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How Free-to-Play Mobile Game Creators Get Rich Off of False Advertising
All that Mafia Wars and Farmville spam in your Facebook news feed was paying off for someone
If you’ve recently played any mobile game — particularly the “free to play” — you’ve probably seen more full-screen interstitial ads for other mobile games than you could ever possibly want. The reason is simple: A North American mobile interstitial ad can earn a solid $5 CPM. Translated: Each viewed video is worth more than listening to one stream on Spotify. Today, you can reliably earn more by spamming the App Store with slot machine games than by recording an album.
In this particular flavor of predatory advertising, free games earn money by showing ads for other free games, bouncing users from one honeypot to another until they eventually land in one in which they’re willing to buy some honey. It’s equivalent to running ads for free tastes of soda between every sip of a water fountain — a momentary loss of willpower leads into another new land of dopamine stimulation.
But the ads weren’t free; that money came from somewhere.
More specifically: Those free-to-play game ads were purchased by earlier mobile game dopamine addicts. I don’t use the “A” word lightly here. The behavioral pattern that generates more than 90% of mobile game revenues is the same one that powers Las Vegas. Even for titles that aren’t explicitly trying to coerce or trick players into spending money, the most important metric for all of these titles is engagement: how often you play, and for how long.
Any game advertiser can promote their game as pretty much anything they like.
Playrix is a Russian developer of mobile games. Their current roster of titles includes well-known copycat games Township, Fishdom, Gardenscapes, Homescapes, and Wildscapes. Township is a city-building game inspired by the legacy of Farmville; all of the other titles are “Match 3” games inspired by the success of Candy Crush. The two founders of Playrix are both billionaires.
The basic marketing formula for free-to-play casual games has certainly evolved over the past decade, but it still reduces to a…
