Game Theory - Are Your Mobile Games ILLEGAL?

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

I'm sure you've been playing a game or watching a video on your phone when suddenly it is interrupted by an ad for a weird and fake-looking mobile game. I've seen a lot of channels try out these games to see if they play as advertised, but they haven't covered what I find most interesting about these games. Are they LEGAL? False advertising is a dangerous game, Theorists, so why do these mobile games get away with it? Let's find out!

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Epic. That villager over there, romance them to have an experience that is best described in one word. Epic! Epic! So go get a warrior. You can do anything you want in this world. What are you waiting for? Your epic adventure awaits in your pocket. In your pocket.

Click to download today. Oh wow, that looks really cool. Epic, actually. I just have to head on over here and download it. Hello internet. Welcome to Game Theory. The show that, like most content on YouTube, is ad-supported.

But that doesn't mean we have to like them. Case in point, if you've spent a lot of time using the mobile version of YouTube, you've probably seen mobile game ads like this. And this. My father is the chief of nephew of neffy. Take him. And this. Sometimes I just want to bury my head in my hands and scream.

Ads that are not only ridiculous, but also totally misleading as to the actual contents of the game. Oh yeah, you're probably smart enough for the ads not to work on you, so good job, first off. But if you were drawn in by the promise of some simple logic puzzle game and actually downloaded the thing, what you would get wouldn't be a quality gaming experience. It would be quite a surprise. Here's the ad. Here's the actual game. It's tile matching with town building elements.

Absolutely nothing like what the ad promises. It'd be one thing if these obnoxious ads were just everywhere. Fine, I get it, chill for your game. But it is a different story when the ads for a completely different product. Oh, wait, wait, wait, no, no, no, sorry. Not a completely different product. Those mini games, as they call them, with their completely different art style and gameplay style from the rest of the other 99% of the game, do happen.

They do. They occasionally pop up as daily bad dreams that you have to make sense of in order to get like a couple extra gold or whatever. In fact, one of the members of Team Theorist over here, Alyssa, actually plays garden scapes and homescapes, and she can say firsthand that she's only gotten these things twice, twice in the whole game. How long have you been playing this game, Alyssa?

Long enough to get to level 965. There you have it. Nope, the only bad dream I need to make sense of today is how any of this is legal. Why do mobile game companies do this? Or maybe the better question, how are mobile game companies able to do this? Like, shouldn't this kind of misleading advertising be illegal?

What is really going on here with these ads? And why isn't anybody doing anything to stop it? Let's take a look at the landscape from the last couple years. Misleading mobile game ads come in a lot of forms. In its laziest form, it just straight up takes gameplay footage from an entirely different game to pass itself off as something that it's not. Take, for example, the game, new mobile game, you can do whatever you want. And yes, that is literally the name of the game.

And if that right there doesn't tell you something about the creative bankruptcy of some of these companies, I don't know what does. To me, this one just reeks of them trying to optimize their game's title so they could show up at the top of search results for anyone who went to the app store and typed new mobile games. I played it and I got to say no, I could not do whatever I wanted, which was play a better game. Anyway, if you pay attention for more than two seconds to this game's trailer, you'll probably notice that, despite the fact that it's purporting to be an ad for a mobile game, the gameplay footage has a mouse cursor in it. That's because the footage was taken from a city builder game for the PC called Banished, which, by the way,

is an incredibly relaxing way to spend time if you're cooped up indoors and long to answer the call of the wild by creating a colony out in the wilderness. But apparently one of the things that you can do in new mobile game you can do whatever you want includes very obviously stealing the footage of one game to promote something completely different. Then there's the browser based game Dragon Awaken, a title that somehow does the impossible and manages to be even more generic than new mobile game you can do whatever you want. It's a game that used footage that looked like this to market a game that looked more like this. And this isn't a simple case of a game using a cutscene or cinematic that diverged from the actual gameplay. The footage here isn't part of the game, nor was it created by a marketing team affiliated with Dragon Awaken. It was straight up lifted from the trailer for a completely different product called Project Awakening, which, it should be said, has nothing to do with Dragon Awakened despite the similarity of the titles.

But again, another instance of a mobile game ad outright stealing the footage of another game to market itself. But then we get to the next tier, Galaxy Brain Status. Rather than copying someone else's homework, they've taken to creating entirely new ads that don't resemble existing games, including the game that they're advertising. These are your pull the key ads, or steal the loot, or give the suffering people a very obvious solution to their plight ads. And it's nothing like the game that they're tricking you into downloading. And the most ironic part of it is that the game in the ads is so simple to make, why wouldn't you just make that into the game?

Oh wait, someone finally did. It's called Hero Rescue, and it's filled with ads. Well, maybe we shouldn't be given them too many points for originality because all the mobile game companies seem to converge onto the same fake game design. A series of compartments separated by barriers, challenging you to unite a person with a pile of gold without getting burned to death by lava along the way. Or the hundreds of variants with things like fish or kitties. And if you're wondering why these mobile game companies all converged onto the same ad concept, well, it can actually be explained via biology. It's just evolution. Convergent evolution, to be more specific.

Convergent evolution is how you'll have two animals from completely different parts of the animal kingdom who seem to evolve similar characteristics, like how bats as mammals split away from birds way back in the family tree before they evolved wings, and yet many generations later those two different branches both evolved wings that operate in pretty much the exact same way. Now for the comparison, if you have mobile game advertisers all across the web throwing ideas against a wall to see what sticks, eventually they're going to converge on the few ideas that do really work well for engaging users. And if you think that throw ideas against the wall to see what sticks sounds like an ineffective way to do marketing, well, this is not only a common technique in online marketing, it is pretty much the default practice at this point.

It's commonly referred to as AB testing, or split testing. The idea is that instead of relying on a designer's intuitions about what would make an engaging ad, you take two very similar ads, maybe with slightly different wording or a slightly different color scheme, and see which is going to be more appealing by running both of them at the same time to see which one gets more clicks. You choose that one, and then, then you continue to iterate.

Back in the day when YouTube had annotations, is anyone old enough to remember that? At this point, we would actually run A-B tests on the channel all the time to see what would get you guys to click more. If you go back to the older videos, I would assume that a lot of those tests are still probably there. That's how we learned that the left side of the screen is stronger than the right side, and that the top of the screen is stronger than the bottom, and that dogs are stronger than cats. And that two arrows to the link in the description is the best number of arrows to use. Big stuff, small stuff, all A-B-tested as,

well as we could with what rudimentary tools YouTube gives you. It's fun, it's science, and ultimately small little optimizations like that when added together go a long way to help your channel grow. But when you're talking about mobile game companies, it's not just two ads. We can be talking on the scale of thousands. Here we have an American flag, different colors, the blues, different messages above. So you'd send two identical ads with different colors? Maybe thousands.

What it is is, is what can make people react? Remember, there's so much noise on your phone. What is it that makes it go, I'm gonna stop and look. Now, granted, that's 60 Minutes interview was with a political consultant who worked on the 2016 presidential election, where both candidates campaign spent a combined $81 million on Facebook ads, which allows them to test a lot more in terms of volume. But the basic principle is the same.

Much like evolution isn't a designed process, but rather a series of random mutations gradually stumbling towards what works best, ads can be iterated on in much the same way, only a whole heck of a lot faster, because now you're doing it at the speed and scale of the internet. And let's be clear, This really is about what can make people react. They're trying to engage people, capture your attention,

get you to watch long enough so you might just click the button to install their app. And they're not just looking for any player. These companies are looking to hook the whales, the power players that are going to get addicted to the game, the ones that will spend the most money inside of the game. They're basically using it as targeted advertising for a specific type of player. They're power players, the people who spend the most time, spend the most money in in-app purchases.

They just throw in whatever they know. will appeal to that specific type of player. And for whatever reason, this kind of animation and gameplay concept is just incredibly sticky for the power players. And creating a five-second animation that'll play on a Twitter ad is way cheaper than actually creating a full-on game to try and ride the wave of this popular trend. But this can't be legal, right? Advertising a completely different product than the one you're selling? Whatever happened to truth in advertising?

I mean, if I'm ever sponsored in any way, I have to declare that up, down, and sideways. And yet these companies are getting away with stealing footage or completely. misrepresenting their games? How? Well, if you want to know the answer to that question, just ask the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, who you might also know as the governing body responsible for rules around disclosing sponsorships for influencers. According to the FTC website, quote, when consumers see or hear an advertisement, whether it's on the internet, radio, or television, or anywhere else, federal law says that ad must be truthful, not misleading. Alright, good so far. Now the bad news, or more importantly, the loophole. Enforcing these rules, for misleading mobile game ads is probably not very high on their list.

Again, from the same FTC info page, quote, the FTC looks especially closely at advertising claims that can affect consumers' health or their pocketbooks. Given that people who download a mobile game based on a misleading ad aren't experiencing negative health outcomes, and in most cases, aren't even spending any money to install this free app, the FTC likely has much bigger fish to fry. Say, for instance, products with false claims around preventing disease,

a complaint saying, hey, I caught a highly contagious virus because this mask didn't comply with the filtration standards that the advertiser claimed. Probably gonna rank a lot higher than, hey, I spent five minutes installing this mobile app and it wasn't like what the ads showed me. When you look at the mobile game apps that the FTC has gone after, it usually involves ads that make false claims like, your phone has a virus. Tap here to remove it. This was the case for an ad that targeted millions of Android users.

The product, as it turned out, was not in fact a virus scanner, but actually a ringtone bundle that build users for $999 a month. And Jesta, the company selling those ringtones, was required to give automatic refunds to people who were lured in by the false advertising. Another case where a site or app got sued for fake or misleading advertising, Match.com, who became a target for FTC scrutiny based on the fact that they would have fake profiles on the site that would message users that could only be read if you paid for a subscription. Humanity is just the worst to itself. If you look through the complaints about misleading ads that have led to actual FTC action, they all have one thing in common. The fact that these misleading ads get people to spend money on something that was either a fake product or not what it claimed to be.

However, these misleading mobile game ads seem to fall short of that. It's true, mobile games do have in-app purchases, but odds are that by the time you start paying money for imaginary currency in that match three game, you're already past the point of realizing, Hey, wait a minute, this isn't the game that I saw in the ads? It's much more difficult for people to claim that when they bought gems or silver in the game after playing it for 30 minutes, that they didn't know what they were signing up for. They did, and they spent money anyway, FTC ain't gonna care.

If it feels like mobile games are getting away with blatantly false advertising more than any other kind of product on the market, yeah, you're not wrong. It's probably because they operate on a business model that kind of protects them from these sorts of claims. It's hard for people to claim that they were actually being faked out at the time they hit the purchase button. The misleading ad isn't trying to get you to pay money, it's simply trying to get you to install a free app, which will then go on to try and sell you in-game items. when you've spent some time in the app to learn what kind of a game it is that you really just downloaded.

There's an old saying about how it's not illegal if you don't get caught. And while that is certainly not true, there is a lot of truth to the claim that a crime that doesn't get persecuted, might as well not be a crime. After all, if you're blatantly breaking the law and nobody's out there trying to stop or punish you, why would you stop? In short, are these misleading mobile game ads breaking the law? Is probably the wrong question to be asking.

Sure, yes, these ads are misleading and not truthful in the slightest, putting them likely in strong violation to FTC policy. But until the legal action starts, expect to keep seeing these ads every time you open up an ad-supported app. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching!