads etc. Indie dev subreddits and other gaming communities have propped up successful games before, and it may cost you more time and effort, but it just looks extremely hard to compete on the mobile ads playing fields against these huge companies these days.
As somebody who almost got a degree in animation to go work at the big AAA companies, everything you’ve said in this thread about the industry has been right on the money to the view I got that made me bail out in college. There’s plenty more that can be said about working in the industry, but suffice to say they play in their own cesspool, and unless you’ve got serious financial backing, it’s not worth trying to compete.
Even speaking of just the indie scene, don’t go in expecting to make anything on a game. Many of the indie studios you see on Steam will never go on to make a second game because their first never became profitable and the company went bankrupt. Even plenty of the more popular indie games will never make back what they cost. There’s those one in a million games like Lethal Company, but you should do it because you like making games, not because you expect to quit your day job.
Yeah. All of this rings really true. I find it really sad because not long ago it felt like a lot of games cropped up from small indie groups. Hell, many of the big names now like blizzard were formed by small groups of friends. But it feels like in the 2010s, big entertainment money got involved and now it’s a festering cesspool.
Accurate, though I would say that the rot started earlier than that. Most of the companies we know and love were started and run by people who just liked making games. But those people have long been replaced by money extractors. I think it really started in earnest around the early 2000s, but it took a long time for it to start to show. There’s also the fact that we look back and forget about all the shovelware from decades past. And that’s not even getting into the working conditions, which easily goes back to the 80s.
The indie scene today is the strongest it’s ever been, thanks to the rise of digital distribution and access to game dev tools. We live in a world where little indie teams can get their games released on Nintendo digital storefronts and there are websites dedicated to just indie games. Social media has made it easier than ever for small creators to gather large followings of dedicated fans. But at the same time, the gulf between the indie scene and the big companies has never been wider. I can’t think of a single time where an indie team has gone on to create a new AAA studio.
It’s frustrating to watch both as a gamer and as somebody who once dreamt of joining that industry.
I mean, in the 80s and 90s we still got flooded with garbage games made in a month just to make a quick buck. I think Sturgeon’s Law has always been in effect, the only difference is that there’s so much more of everything now (both good and bad), and marketing teams have gotten so much more effective at farming engagement. But I think that <10% is always there and still worth people’s time to both make and play.
I’ve been mostly making games for fun and am fairly risk adverse so am planning on sticking with a stable job and making games in my free time.
It’s discouraging, but it is reality. I still want to try, but definitely not putting more than one egg in this basket.
I’ll admit I’m knowingly doing the following haha
hopefully it’ll at least be a positive experience and I learn something from it
Sounds like you’ve got the right mindset and sounds like you have your head on your shoulders. Best of luck!
You’re only about a month in, aim to release on somewhere like itch.io instead of a mobile store. Join some dev communities and game jams and the like. Building up a following like that is a million times easier than trying to get noticed in the sea of SEO games in an app store.
I’ve been doing itch and jams for a little bit, even managed to win one once. I’ve learned a lot but can’t shake this feeling that I’m just making free games for itch. You might be right though… whatever kind of sea of games I think itch is, the mobile sea may be a lot worse.
You might be right though… whatever kind of sea of games I think itch is, the mobile sea may be a lot worse.
It definitely is. I think it’s really hard to comprehend how much garbage is floating around mobile app stores. In recent times, it’s gotten to the point where if you release a new game, even people searching for your exact game name might not find it just because of how much stuff they have to sort through and how much they have to “suppress”. It’s hard to tell how much stuff you’re really up against in those stores because it’s so hard to even see a portion of it. There’s just so much and everything relies on algorithms and recommendations.
Mobile games are also mostly played by hyper casuals, and the space is dominated by dopamine hit money extractors, so people that don’t want that basically left, and everyone that remains is expecting it. If you don’t think you fit into that model, I would also recommend itch or steam because the user bases there will likely match your target audience better, and there’s less stuff to compete with there.
It’s kind of sad because I liked the idea of mobile games and working with them was a bit like seeing the devil behind the curtains
This has kind of discouraged me from getting into game development. I’m not creative enough or talented enough at game design to do it myself, and I feel like the likelihood of getting onto one of the few teams we see out there today who aren’t willing to sacrifice every last bit of humanity that their games and software have for revenue… is slim.
What are you on about? Why does any dev in the mobile need to deal with companies like this?? Unless you’re looking to work for Niantic, EA, Ubisoft/Gameloft etc you can just self publish and that’s what people do daily. Lots of self published games and apps exist and more are available every day.
I am concerned with the larping you’re doing here. Why are you trying to scare people ?
Why does any dev in the mobile need to deal with companies like this??
I didn’t say I “needed” to. And my job did require it at the time. The circumstances of my employment are kind of out of the scope of this discussion and it’s pretty much entirely irrelevant. I was just stating where I got my information from.
you can just self publish and that’s what people do daily.
Sure. You can. People do. Mobile it’s way less successful though. And I didn’t say anything about what an indie devs options are. You’re reading something very different out of what I’m saying and I don’t know what it is or where you’re getting it from.
Lots of self published games and apps exist and more are available every day.
Exactly. That’s part of what’s going on here.
I am concerned with the larping you’re doing here.
Larping? What am I role playing? And we’re on the internet, so this definitely isn’t “live action” by any means. I don’t understand what you think is going on here.
Why are you trying to scare people ?
Me stating what goes on inside the industry is not “trying” to do anything. I’m just explaining what I’ve seen in it. Whether they choose to be “scared” or not is their own perogative. Would you say I’m trying to scare people if I said many people have died in Gaza in the past few months? It’s just stating what’s happening.
These are all examples of exaggerated and misleading ads. Hell, the heading you linked to is literally called “exaggerated ads”. That’s not “this game does not exist at all” ads, it’s “this isn’t how the game actually plays” ads. The examples this article gives are the like weird “Omg he got me pregnant” ads that then link to a match 3 game and the like. These are a different thing than things like the OP linked which are entirely irrelevant and link to random unrelated games.
The article is from and advertising company that is selling customers who have an existing game who want to improve ad conversions and then lists techniques for doing so. They do not explain the outcome the OP is asking about. Not would they outline the strategy I’m talking about since what in referring to is a process by which you would test new game ideas. That’s not something the company you linked to would be involved in.
There are many many many types of advertising campaigns in mobile gaming. And they serve different purposes. The stuff your outlining is different than the OPs question and my response. They exist in the same market and one existing doesn’t mean the other doesn’t.
You didn’t read the article at all. My god you’re full of it.
If true it’s kind of a dumb idea. I downloaded one of these that looked good many years ago, didn’t end up being the game, I deleted it immediately and haven’t clicked on a single one of these since. A few of them even looked like fun concepts but fuck it, it’s probably not real. Seems like their market research is going to be heavily skewed by people once bitten, twice (or forever) shy.
That’s just the thing they want. You know that 99% of the ads are fake, but if you enjoy one enough to click it anyway, on the off chance it’s real, that data is extra valuable because you’ve watched a thousand ads and clicked on one so that’s the one they know to focus on.
Yeah, but I’m not clicking on ads in 2024, I’m gonna Google anything I think is interesting or check its reviews in the play store. I treat all ads like potential one click viruses. Plus I see them so rarely, like if I’m doing a crossword or something, that I’m just waiting for the little x to appear so I can get back to my game. Who’s clicking on ads?
The simple truth is that you’re in the minority. Most people aren’t quite so diligent about avoiding them.
They’re not market researching the gameplay. They’re market researching the visual elements, the animations, the artstyle, the sounds, the indicators…
The real question for me is: where is the money coming from?
It seems like mobile ads are extremely incestuous. Game A advertises games B to M, which in turn advertise all the others. So ad revenue can hardly be a significant source of income for the industry as a whole.
The games themselves probably all work on a freemium model, but even given the whale dynamics there, it seems unlikely that the games produce enough revenue to offset literally billions of ads.
Also, how exactly does your analysis square with the fact that I’ve seen the exact same game ads for years? It doesn’t really make sense to advertise 5 years for such throwaway products.
It seems like mobile ads are extremely incestuous. Game A advertises games B to M, which in turn advertise all the others.
In many ways, yes they are. Especially if you like inside individual genres. But mobile games also have so so many players and a rotating player base. Even old games can still attract new players etc. But yes, they are pretty incestuous.
But that’s the market. It’s unlikely to see massive growth like it has in the past. Mobile games have become so common that they’ve pretty much saturated the market and rotate players around. The same idea could kind of be said about things like movies or theaters, but the business still works.
The games themselves probably all work on a freemium model, but even given the whale dynamics there, it seems unlikely that the games produce enough revenue to offset literally billions of ads.
Whale dynamics are a huge part of this, and the spenders on these games absolutely do produce enough to pay for the ads. If they didn’t, the companies wouldn’t be running them.
Let me put it this way - I’ve seen companies run games all the way through the process from “fake ads” to a fully released game… And then shut it down because the players “only” end up spending 2-3x what it cost to acquire them through advertising. 3x their investment is seen as a failure because of the cost to build them. That’s how important it is to them that they run these fake campaigns so they can bail on the failures early. And their targets for successful games land in 3-8x the advertising budge to be successful. Though exact ranges depend on genres and the “longevity” of a player and lots of other things.
I’ll also add, as expensive as you might think running ads is, actual development is significantly higher. Ads will likely be run for a long time on a successful game, but the advertising for 6 months is way cheaper than spending 2 years with engineers, artists, designers, QA, and management all on the project. If they can spend 200k on advertising in 6 months to gauge interest, that’s only costing the salary of like 2 engineers, so it’s highly worthwhile. Most mobile game “success” rates are well below ten percent.
Also, how exactly does your analysis square with the fact that I’ve seen the exact same game ads for years? It doesn’t really make sense to advertise 5 years for such throwaway products.
To be honest, I can’t answer this one with confidence. I’ve seen multiple companies using the strategy I outlined, so I know it’s pretty common. I also know that those companies were copying the strategy from other companies in the space. So I know it’s prevalent. But that’s not going to be every single ad you ever see.
I’ll point out a couple things:
How exact is exact? Are you sure it’s the exact same video down to a T? They may be floating multiple ideas at a time, and games can live in this “fake ad” state for multiple years while they iterate on it. Everything from different sound effects but the same video, different visual themes, running cuts of players doing well vs poorly, changing individual words in the messaging, etc. They then test these against each other to see which do better. I’ve seen some run for a while, but I’ve never felt confident it’s actually exactly the same.
And if that’s the case… Is it possible someone saw that and ad was fake but thought it was a good idea, and now a different company just literally copied and posted the same video?
Second, this may just be a “market analysis” learning vehicle. They may never intend on building the game. For example, if a company is thinking about game A, they may run ads, see it doesn’t work, kill the project, and start considering game B. Now they already have data on how game As ads ran, and they can use their original ads as a “control” and try different variants to see what does better, and then use that data to determine how to best advertise game B. Or they may test game B against game A. Then they might see that it’s doing worse than A, and try something else.
Third, some of this may be chasing measuring “seasonality”. Game genres trend back and forth over time. They may use an old ad they put together to test the waters now to test the water again.
Fourth, I’m not totally convinced these are always studios running the ads. These might be publishers that never intend on building the game, but are trying to find info on what types of games are trending and what genres they should be invested in. Or they might be the advertising networks just running bullshit ads to gauge how much they should bid for ads in a particular genre. Or maybe it’s some giant joint venture like Tencent who owns tons of studios and is gaging what they should be recommending their studios work on.
Data is extremely valuable. In many forms. And many people will pay for that data. And this type of data is such an accurate gauge of actual user behavior because it is literally actually current user data.
There are about 3 companies that dominate 90% of the mobile games market and these ads are extremely cheap to produce
Also there is tons of money in mobile gaming, just look at Blizzard, their highest revenue brand is Candy Crush
It’s also illegal (False Advertising)
Is it though? IANAL, but I feel like this is, at the very least, a gray area.
You can’t purchase anything. The ad didn’t say anything except maybe “play now”, and there is a game and it may even contain a mini game of sorts that’s kinda the ad… The “harm” is like 3 seconds of your time. The “product” doesn’t not do what it says because… It doesn’t exist…
I dunno. Maybe it is. I feel like this is one of those things where “we all know it is” but “legally they probably wiggle their way out of the legal definition, and what are people going to do? Sue them for 5$?”
Not that I agree with it, don’t get me wrong. I think we all know it’s fucking scummy bullshit. But I’m not sure you’d win a court case over it and what harm you could argue it caused you etc.
If it’s not punished, is it really illegal?
But that game in the screenshot looks like it’s a thing, I saw a video of it. Like somebody could make that in Unity in a week or so.
Why not release Bridge Blasters or whatever the fuck it’s called, and then when it’s a surprise hit, put a ton of resources and all your worst money grubbing microtransactions into Bridge Blasters 2 DX Extreme. Then when people see that advertised, they’ll go “oh Bridge Blasters, I remember that, I’ll give that a go”, rather than going “huh, another scam game. fuck that”.
Because no matter how “easy” you think it is to build said game, it’s always easier to build a video. You don’t have to make the whole thing. You don’t have to use unity. You don’t have to have actual mechanics. You don’t need save states. You don’t need an app store listing. You don’t need other screen shots.
But no matter what, when you release the game, you’re going to want to make these ads. So why not just make the ad, then run it, and see if it’s worth it?
As simple as you think it is to make these games work, it’s always cheaper to not do the whole thing and just do a subset. Hell, even making the game and just only doing one level and not making any controls is easier and would still be more than enough to make the video.
The number of people that see it as a scam game is nothing next to the target audience when it’s released. It’s a drop in the bucket. So it’s well worth the savings.
somebody could make that in Unity in a week
Except unity is dead. It died by terminal enshittification.
“Not dead,” you say? Yet, I say.
These guys are doing agile better than any team I’ve ever worked with…
the market research aspect makes sense. but why go the roundabout way of surveying? isn’t it counterproductive to lose users this way?
but why go the roundabout way of surveying?
I would not call this “roundabout”. Is it weird? Yes. But I actually would actually argue it’s less roundabout than alternatives. What alternative would you propose?
I suspect most people would say “well why not put out a survey to users and ask…” but that comes with multiple known faults. 1) People’s answers are not always genuine, and they can’t always accurately forsee how they would react, which is a common problem in data gathering. And 2) How do you collect and sample those users? Sure, you have your existing player base, but what happens if your game is in a different genre and your player base wouldn’t be the same?
I suspect that the second point is the bigger reason things shifted this way - ads are common in mobile games and mobile games are trying to sell to people already playing mobile games. Your audience is already reachable through ads, so why build a new system when one is already in place, being built by someone else so you don’t have to do any work but make the ad?
But to circle back… When you ship your game, you’re going to advertise it, and you want people to click on those ads, because that is how you get users. By putting out ads before you’ve built the game, you’re literally sampling by using the exact system you will be using when you ship. And you’re going to get data on whether users actually perform the behavior you want - to click the ad.
I fucking hate this, but to be honest… It’s actually a perfect parallel… They’re measuring exactly the end goal (efficacy of the ads) before they’ve built the product. It’s actually pretty genius and lucky it works out. It’s fucking evil, don’t get me wrong, but it is actually a perfect gauge.
Any alternative, imo, is actually more roundabout.
isn’t it counterproductive to lose users this way?
What users would they be losing? People already playing their game aren’t going to see ads, click them, see they have it installed, then quit. So they’re not losing existing users. They can’t be “losing” users for a game that doesn’t exist yet.
You could argue that the negative reviews on your original game will hurt it, but this process is usually done when they have a steady existing game. And those don’t last forever. Once they’ve peaked, they’ve “served their purpose” in the companies eyes. And these negative reviews are way less impactful on successful games that have thousands of reviews already. And, the game probably isn’t growing so they don’t care. And they’re relatively rare and the “hate” is far less impactful than knowing whether your next game is worth investing in.
You could also argue “well they’re upsetting potential players they would have when the game releases” but they run these at “relatively small” fractions of their intended target audience, and the mobile player pool is gargantuan. On top of that, by the time the game comes out, people likely won’t remember the ad, and they very likely won’t remember it was a bait. And they may even change the art style or theme for release, and just leverage the same mechanics etc.
Thank you very much! These answers are very insightful.
I think these points brought the point home on why some of their decisions seem absurd for me:
ads are common in mobile games and mobile games are trying to sell to people already playing mobile games
Once they’ve peaked, they’ve “served their purpose” in the companies eyes.
On top of that, by the time the game comes out, people likely won’t remember the ad, and they very likely won’t remember it was a bait.
mobile player pool is gargantuan
Of course! Glad my arcane knowledge of a shitty industry could be… Helpful? :)
Incredibly insightful.
I really enjoyed reading about this awful shit, it makes a ton of sense though.
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?
They’re not wrong, they’re just assholes.
True. Entirely agree.
Damn
I never click on these, but I feel like if they made it explicit that this ad is to determine whether this kind of game is wanted, I’d feel much better clicking on it.
Your whole guess is incredibly well written and it’s also entirely wrong. Wanna know why? You’re about to feel really foolish.
You see the picture OP posted? Most will recognise it because regardless of theme (sometimes a long soldier fighting army other times it’s a person against a horde of undead etc) it’s an archetype that many of these ads use (others are the puzzle game with water, the rpg where you outfight or outfuck etc). Those archetypical fake games have been doing the rounds for literal years, some close to a decade. If they were prototypes or seeking audience interest they would exist by now or they would be much more varied. They don’t and they aren’t.
No, what you’re actually seeing is an artifact of the financial rewards a lack of interest and imagination can render if your audience is large enough - these ads aren’t selling the games they portray, they are the central player to a bait and switch strategy to farm people into generic games that harvest clicks, user data and money from the unsuspecting tech ilterate. These ads are not market research because those who publish already know their markets extremely well and they know down to the second what enough of the audience will do when faced with these bait and switch games.
That you attribute such grandiose cleverness to this scam is pretty sad.
Yeah, I don’t feel foolish at all. I’ve explained this in other comments.
In summary:
I’m not claiming literally every instance is exactly what I’m describing, but it is a very common pattern.
Many of these ads are slight variations to test which performs better.
Many of the “which performs better” are run against long standing ads they’ve had to learn about how to advertise. They may never intend to release the games being advertised. They may know the ad does well, but they built a prototype game and it didn’t monetize, so they’ll never finish it or already killed it. But that doesn’t stop them from running the same ad but with a different visual theme to see which visual theme is more popular right now.
Some of these ads are not run by dev studios but by advertisers or publishers.
Markets are not static - interest in themes, visual styles, and game genres are all extremely “seasonal” and keep changing. They do not “know their market extremely well” because interest keeps shifting. Companies will constantly run ads just to gauge what genres they should be thinking about and to track trends over time. IE, they may run the same exact strategy game ad for many years straight to determine the long term stability of strategy games. Without caring about the specific game idea in the ad itself.
I don’t feel foolish, nor do I think it’s “clever”. I just know from first hand experience that this is how the market works.
Now who’s dancing around the point? The same half dozen vertical slices or renders have existed for years so why have exactly 0 been realised as games?
Because they aren’t games they are bait and switch adverts. There’s no market research campaigns and you’ve provided no fucking evidence for your claims at all. Your thesis is bunk and I think so are your claims to be a dev too.
The same half dozen vertical slices or renders have existed for years so why have exactly 0 been realised as games?
Already covered above. They likely prototyped it and it didn’t monetize well or something so they axed it.
Because they aren’t games they are bait and switch adverts.
Or they’re neither, and they’re just trying to gauge the market. But sure, you can believe whatever you want.
There’s no market research campaigns and you’ve provided no fucking evidence for your claims at all.
You haven’t either. You’re just assuming a) the worst and b) something that makes objectively less sense - if your whole premise is they’re advertising something fake, how would this even work as bait and switch if people see that’s not what the ad links to?
Your thesis is bunk and I think so are your claims to be a dev too.
And your thesis is “I feel like it’s bait and switch, so it is” and you have no claims of credibility. Nothing I say will prove to you that I’ve worked for some of the largest corporations in the US, so I can’t change your mind.
The ad is for a single player mobile game - it has not been realised and in no way would there be ongoing costs that require it to be axed should a It sell poorly.
Honestly, you’re full of shit and should stop this bs about working in the industry. Here’s what a real mobile advertising company has to say on the matter - note that none of your bullshit is referenced at all.
Can’t find the other comment you made about this anymore, but this is an advertising company that’s helping devs advertise their games, so yeah, it’s not going to talk about advertising non existent apps for market analysis. Instead it talks about twisting games to advertise them with exaggeration and weird hooks to try to convince people to download them… Which is another shitty advertising practice in mobile gaming (yeah, there are a lot of them, shocker) and not really pertinent to the topic/OP.
I also find it funny you left the highlight showing you probably searched exactly for something that proved your point, but it’s listed “exaggeration” in the heading which is entirely different.
The title of the article is literally: “Fake Mobile Game Ads: Why Do Advertisers Use Them?”
It covers many of the methods fake games are used as bait and switch marketing including hyperbole. You would know this if you actually read the article instead you searched for something in it to try and dissuade from the point of the article. If you’re a developer of any experience I’m a billionaire. Keep lying liar.
This was my thought as well. A lot of these games are never made, even when the ads do very well (as evidenced by the ad continuing for years). Someone actually made the bait game for real, in recognition of the fact that the games have been advertised for many years and never made.
Even if OP’s explanation is sometimes correct, it doesn’t seem typically correct. In fact, it seems like a rare edge case, at best.
Thank you for sharing. I’ve never worked in mobile games but I work in regular game dev and I’m very tired of people being very vocally incorrect (especially if they’re unwilling to change their preconceived notion because they decided it sounds too logical not to be true) about how the industry works.
What are you going on about this is not a hard game to make and it’s been advertised forever now so the market research has been done.
You keep saying “expensive”, but don’t provide context. How expensive? Either in relative terms to the revenue they bring in or competitors’ products. Without that, the actual numbers are worthless.
I’m not sure exactly what use of “expensive” you’re getting at, but my primary point was that it’s more expensive to build the full game than it is to develop a 30 second video of it. I don’t cite actual numbers because this is being done by absolutely monstrous companies with millions of dollars to throw around and smaller companies that only have advertising budgets of 5 or 6 figures. It’s also being done for larger scale games like RPGs and smaller scale games like the water drop puzzle stuff.
But we’re talking about 30 second videos, and building 30 second videos can be done by a single artist within a month, maybe a couple months if we’re being generous. This is like, maybe like a 30k investment. And you can get reasonable data out of like 50k in advertising.
But there’s no way in hell your developing these games on an 80k budget. Most of these games are built by multiple engineers, multiple artists, multiple designers, multiple managers, and multiple marketing people. You can’t pay a single one of them on 80k.
These games generally cost millions and millions to build. A single million dollar ad campaign will give you TONS of data. The other thing is that’s work that has to be done anyway so you don’t lose anything by just doing it first to see if it works before building.
If you have a more specific, question, I’m happy to try to outline something else or give numbers based off my experience. But these happen at many different game scales and it’s just hands down cheaper to do a subset of the work.
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Incorrect. If you even slow down scrolling to look at the ad you’ve already given them feedback; how long you looked, if you scrolled back after passing it, how long did you look, did the camera track your eye movements/where do you look; did you play the ad’s audio, did you click, did you download, how long did you look for the mini version of the game, did you play the game your downloaded instead; how long, did you delete it afterwards….and once their app is on your phone: who are you, where are you, what apps do you use, how many contacts are in your phone, how often do you text, how often do you. Use data, what is your WiFi called, what websites do you visit, do you have and phone customizations like an enhanced keyboard; based on browser tracking they can get from other companies associated with your tracking profile : age, gender, behavioral analysis as of late.m; favorite shows favorite animals, do you have any pets, do you have children, are you pregnant, how much do you spend a month online or on FB marketplace or Play store or Amazon
And what kind of clues can they sus out based on the million of data points they got JUST BECAUSE YOU SCROLLED PAST AN AD in order for them to make a product that will be directly addictive to you and people like you, in order to extract money from your obsession; to exploit the dopamine backdoor in your monkey brains in order to take the value you generate for yourself and take it for themselves.
Just. Because. You. Scrolled.
For anyone who is wondering, this is why online ads are SO much worse than TV commercials.
Yeah, pretty much this exactly. I can confirm almost everything listed here does get tracked and thrown in the mix, but in some ways it is a little more complicated. For example, eye tracking is a bit tin foil hat, but I’m sure some companies go that far.
For most game devs, the rabbit hole isn’t that deep because of ad mediation networks.
For example, most company posting the ads really only see “how many people saw my ad” and “how many people clicked my ad” and “how many people downloaded the game after clicking”. They often also have a say in “target demographics” etc but the data they get back usually doesn’t dig much deeper unless they build tracking of your in game behavior etc. That’s not to say the other stuff isn’t tracked, but most of the other bits are not tracked by them. T
This stuff is all outsourced. There are entire advertising networks built around this stuff. Google has their own. Facebook has one. Unity has one. And there are plenty of others. Those companies are definitely looking more closely at things like individual user behavior and which ads get interaction etc and then make profiles of their users and decide what ads to serve them next based on their behavior with the ads they’ve been shown.
And because this is such a huge industry, there are then mediation networks built on top of that. Things like AppLovin/Ironsource and AdMob then build “mediators” that hook into advertising networks so that a game dev just asks to show a video ad, the mediator software asks all the advertising networks to bid on a the opportunity, and then it sells the game devs slot to the highest bidder. And THESE pieces of software are also tracking how the player interacts in order to justify their own pricing on the slots.
This shit is literally a fucking behemoth. Unity made a huge acquisition/merger with IronSource who’s sole purpose is to bid out advertising slots. They were a multi billion dollar company just playing fucking middle man to other middle men. That’s how insanely large this business is.
This is way worse than TV. It’s way more fine grained. And not only do the advertisers get more data out of you, but these ad brokers get even more data out of you, and then these ad bidding mediators get even more data out of you.
This is why you should install an adblocker on the network as well as your machine + browser & browse with JavaScript in allowlisted mode (enable remote code execution if & only if it is required—which it often is for web apps, but web pages should work without via progressive enhancement).
That’s not true. Ads are covered in tracking data. For every one person who posts a negative review because a game misled them, there are literally tens or hundreds of thousands who clicked on it, saw it was not the same game, and never posted anything. For every one person who clicked, there are literally hundreds or thousands of people who didn’t. And they have all this data.
One data point posting a negative review on a game is much less impactful or meaningful to them then the literally hundreds of thousands of data points telling them whether their idea is going to be downloaded and successful or not. The complaining reviews are tiny drops in the bucket relative to the troves of engagement data they get on the ads being run.
Just fucking get “Yeah You Want Those Games” on Steam.
Btw, I love the ones where they actively acknowledge that many of the ads are fake “Why does everyone say this game is fake? I’m playing it right now.” or “See, we’re going to walk through the game in order to prove it’s real…” proceeds to make overly generic commentary that proves nothing
And I find it amusing this game Envoy: The King’s Return has been a puzzle game and an RTS, and it seems the voice over keeps getting confused… because after the generic voice over for Envoy sometimes says “Let the battle begin!”, after showing it as a puzzle game.
I forget the game but there was one ad that specifically said, “Don’t you hate those fake ads? Well we’ll show you what our game is really like!” I was so amazed that I downloaded the game even though it didn’t appeal to me… their ad was also fake.
I get that Google Play is “whatever goes” but it’s fucking embarrassing that Apple doesn’t police their store - they’re certainly being paid more than enough money to do it.
The most devious format is when they show a “clip” from a “totally real youtuber’s very real games people say are fake, but aren’t” series
Protip: The harder someone tries to convince you something isn’t the case, the more likely that it is. Lemme put it like this. Would you trust a restaurant that felt the need to put up a sign saying “We do NOT jack off into the clam chowder!”, no?
embarrassing that Apple doesn’t police their store -
Isn’t it the ads that you want to be policed? Or are the screenshots in the Play Store and App Store also misleading?
It’s the app. If they’re deceiving customers then Apple should remove their app.
How is apple supposed to keep track of ads displayed within other apps and platforms, though?
I mean, if nothing else, user reports and reviews, followed by a trivially short investigation?
Firstly, this is easier said than done.
User reports are a dangerous step to take, because once they prove they do it, any company can just review bot their competition claiming it’s fake.
They could technically police their own ad networks, but most of these networks are not Apple’s so they can’t. They’d have to just hire people to go play games to get ads to click on to then take down games.
And then what’s the point? Apple is just money chasing like every other company, and most of the huge game companies do this. They’d be shooting themselves in the foot and hurting their own revenue. As much as they like to tout that they protect users, that’s something they like to say because it serves them. At the end of the day, their own best interests are far more important to them.
Wishlisted, this looks like it’ll be some cheap fun for my deck. Thanks for sharing 😁
I love that somebody actually went and fucking made them.
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Because you can’t play steam games on the phone. Pretty easy to understand.
This is why we have computers.
Even for someone that doesn’t leave their basement, can’t use the computer in bed.
Because my phone is a lot easier to carry in my pocket while I’m out doing errands than my gaming desktop. Or a steam deck.
Same reason people who already have a desktop computer also use smartphones.
I don’t have my fucking Doom Eternal or even my Lego Batman off of my Steam Account when I’m at work pretending to have diarrhea to get a minute to myself.
This doesn’t answer the question but it’s amusing.
It’s beautiful 🥹
That’s really a smart idea 😂
Wow, that title’s approaching light novel length haha
Hilarious!
Brought to you by the guys behind the recent remasters of Klonoa and Katamari Damacy
I can’t believe I haven’t seen this until now… That’s quite funny. They sold a pretty decent number of copies too 👀
It’s important to realize that this isn’t a game, it’s 20 seconds of animation that looks like a game. There would be a lot more work designing levels or an algorithm to send enemies etc.
The actual game is designed to be as addictive as possible so you become a whale spending money on it. The advertising is designed to get you to download the game. Two different jobs.
Also, easier A/B testing and targeting if you can just advertise different games to different people but funnel them all to the same end game.
If the math worked out that people who saw the real game downloaded it and ended up paying more money, they would advertise the real game. Guess the math doesn’t work.
The ads also have obvious mistakes in the gameplay. That’s to deliberately induce frustration in the viewer, who thinks they would be able to do better.
Can’t cite sources, just want to reaffirm. Kept running into that concept when researching game design, advertising, psychology.
Yeah, advertising is one of those things where it superficially looks awful. Then you study the details, and it only gets worse.
Ah yes, the 'ol fractal of horror
Its also an old trick of greengrocers. They put a sign up advertising “tomaetoes” People come in to correct them and end up buying stuff
There would be a lot more work designing levels or an algorithm to send enemies etc.
Here’s a video of a guy doing just that: https://youtu.be/zRDhiN50Vo0?si=mMnc8ieKbCxcLcSY
TLDW: He manages to make a working game, but doesn’t think it’s all that much fun.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/zRDhiN50Vo0?si=mMnc8ieKbCxcLcSY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
iirc they actually started adding these as mini games after getting sued for false advertising
My wife got caught in a mobile ad game. After a thousand of them she finally said, “I’m bored why not” and got addicted for a few weeks.
When I saw the ad of the game she was playing, I was mocking her like, “Oh is that in the game?” And she showed me. Yeah, it totally is. Usually as a special event, or some “mini game” inside the game.
Well damn guess I was wrong.
I don’t remember having seen any actually successful lawsuits about this. There have been a few about the fake sale price thing etc, but I haven’t seen anything about these ads for games that don’t exist. Happy to admit I’m wrong if anyone has any proof, but as far as I’m aware, that’s never happened.
These games do end up adding mini games of the advertised game, but that’s not because they’re trying to cover their ass. It’s because the ads are for games they’re considering making, and if the ads do well, they know people will click to the store page. The next step is to build it as a mini game inside another game to get more data on engagement with the actual gameplay mechanics to see if people would actually play and keep playing the game. It’s much cheaper and more efficient to do that as a smaller part inside an existing game instead of building a whole new stand alone game. If they mini game does well, they may move it standalone, but if not, it may just stay as a part of the larger one depending on how much it costs to maintain there.
Yeah, once you’ve given the app permission to snoop out all your data, they have what they came for and don’t need you to keep it any longer.
That is insane. Makes me want to follow these trends and make the actual game. Put ads in it, charge a dollar or two to get rid of them. Give the people what they saw and want while also making myself not egregiously poor.
The thing is folks have proceeded to do effectively that, make the game you see in the ad… and…
You realize the game isn’t actually fun, it’s pretty boring. The only driving force of the ad is your frustration at watching a person fuck up the game on purpose.
People made faithful clones and it became painfully obvious its not actually interesting or fun, and you quickly get pretty bored of it. There’s not much skill involved.
It is insane. It’s also incorrect - that’s not what’s happening here.
There is a market of “games that were ads people liked that never got made” though - so you wouldn’t be the first.
This is a >11 minute video, which winds around the truth, but ultimately the creator trying to reason about what’s going on… But his conclusions end up being incorrect. Don’t waste your time.
These videos are made to gauge interest in game ideas by making up ads, and the seeing what engagement is like. If people will click on an ad to download a game, they don’t know if that game is real, but their clicking says they are interested. And if it’s successful, the game may incorporate the idea as mini game, within their existing gams, and see how it pans out in actual game play.
This is idea testing, it’s not deceit trying to hook you up into their existing game by baiting you with something else. That might be a secondary side effect but this is not the primary goal.
This creator is totally misreading this.
They cover A B testing part in the video.
They also cover the marketing disconnect from the game devs.
I’m not sure how you came to the conclusion that the video misread it.
I also don’t care how you came to the conclusion so misread me all you want.
They cover A B testing part in the video.
It’s not A B testing.
They also cover the marketing disconnect from the game devs.
It’s not really a “marketing disconnect”
I’m not sure how you came to the conclusion that the video misread it.
Because I have been involved in the industry and know what these ads are for. The video is blaming things like trying to swindle people into downloading a different game, false advertising, misdirection, and is blatantly calling it “lying” in the title. That it’s trying to pit people into mini games to get them hooked on the outer game. That’s not what these ads are for. At all.
He’s claiming they know what people want but don’t want to build it… But they are building it?
I came to this conclusion because the video is just blatantly wrong.
These ads are made to test popularity of game ideas before they bother to build the whole thing as a standalone game. He’s reading into what he’s seeing. I have worked with these companies and know their exact reasoning and it’s not what he’s claiming. He’s just wrong.
I like Upper Echelon, but this take is just misinformed and wrong.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=03I_a5cVoS0
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When I was pitching games to publishers, this was how they would test game ideas to see if there was interest. You essentially sent them a few minutes of gameplay or faked gameplay ideas and they would create these ads.
Does anyone understand the point of advertising a game doing something that, after downloading, it does not do?
They’re called “lies.”
Todd Howard has entered the chat.
Plant malware?
Generally they’re not malware
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.
The ads are for testing game concepts, if an ad have enough engagement the game is made.
That doesn’t feel right. Most of the time the game is something incredibly simple, like counting or moving blocks around, and the ad is showing someone playing it incredibly poorly. Like too poorly to be real, like they can’t count to a number like six or can’t move the triangle in a circle hole. I’ve always felt that’s supposed to frustrated the viewer, who will then want to download the game to play it correctly. But by then they realize it’s not even the same game that’s in the advertisement.
Problem is, hero wars never seems to make these games lol
I play D&D with a guy who plays one of these games. It’s so strange. It’s clearly cheap junk, it has absolutely awful reviews everywhere but he just… plays it casually and talks about it like it’s any other major multiplayer game.
It’s weird but I guess he likes it so, who cares? I’m guessing that these studios spend an incredibly low amount of development, a good amount on misleading marketing, and coast by with a moderate playerbase of a maybe a couple thousand people
Probably because there is a nugget of quality and a whole lot of nuggets of attention attraction built into the game. Check out Vampire Survivors sometime, it’s free on Android and it doesn’t have ads (unless you go out of your way to click the button that says “view an ad”). And it was developed by someone who had previously worked at a casino.
It’s the same reason somebody relentlessly checks Twitter, it triggers the same dopamine receptors.
One of the more interesting things about how these games are advertised (I don’t play mobile games but I suspect a lot of people that do are kids) are that it always shows someone playing the game poorly. It’s supposed to make you go “huh. Well that looks easy. Wait wth is he doing? No! He could have gotten the powerup. Oh! Looks like he might get this one! What?! How do you mess that up?! I bet I could do that.”
One thing that I’ve realized about this generation of kids and people who didn’t grow up on tech but were forcibly introduced to it(millennials, gen x, boomers) is that they don’t want the game to be challenging or to reward skill. They just need the game to be flashy and to pass the time. That’s why these games are always made to look so easy and like the guy playing is a moron. A lot of people are attracted to games in a different way than “gamers” … They are not attracted to the challenge or the mastery, they’ve attracted to the visuals and lack of difficulty.
I believe these types of games are akin to gambling. The last time I went to Dave and Busters, you wouldnt believe the amount of adults i saw playing games of chance (not skill) for tickets. Exactly like a casino.
One thing that I’ve realized about this generation of kids and people who didn’t grow up on tech but were forcibly introduced to it(millennials, gen x, boomers) is that they don’t want the game to be challenging or to reward skill.
As a gen X who has been gaming for all my living memory, electronic gaming since I was 5, and gaming on computers since i was 10, I don’t think you have any clear idea what those generations are like. Certainly, there are groups that vastly prefer games of chance to games of skill, whether they be electronic or not, but I’ve seen those in every generation, just like I’ve seen the opposite.
There’s a psychological phenomenon around this but I forget the name for it. But yes, there’s evidence that seeing someone play poorly, and thinking “oh that’s easy I could do that” actually does motivate you to want to do it. Like a weird “prove I’m better” self ego stroke sort of thing. And these ads very much are intentionally playing into that.
True, I’ve seen ads that are like “if you can make it to level 5 you’re a certified genius” or something like that. It’s really sad.
Additional facet: when I was younger, only super nerdy, tech people into coding and stuff played video games. Now tho, way more people playng phone games, video games. So games popping up to cater to people who aren’t super nerdy or into tech.
see also the find the lady game played in tourist traps around the world.
Pretty much going right for the dopamine hit; gotta keep em hooked.
Anti-user features are a major thing. People are dumb enough with technology you can get away with openly screwing over your “customers”. The antifeature in this case is “it’s not actually the advertised game, it’s a cheap pay to win thing”.
Presumably, people download this thinking it’s cool, and then end up playing it anyway and whaling for the “developers”, who may literally be four people, one of which reskins existing games, while everyone else does sales and marketing.
How is that holding up as a marketing technique
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the kindergarteners playing roblox on their mom’s phone don’t care
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you already have their malware and that’s all that matters
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