It seems like if what you’re showing is what you understand they find appealing and fun, then surely that’s what should be in the game. You give them that.
But instead, you give them something else that is unrelated to what they’ve seen on the ad? A gem matching candy crush clone they’ve seen a thousand times?
How is that model working? How is that holding up as a marketing technique???
This is brilliant for them. They basically take the elevator pitches from the concept phase of design and toss them at players to see what sticks. Don’t even have to get to the point of a vertical slice to playtest, just a conceptual animation of gameplay.
Yeah, this makes me so fucking mad as a player but like… It actually works super well so I can’t blame them.
Mobile gaming is full of shitty elevator pitches and super high failure rates so it just kinda… Makes sense.
But I still hate it.
Absolutely, I hate it, too. It’s like how the more I learn about advertising, the more disgusted I become as I discover that it’s all just malicious psychology to push the buttons in your brain to get you to do what they want, but it’s still brilliant psychology that they’ve honed after more than a century of practice. I hate it, but I can’t deny it works.