"driving players into their games"

I don't know anyone that plays a game because of the ads that are in it. I must be misunderstanding what they are saying?

presumably they mean adverts elsewhere for the game they are being driven to. Although of course if those other places are also mobile games, there is a certain bizarre oroboros to the whole idea... talk about zero-sum games, this is negative-sum

There was a GDC talk telling a a story where two bored indie game devs made an AI that churns out throwaway low-quality slot machine games as a joke, but actually earned much more money they they’ve expected (thousands of dollars per day). They jokingly told that the reason for high CPU numbers was their “anti-retention” model, where people get so bored by their game that they would literally click ads to escape into another game!

That talk was hilarious, here’s the link: https://youtu.be/E8Lhqri8tZk

It was only ~$250 per day, but still entertaining and worth watching. Thank you!

It does seem to be a circle: games carry adverts. The overwhelming majority of adverts is for more games. If you get the advertised game, you're now seeing ads in that game for more games...

Mobile games are a weird, impossibly self-sustaining beast. Developers (usually have to) dump money into advertising, even as their own games are advertising the competition.

Which as many people I’ve talked with about the mobile game industry tell me… is a cold calculated game of roulette, you burn money in adds trying to get enough attention to yourself that some whales spend enough on in game purchases to let the whole thing make some money… it’s a very “luck” driven market and they often are just experimenting with for side projects, which is one of the many less evil ways money flows into the mobile game advertising ecosystem.

The "luck driven" part is definitely true for Unity's whole niche. You can hear reports online of people "hustling", trying to hit jackpot, leaving jobs in order to spend a year doing random mobile in games to see what sticks.

The ads in smaller games push players away from those games, while pushing ever more players into the F2P megahits that are perpetually at the top of the store charts and still rake in millions per day (and therefore have great big advertising budgets).

There's little point trying to enter the mobile game market at this point.

Perhaps by making games ad supported where there otherwise would've been pay first or subscription based

Free mobile games are full of ads for microtransaction-driven mobile games.

I think the idea was to try and say "by hooking this into an ad platform, you'll get useful analytics like adoption rates, even if you're not serving ads," but the writer couldn't quite sell themselves to it.

I'm gonna guess there was a first draft of the doc that was basically "this is only about ads," but then someone who reviewed the doc said "this sounds terrible, explain how it's more than just ads," so they added a "this isn't just about ads" section and tried to come up with a list of bullet points, but they had very limited success because it wasn't true.

They actually doubled down when they started building their own Ads mediation platform after having an AdNetwork, but they struggled to grow. Their targeting tool "Pinpointer" failed and showed up on an earnings call.

It makes sense considering 99% of Android "games", whose revenue models are entirely based on ads, are built on Unity.