Mobile Marketing

 Guess what guys?

My world of gaming and the world of mobile gaming almost never intersects if I can help it. I mean sure; sometimes I'll end up playing through 'Deus Ex: The Fall' whilst blindly pretending that the game is not just a sub-par port of a crappy mobile adaptation. Sometimes I'll buy a game that was lingering on my wishlist and frown a little once I realise it's control scheme is eerily similar to a mobile games'. (As far as I can tell, Tower of Time was never a mobile game; I guess their UI guy just had very specific tastes.) But when it comes to the trends of development that mobile games are going through, I'm totally unplugged from that world! Maybe that is to my detriment- I mean, I've got no way of proving otherwise! Let me just take a quick lookie at some of their ads... OH GOD, IT's ALL TERRIBLE!

I don't want to be the 'laugh at them because they're not me' kind of guy, but when you look at modern mobile games that are dominating the adverts all over Youtube, is there any other way to really react to them? It's not that they're rudimentary, or that their simple, that would be fine; it's that they're utterly and totally devoid of passion and life. We slam Ubisoft for turning AAA development into as stale of a process as they physically can, well at least they're not literally developing to a corporate written mandate. I'm talking city builder games plus 1. At the very least the big games of today aren't using that same Unity game framework I found for free a while back, but they are putting out the same insanely low quality ads for the small buff in retention rate they earn from viewers who stick around to mock them. And I'm going to be honest; these are the sorts of ads that make the entire industry look bad.

When I see swinging arguments from people who don't know better telling me how gaming is a merit-less and vapid pursuit not even worth being considered in the same breath as real art, I think about these ads and I can't really say much in response, now can I? People who assume that Grand Theft Auto is about running over prostitutes for 'points' feel validated by the barrage of awful mobile ads they skip past everyday online. Ads where we see people running through light gates with random 'rewards' in each gate that feel lifted off some Buzzfeed article about what life objects 'speak to the real you'. Ads where we see brain numbingly simple puzzles being screwed up whilst an awful TTS sounding voice bemoans their own stupidity. And of course, Ads where a cadre of simply manic and unhinged people tell me excitedly about how they've found "tHe ReAl PUll ThE PIn GaMe!'

Can I just say this here, right now, as a personal cleanse of my demons. I hope 'Evony: The King's Return' is thrown to the ghost corridor in Morioh with the grapping hands that rip apart your soul and send you to a purgatory wherein you're doomed to try and atone for unforgivable sins. I cannot accurately convey, without screaming (which doesn't come across very well in text) how sick I am of seeing the Evony ads! I can't be the only one who saw those original ads for the 'pull the pin game' and thought: Wow, this looks like hot trash. But to then, months later, be barraged by insane people telling me "Oh, it's okay! I've found the real game for you!" is just utterly maddening. I don't want to play your awful mindless trash game, I'd rather trap my testicles in a tumble dryer and set it for the hour-long spin. (Phew, got that out of my system.)

But as far as I can tell from the adverts I've seen; the two big mobile games currently dominating the marketing time of Youtube is State of Survival and Rise of Kingdoms; both using two different, yet eerily similar, advert styles. State of Survival used to go around with these very prototypical adverts where attractive female characters from the game would find themselves in sudden peril and have to fight for their lives in their tank tops through overly rushed animations that speed through events nearly quicker than you can process them. And those adverts, don't you know, have no reflection on the base game which is actually just a town builder with some very rudimentary tower defence gameplay slapped on for meat. Which is more than most town builder games do, to be sure, but not really anything to write home about.

I can only assume that their original campaign ended up earning the company a bit of money, because now State of Survival almost exclusively do these terrible live-action ads that portray different actresses (a term I'm using very loosely) acting as executives from the company going around and offering coupons in heavy eastern European accents with genuinely godawful performances.  They've also thrown up an apology ad or two, but only as a ploy to throw more sign-up coupons to desperately grab at new users, because another Mobile Game marketed their own false marketing apology and turned it into a marketing stunt. All of these games spend every last red cent into these marketing stunts, whilst underneath it all their base games are just utterly pathetic. State of Survival isn't worth more than an afternoon of play, and even for a 'free product' there are genuinely worlds better options out there for your time. 

And then there's Rise of Kingdoms, a mobile game so desperate to cement itself as the next 'Clash of Clans' but lacking any of the production talent to come close to where that game was in it's prime. All of Rise of Kingdom's adverts are based around the 'leader' characters of their game role-playing as players who flaunt their in-game successes as real world social currency in predictably banal displays. I've yet to see them hit the lowest common denominator and go for sex appeal, but I did see one advert in which the Jesus-looking character admonished a ratty Cleopatra by saying "I need a wife, not an apprentice" which felt like it was scratching at that door. Oh, and the meat of all these adverts is, again, clearly non-native English speakers badly reading scripts in which they desperately try to pretend their city builder game has the grand strategy depth of a Civilisation game. It doesn't. All they have is a supremely bland zoom-out map that you can have fights in. Other than that, it's exactly the same as every other trash city builder on the market.

Recently I've made the rather grim discovery that there are actually Youtubers who form communities around covering and supporting these digital dumpster fires. Including one man who seems to be a career Rise of Kingdoms player, which is about along the same lines as putting 'professional dumpster diver' as your legal occupation. All this means that within the apparent niche that gaming is still considered, there is a niche even under us of actually dedicated mobile games fans towards which these adverts are their entire gaming world; as utterly morbid as that sounds. But I suppose that is the way of life, the world turns and mobile ads are still, after all this time, utterly pathetic. I suppose it is true what they say, money can't buy taste. Or effort. Or talent. Or worth as artists.