Royal Match must die

 No more chances

Have you ever hated before? No, that's not right. What I should say is: have you ever been taken by Hatred before? Subsumed by a flowering blossom of fiery passion that writhes and seethes through your veins, scorching and seering and pumping from the seat of the heart and deadening the wisdom and calm of the house of reason? Have you ever lost yourself in a sea of red- cast into a scarlet stay of blistering stars, each one a white-hot sun of detestability glittering and falling like comets scarring great tracks of carnage and wreckage upon the surface of reason? Have you ever felt like that? I have. Often, actually. Just about every time I find myself affronted, no- accosted by the face of an Ad campaign right out of the seventh gate of hell to rustle my feathers. Everytime I have to endure one of those god damned Royal Match adverts.

See, I'm not inconsolable bore. I fully understand that underneath the faux credibility and 'professional masque' of the games industry there lies a seedy underbelly of opportunistic garbage we call the larger mobile gaming market. Just as I understand that, unfortunately, the rivers of gold run far more resplendent down in those musty sewers than our side of the market has ever, and likely will ever, see. (And, of course, I know that there are sole separate gems upon the mobile market too. Again, I'm no bore.) It's no great insult to my person that in the days of one of the most refreshing and heart warming video game releases of the current decade: Baldur's Gate 3, a mobile game will swoop up more concurrent players than that masterpiece will ever see during it's entire lifetime. I understand that's the way the world works and I don't care. But good god, why would you market that to me?

A great disservice within the marketing industry lies in how marketing companies often, and wantonly, fleece the clients they proport to deliver for. I merely need to hop on to my Youtube to be assailed to endless advertisements trying to court services to help deal with my pension or guide me through the menopause or any manner of things that have never once pertained to my very obvious online presence. I'm no ingenious hacker-man who disguises his online profile from the advertising market, I'm pretty much an average joe who Googles and Youtubes anything that comes to his mind, thus providing what I can assume is a pretty coherent modal from which online services can categorise and market to me. Trust me, Amazon knows how to keep my wallet perpetually drained and I use that particular website sparringly. Which can only mean that the marketing companies working for these conglomerates are purposefully taking exorbitant budgets and totally ignoring decently robust 'demographic' selectors during marketing campaigns, wasting millions as they go. I swear, the entire marketing industry is a roiling toilet of talentless hacks just waiting for the bubble to burst. But for me Royal Match hits different.

Because yes, Royal Match is yet another example of a product wasting time and money advertising where it has no business to be- but being a game, in it's most vapid sense, I can't help but feel the hand of intention behind this. I mean I know these idiots are just casting a wide net, without doubt- but I still sense, or perhaps just manifest, the presumption that because I am someone who enjoy games I am the target audience for something as vapid, pathetic and ridiculous as bloody ROYAL MATCH! And that presumption just makes me seethe. It worms through the cracks of my skin and melts into my being. It taunts me, haunts me, and for the way it controls my emotional state one might say it flaunts me as well. I despise being considered as living on the same planet as Royal Match enjoyers; and I despise even more the people they employ to make that happen.

You see, unfortunately it would seem that Royal Match (Which is already a two year old game, I might add) seems to have some sort of presence down here in England. Typically if you live outside of America you don't have to deal with cringeworthy celebrity figures that you recognise clogging up the advertisement space because of American Centralism convincing advertising firms that a celebrity unheard of in America is no celebrity at all. Which is probably the state that Royal Match was in last year when they were desperately buying Cameo's off of television actors (Rick Hoffman from 'Suits' is an example I can confirm) in order to buy themselves some veneer of legitimacy. (They couldn't even figure out how to scrub the 'cameo' watermarks off the ads. It was pathetic.

But in the time since then it seems that Royal Match has made a bit of money, and that naturally means that in the same vein as any similar mobile phone game maker: all that money went directly into marketing, totally skipping the development side of the company altogether. (Why bother develop anything, it's just a match tiles game!) Now we see professionally made adverts with British 'sellouts'- I mean 'icons'- like the members of 'Take That'? (Did I mention 'washed up'? I feel that needs to be mentioned as well.) Endless reality show presenters, those who facilitate and put a face to the lowest common denominator of English Entertainment. Oh, and I can't forget the half-melted wax sculpture of Simon Cowell, these days resembling a poorly made wiccan voodoo doll of his former self. (The dangers of plastic surgery, everybody.) 

These relics of a slowly dying form of rapidly antiquating entertainment have the sheer brass gall to tell me the values to which I should find value in this unimaginative mobile hogwash. What's that Amanda, it doesn't have ads? Neither do most real games that I play, it's kind of a quirk of the medium you might find! If I got shoved out of Rapheal's Last Dance in order to have an advert for improving my Credit Score, I'd be a little bit miffed! What was that Dec? The game's graphics are gorgeous? No offence, but I highly doubt you have even the most remote frame of reference to make that extremely bold assumption. (It's animation is generic and it's art direction is aggressively mediocre, for the record.) It's really easy, everyone assures me? Well then maybe market it to game's journalists then, strike where the market is, why don't you!

I don't mind mobile game ads, just to be clear; because they're forgettable. But to be assaulted by a never ending onslaught of them, that just feels like I'm being begged to bite back. Because I'll be honest, it's clueless strawmen backing up a crappy no-talent product lying with confidence, and I've always had a issue with confident liars. You'd like to believe in some sort of enduring personal integrity thrumming through the heart of 'the human condition'- but I suppose maturing is learning that isn't true. Honesty is a myth credited to ancient dreams of golden haired heroes from Greek antiquity. Hope is a construct of a cold unfeeling world designed to give us the tools to think we can stand up to it. And Royal Match is the true face of the narcissistic angel who collapsed from the heavenly gates into the bog of burning pandemonium to crown himself 'Satan'. That is why Royal Match must die- to prove me wrong and reaffirm that some small spark of worth still exists in this twisted and sullen experiment we call conscious existence.