Rants and raves about stuff happening in and around my life in Singapore

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Mobile Game Adverts

8:07 AM By Barry Smyth No comments

The mobile gaming community needs a kick up the arse. Don’t get me wrong there are plenty of excellent games out there that are worth paying for, but unfortunately there are even more so called "free" games that are nothing more than a bunch of adverts glued over a shell of a game.



I mean seriously who the hell clicks on adverts these days. The only advert I’ve ever clicked on has been by mistake. And any game that I load that has too many of the damned things is immediately deleted and the developer put on my ignore list for future reference.

Maybe the younger generation click on them because they look interesting, but since they are not the ones who are actually paying for the games in the first place it’s kind of stupid. And maybe game developers already know this and are specifically targeting minors with their brand of advertising which if it ever proves to be true would make those same adverts (not to mention game developers) even more deplorable.

No-one minds paying for a good game (emphasis on good there by the way, and yes I appreciate that it’s an individual assessment) for a reasonable price, and indeed I have done that a few times myself just specifically to get rid of those same annoying adverts.

By all means give me a limited free game so I can test it out and decide if its a game I want to spend money on. But keep the adverts to a minimum, and discreet. There’s just no need for anything else, none because to be honest I’m never, I repeat never, going to click on them unless it’s completely by accident.

If the various app stores in existence were required to identify if a game had adverts in it (just like they do for in-app purchases) I can bet that a lot less people would be inclined to download them in the first place. In fact maybe that should be the next thing everyone should push for so we can decide to install a game in full knowledge that our senses will be assailed by a plethora of adverts.

And while games may harp on about 900,000 downloads so far, they don’t tell you that there was 899,999 uninstalls because their game was so full of adds it had the playability factor of a block of wood. So maybe we should also show the uninstall record of a specific game too, another indicator of a game to avoid like the preverbal plague.

Yes, in-game adverts on mobile games are a pain in the neck, so much so that I don’t actually bother with mobile games anymore. I still think all games should carry a “Adverts Warning” so that everyone has a choice upfront to decide if they want to install it or not on that basis.

Of course, I can guess why that would never happen, I mean who would actually install a game if they knew up front it had a whole bunch of adverts embedded in it, yep, so what does that tell you.

Stupid adverts, game developers just haven’t a clue what is really killing their revenue.


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