Have you ever been on TikTok for so long that you get served a video by TikTok itself telling you to stop it and go to bed? It happens to me, dear reader, once or twice a week.
And when I’m in TikTok’s clutches, powerless to stop the cooking tips, pithy album reviews, rug-cleaning videos and clips of people throwing rocks off bridges, there are ads for mobile games. Really weird ads for mobile games.
You’ll have seen them too, surely, particularly the ones for Top War: someone talks over footage of what looks like the game, saying they’re exposing ‘fake game ads on TikTok’. The action you see in these Top War ads suggests it’s a simple two-lane runner-type game. If you actually install Top War, however, you will play a few stages of that runner game, and then the ‘real’ game reveals itself: a strategy builder-battler.
So to quickly summarise: you’re being duped into downloading a game by an ad that says it’s exposing fake game ads, which is itself a fake game ad. Weird.
@Top War: Battle Game I can’t stop playing this game!
♬ Promoted Music – Top War: Battle Game
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Above: Please enjoy this fake game ad that claims to expose fake game ads while also literally being a fake game ad.
There’s history here. These ads are effectively the supercharged, mutant descendants of those saucy ‘save me, my lord’ Evony banner ads from the late 2000s. Those grubby ads promised a lot more than what the brave souls who clicked through on those banners actually got: a Civilization-style free-to-play game. (Evony, by the way, is not just still going, but is in rude health and part of the modern ‘weird mobile game ad’ industrial complex. More on that later.)
The reason misleading ads have persisted all this time is very simple: they work. Unlike the banner ads of yore, though, today’s mobile game ads revolve around ‘user acquisition’, a slightly bleak term, but an important one to understand.
You really need to know your RPD from your ARPDAU in the jargon-filled world of mobile games. Never fear, though: I’ll try to explain all this without using too much lingo.
@Top War: Battle Game I can’t stop playing this game!
♬ Promoted Music – Top War: Battle Game
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This one’s my favourite ‘fake game’ ad because it says ‘Part 3’ and I’ve searched for weeks for parts one and two. I don’t think they exist.
Picture the scene: a mobile game developer works out the average player’s lifetime spend in its game. Then it goes to a user acquisition (UA) company and pays it to put ads in front of players likely to download its game based on their tastes, just like the programmatic ads you see across the web.