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Ottomateeverything

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Roku TV bricked until agreeing to new terms of service

See title - very frustrating. There is no way to continue to use the TV without agreeing to the terms. I couldn’t use different inputs, or even go to settings from the home screen and disconnect from the internet to disable their services. If I don’t agree to their terms, then I don’t get access to their new products. That...

Ottomateeverything ,

IANAL, and not that it really makes this bullshit any better but…

It’s unlikely that agreeing to terms of service that claim you waive rights to any class action lawsuit would actually hold up as legally binding in court. Many of these agreements aren’t reply binding are already legally gray… Plus, universally vaguely signing your legal rights away in any contract doesn’t hold any water either.

I highly doubt you’d actually lose any rights to a check box that’s bound to “you can’t ever sue us”.

Why are people so antsy to see others in person?

I WFH, every year one of the goals that the rest of the team decides is that it’s “so great” to see each other in person. The past few years haven’t worked out but one did. I spent hours in a couple of airports, the huge expense for the company, I spent days away from my family, and for what? So you could look me in my...

Ottomateeverything ,

I’m actually shocked to find how many people agree with the OPs sentiment, but maybe there’s something about the demographics of who’s using a FOSS Reddit alternative or something. I’m not saying everyone is wrong or has something wrong with them or whatever, but I entirely agree with people finding this valuable, so maybe I can answer the OPs question here.

I’ve been working remotely long since before the pandemic. I’ve worked remotely for multiple companies and in different environments. I am extremely introverted and arguably anti social. I tend to want to hang out with many of my friends online over in person. But that doesn’t mean I think there’s no advantage at all. To be honest, when I first started remote work, I thought the in person thing was total bullshit. After a few meetings my opinions drastically changed.

I’ve pushed (with other employees, of course) to get remote employees flown in at least a few times a year at multiple companies. There are vastly different social dynamics in person than over video. Honestly, I don’t understand how people feel otherwise, especially if they’ve experienced it. I’ve worked with many remote employees over the years and asked about this, and most people have agreed with me. Many of these people are also introverted.

I think one of the big things here is people harping on the “face” thing. Humans communicate in large part through body language - it’s not just faces. There’s also a lot of communication in microexpressions that aren’t always captured by compressed, badly lit video. So much of communication just isn’t captured in video.

Secondly, in my experience, online meetings are extremely transactional. You meet at the scheduled time, you talk about the thing, then you close the meeting and move on. In person, people slowly mosy over to meetings. And after the meeting ends, they tend to hang around a bit and chat. When you’re working in an office, you tend to grab lunch with people. Or bump into them by the kitchen. There’s a TON more socializing happening in person where you actually bump into other people and talk them as people and not just cogs in the machine to get your work done.

I find in person interactions drastically change my relationships with people. Some people come off entirely different online and it’s not until meeting them in person that I really feel like I know them. And then I understand their issues and blockers or miscommunications better and feel more understanding of their experiences.

Maybe things are different if you work jobs with less interdepencies or are more solo. I’ve always worked jobs that take a lot of cooperation between multiple different people in different roles. And those relationships are just way more functional with people I’ve met and have a real relationship with. And that comes from things that just don’t happen online.

Im honestly really curious how anyone could feel differently. The other comments just seem mad at being required to and stating the same stuff happens online, but it just doesn’t. I do wonder if maybe it has to do with being younger and entering the workplace more online or something. But I’ve worked with hundreds of remote employees and never heard a single one say the in person stuff to be useless. And I’ve heard many say exactly the opposite.

Ottomateeverything ,

Yeah, I’ve met many people who literally have never spoken up in a meeting unless called upon… And then you meet them in person and they talk all the time.

Online dynamics are entirely different and it doesn’t work at all for some people.

But for most people it’s functional but much less so than in person. Humans were wired for in person interactions. Not just cropped compressed video of a persons face.

Ottomateeverything ,

As an introvert, as much as I feel weird aroind people, I feel even weirder video chatting with people I’ve never met in person. In that situation, I have no idea how to read people and the expectations are way harder to try to meet. This makes meetings even worse until I meet them.

While I agree that forced in person work daily is insane, the OP is complaining about meeting people in person once after many years, which feels equally as ridiculous. IMO even for widely dispersed teams, meeting a few times a year seems ideal.

Ottomateeverything ,

No.

Ottomateeverything ,

Aren’t a lot of US’s enemies closer if you go around the West instead of to the east? I think your maps backwards.

You Don’t Need to Use Airplane Mode on Airplanes | Airplane mode hasn't been necessary for nearly 20 years, but the myth persists. (gizmodo.com)

You Don’t Need to Use Airplane Mode on Airplanes | Airplane mode hasn’t been necessary for nearly 20 years, but the myth persists.::Airplane mode hasn’t been necessary for nearly 20 years, but the myth persists.

Ottomateeverything ,

The idea that plane safety is tied to everyone together agreeing to and remembering to push a button on their devices is absolutely insane. You think that the regulating bodies that require multiple backups for every possible system also just trust that every passenger pushes a button and every flight attendant actually checks every passengers devices?

Ottomateeverything ,

Apparently without any correction there is significant racist bias.

This doesn’t make it any less ridiculous. This is a central pillar of this kind of AI tech, and they’re trying to shove a band aid over the most obvious example of it. Clearly, that doesn’t work. It’s also only even attempting to fix one of the “problems” - they’re never going to be able to “band aid” every single place where the AI exhibits this problem, so it’s going to leave thousands of others un-fixed. Even if their band aid works, it only continues to mask the shortcomings of this tech and makes it less obvious to people that it’s horrendously inacurrate with the other things it does.

Basically the AI reflects the long term racial bias in the training data. According to this BBC article it was an attempt to correct this bias but went a bit overboard.

Exactly. This is a core failing of LLM tech. It’s just going to repeat all the shit it was fed to it. You’re never going to fix that. You can attempt to steer it in different directions, but the reason this tech was used was because it is otherwise impossible for us to trudge through all the info that was fed to it. This was the only way to get it to “understand” everything. But all of it’s understandings are going to have these biases, and it’s going to be just as impossible to run through and fix all of these. It’s like you didn’t have enough metal to build the titanic so you just built it out of Swiss cheese and are trying to duct tape one hole closed so it doesn’t sink. It’s just never going to work.

This being pushed as some artificial INTELLIGENCE is the problem here. This shit doesn’t understand what it’s doing, it’s just regurgitating the things it’s consumed. It’s going to be exactly as flawed as whatever was put into it, and you can’t change that. The internet media it was trained on is racist, biased, full of undeniably false information, and massively swayed by propaganda on all sides of the fence. You can’t expect LLMs to do anything different when trained on that data. They’re going to have all the same problems. Asking these things to give you any information is like asking the average internet user what the answer is. And the average internet user is not very intelligent.

These are just amped up chat bots with data being sourced from random bits of the internet. Calling them artificial INTELLIGENCE misleads people into thinking these bots are smart of have some sort of understanding of what they’re doing. They don’t. They’re just fucking internet parrots, and they don’t have the architecture to be “fixed” from having these problems. Trying to patch these problems out is a fools errand and only masks their underlying failings.

Ottomateeverything ,

They didn’t? At least in the version I’ve seen, they typed “Fe” and excel auto filled the “buary”. That’s the whole point of the meme.

Ottomateeverything ,

Someone posted the version I saw below. In that one, the person has only typed “Fe”. I haven’t seen one that had “Febu” typed, but yeah, that obviously would throw it.

Ottomateeverything ,

I don’t know, maybe that would work, for this one particular problem. My point is it’s more than that. Even if you go through the trouble of fixing this one particular issue with LLMs, there are literally thousands of other problems to solve before it’s all “fixed”. At some point, when you’ve built and maintained thousands of workarounds, they start conflicting with each other and making a giant spider web of issues to juggle.

And so you’re right back at the problem that you were trying to solve by building the LLM in the first place. This approach is just futile and nonsensical.

Ottomateeverything ,

You’re just rephrasing the same approach, over, and over, and over. It’s like you’re not even reading what I’m saying.

The answer is no. This is not a feasible approach. LLMs are just parrots and they don’t understand anything. They were essentially a “shortcut” that gets something that acts intelligent without actually having to build something intelligent. You’re not going to convince it to be intelligent. You’re not going to solve all it’s short comings by shoe horning something in. It’s just more work than building actual intelligence.

It’s like if a costal town got overrun by flooding from a hurricane. And some guy shows up and is like “hey, I’ve got a bucket, I’ll just pull all the water to the sea”. And I’m like “that’s infeasible, we need a different solution, your bucket even has fucking holes in it”. And you’re over here saying “well, what if we got some duct tape? And then we can patch the holes. And then we can call our friends, and we can all bucket the water”.

It’s just not happening.

Eh I really need to learn more about AI to understand the limits

Yeah. This. You just keep repeating the same approach over and over without understanding or listening to the basic failings of these chat bots. It’s just not happening. Your just perpetuating nonsense.

These things are basically slightly more complicated versions of the auto complete in your phone keyboard. Except that they’re fed hug amounts of the internet. They get really good at parroting sentences, but they have no sense of “intelligence” or what they’re actually doing. You’re better off trying to convince your auto correct to sound like Shakespeare than you are to remove the failings like racial bias from things like Gemini and ChatGPT. You can chip at small corners here and there but this is just not the path forward.

Ottomateeverything ,

I don’t see any reason these kinds of relationships can’t be integrated into generative AI, they just HAVEN’T yet

No, it’s just fucking pointless. You’re talking about adding sand to a beach. These things are way more complicated and trying to shovel these things in just makes a mess. See literally the OP.

each time you increase how the relationships interact, you’re also drastically increasing the size and complexity of the algorithm and model.

No youre not. Not even fucking close. You clearly don’t understand this at all.

The ALGORITHM will always be the same. Except for new generations of these bots. Claiming adding things like racial bias is going to alter the algorithm is just nonsensical.

The MODEL is the huge fucking corpus of internet data. Anything you tack onto it is a drop in an ocean. It’s not steering anything.

Whats changing is they’re editing inputs because that’s all you can really do to shift where these things go. Other changes would turn this into a very different beast, and can’t be done at the fine grained level like “race”.

Claiming this has any significant impact on the size or complexity of any of this is just total hog wash and you must not understand how these work or how big they are.

Ottomateeverything ,

I didn’t say any researcher or anything had named it intelligence. Nor am I trying to be semantically correct.

Read the guys comments. He’s trying to push the idea that we can “change” it’s “understanding” about the things it’s discussing. He is one of the people who has fallen for the tech bros etc convincing people it is intelligent. I’m not fighting semantics, I’m trying to explain to him that it’s not intelligent. Because he himself clearly doesn’t understand that.

Ottomateeverything ,

You seem to think I’m just talking about linearly expanding the vocabulary of the model, I’m talking about giving it an entirely new paradigm through which to work.

No, I don’t. I know exactly what you’re trying to say. But you’re basically talking about trying to make a car fly. That’s not how it was built and it’s goals and foundations are entirely different. You’re better off starting over and building a plane. Your proposal just doesn’t fit within the paradigms of what was built and makes no sense.

I’m talking building in entirely new ways for the AI to understand.

Exactly. But the AI doesn’t “understand” anything. In order to achieve this, you need to build something that “understands” things. LLMs don’t understand anything.

Anyway, this is why no one likes pedants. If you want to actually engage in conversation, sure.

It’s easy to label me as a pendant, but I’m explaining how this stuff works. You clearly have no idea, admitted yourself that you don’t understand, and then keep going. You just keep spewing the same shit, but the shit you’re spewing makes no sense. But you refuse to budge or engage in conversation here.

You’re just talking out of your ass. You’re admittedly uneducated but want to be treated like you’re educated and make any sense. You don’t. This is why people hate people pretending to be experts and talking about things they don’t understand. It’s a waste of time.

If you want to keep living in some imaginary world where this can be done, be my guest, but it’s fake. That’s not how this shit works. Enjoy your imaginary quest though.

Ottomateeverything ,

You can already see this on air quality maps and such anyway. People just don’t care.

Ottomateeverything ,

It’s probably because sending old scraps to Ukraine doesn’t make any money. Sending soldiers to die in Afghanistan was futile and guaranteed the production, sale, and shipment of more military tech/vehicles. Sending shit that was already made just costs money and doesn’t fellate the military industrial complex.

Ottomateeverything ,

The idea that you think people in the Bush administration sent soldiers to Afghanistan to make money is insane, and shows me you have never worked in government or met anyone who has.

The fact that you think this is so insane shows that you have no idea how the actual finances of sovereign currency works. What’d it cost them? Numbers on the “debt” that’s so astronomically high that it’s a joke?

since the US was attacked and the whole world agreed on going into Afghanistan

Yeah, sounds like you “worked” too closely to this militarization. That’s just blatantly false. Portions of the fucking US itself, the target of the attacks, still protested and was against going there.

War is a net negative (look up broken window theory) and everyone in government knows it.

Many huge corporations disagree, and profit off of this. Even in the early 2000s, while it was happening, Haliburton and Cheneys relationship were heavily criticized, because even if it’s some “net” negative or positive, there are people that stand to make a lot of money off one side of that equation.

The point of war is to change the global order, not pad pocketbooks

There were large issues people took with many international conflicts being about money and companies lining pockets. Whether it’s oil in the middle east, fruit in central America, or any of the others, there are many conflicts in the “global order” which have had huge impacts for the aggressor and their economy. If you want to try to justify each one, sure, but many points point to a trend.

Ottomateeverything ,

Same shit in my area. I’ve asked landlords why they’re increasing rents and they say things like “well based on local prices and value of the property…” I’ve asked multiple what makes them think that and it’s always “we have software that estimates what our units are worth”. So now any landlord raises rent and they all raise rent in unison. No renovations or new perks to the property. It’s just “well someone else hiked rent this year so now your new lease does too”.

Ottomateeverything ,

It’s not at all free - you pay for it when you buy their new product. This is just sale incentives.

Ottomateeverything ,

No no no, you’re missing the important piece

On April 1, 2023, three undercover agents met with Faye… Faye asked if the undercover agents were federal law enforcement.

They didn’t have to say yes, because it was April fool’s day!

Ottomateeverything ,

The whole police thing and public accountability kinda makes sense, but I don’t think this means we should be pushing on AI just because the “bad guys” don’t like it.

AI is full of holes and unknowns. And relying on it to do stuff like this is a dangerous precedent IMO. You absolutely need someone reviewing it, yes. But they’re also not going to catch everything and starting with this will mean it will start being leaned on and it will replace thorough reviews by people.

I think something low stakes and unobtainable without the tools might make sense - like AIs reading through game chat or Twitter posts to identify issues where it’s impossible to have someone reading everything, and if some get by, oh well it’s a post on the internet.

But with police behavior? Those are people with the authority to ruin people’s lives or kill them. I do NOT trust AI to catch every problematic behavior and this stuff ABSOLUTELY should be done by people. I’d be okay with it as an aid, in theory, but once it’s doing any “aiding” it’s also approving some behavior. It can’t really be telling anyone where TO look without implying where NOT to look, and that gives it some authority, even as an “aid”. If it’s not making decisions, it’s not saving anyone any time.

Idk, I’m all for the public accountability and stuff like that here, but having AI make decisions around the behavior of people with so much fucking power is horrifying to me.

Ottomateeverything ,

I can’t believe I haven’t seen this until now… That’s quite funny. They sold a pretty decent number of copies too 👀

Ottomateeverything ,

but why go the roundabout way of surveying?

I would not call this “roundabout”. Is it weird? Yes. But I actually would actually argue it’s less roundabout than alternatives. What alternative would you propose?

I suspect most people would say “well why not put out a survey to users and ask…” but that comes with multiple known faults. 1) People’s answers are not always genuine, and they can’t always accurately forsee how they would react, which is a common problem in data gathering. And 2) How do you collect and sample those users? Sure, you have your existing player base, but what happens if your game is in a different genre and your player base wouldn’t be the same?

I suspect that the second point is the bigger reason things shifted this way - ads are common in mobile games and mobile games are trying to sell to people already playing mobile games. Your audience is already reachable through ads, so why build a new system when one is already in place, being built by someone else so you don’t have to do any work but make the ad?

But to circle back… When you ship your game, you’re going to advertise it, and you want people to click on those ads, because that is how you get users. By putting out ads before you’ve built the game, you’re literally sampling by using the exact system you will be using when you ship. And you’re going to get data on whether users actually perform the behavior you want - to click the ad.

I fucking hate this, but to be honest… It’s actually a perfect parallel… They’re measuring exactly the end goal (efficacy of the ads) before they’ve built the product. It’s actually pretty genius and lucky it works out. It’s fucking evil, don’t get me wrong, but it is actually a perfect gauge.

Any alternative, imo, is actually more roundabout.

isn’t it counterproductive to lose users this way?

What users would they be losing? People already playing their game aren’t going to see ads, click them, see they have it installed, then quit. So they’re not losing existing users. They can’t be “losing” users for a game that doesn’t exist yet.

You could argue that the negative reviews on your original game will hurt it, but this process is usually done when they have a steady existing game. And those don’t last forever. Once they’ve peaked, they’ve “served their purpose” in the companies eyes. And these negative reviews are way less impactful on successful games that have thousands of reviews already. And, the game probably isn’t growing so they don’t care. And they’re relatively rare and the “hate” is far less impactful than knowing whether your next game is worth investing in.

You could also argue “well they’re upsetting potential players they would have when the game releases” but they run these at “relatively small” fractions of their intended target audience, and the mobile player pool is gargantuan. On top of that, by the time the game comes out, people likely won’t remember the ad, and they very likely won’t remember it was a bait. And they may even change the art style or theme for release, and just leverage the same mechanics etc.

Ottomateeverything ,

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. What I’ve gathered is that while they may be dumping lumps of money at these campaigns over the analysis’ lifetime (like, hundreds of thousands to a few million dollars), they’re not spending nearly as much as they would on the actual released product and it’s lifetime (likely millions or tens of millions). Because of this, even if they do, they’re only “poisoning” a fraction of their end-target player base… The mobile market is fucking huge. And a lot of these companies are gargantuan.

The other thing is I don’t think most people understand what’s really happening. Many people will be like “I clicked an ad and it went to the wrong thing” and move on. They also may not even remember the game by the time it releases. Except for some of the heavily heavily repeated ones. And even if so… Would you try again eventually? If they repackage the same idea in different art assets and theming or names, would you even know?

I think this also points to something else that I’ve thought a bunch about that is semi related… Are they just poisoning mobile game ads in general? Have people run into this so much that they don’t even trust ads anymore? I know that at this point I just generally don’t believe any of them and I click things less than I did before… Are other people following this same trend? Is that aversion uniformly distributed or is it going to start clogging up the data and undermine the actual purpose of these ad streams?

Ottomateeverything ,

True. Entirely agree.

Ottomateeverything ,

It seems like mobile ads are extremely incestuous. Game A advertises games B to M, which in turn advertise all the others.

In many ways, yes they are. Especially if you like inside individual genres. But mobile games also have so so many players and a rotating player base. Even old games can still attract new players etc. But yes, they are pretty incestuous.

But that’s the market. It’s unlikely to see massive growth like it has in the past. Mobile games have become so common that they’ve pretty much saturated the market and rotate players around. The same idea could kind of be said about things like movies or theaters, but the business still works.

The games themselves probably all work on a freemium model, but even given the whale dynamics there, it seems unlikely that the games produce enough revenue to offset literally billions of ads.

Whale dynamics are a huge part of this, and the spenders on these games absolutely do produce enough to pay for the ads. If they didn’t, the companies wouldn’t be running them.

Let me put it this way - I’ve seen companies run games all the way through the process from “fake ads” to a fully released game… And then shut it down because the players “only” end up spending 2-3x what it cost to acquire them through advertising. 3x their investment is seen as a failure because of the cost to build them. That’s how important it is to them that they run these fake campaigns so they can bail on the failures early. And their targets for successful games land in 3-8x the advertising budge to be successful. Though exact ranges depend on genres and the “longevity” of a player and lots of other things.

I’ll also add, as expensive as you might think running ads is, actual development is significantly higher. Ads will likely be run for a long time on a successful game, but the advertising for 6 months is way cheaper than spending 2 years with engineers, artists, designers, QA, and management all on the project. If they can spend 200k on advertising in 6 months to gauge interest, that’s only costing the salary of like 2 engineers, so it’s highly worthwhile. Most mobile game “success” rates are well below ten percent.

Also, how exactly does your analysis square with the fact that I’ve seen the exact same game ads for years? It doesn’t really make sense to advertise 5 years for such throwaway products.

To be honest, I can’t answer this one with confidence. I’ve seen multiple companies using the strategy I outlined, so I know it’s pretty common. I also know that those companies were copying the strategy from other companies in the space. So I know it’s prevalent. But that’s not going to be every single ad you ever see.

I’ll point out a couple things:

How exact is exact? Are you sure it’s the exact same video down to a T? They may be floating multiple ideas at a time, and games can live in this “fake ad” state for multiple years while they iterate on it. Everything from different sound effects but the same video, different visual themes, running cuts of players doing well vs poorly, changing individual words in the messaging, etc. They then test these against each other to see which do better. I’ve seen some run for a while, but I’ve never felt confident it’s actually exactly the same.

And if that’s the case… Is it possible someone saw that and ad was fake but thought it was a good idea, and now a different company just literally copied and posted the same video?

Second, this may just be a “market analysis” learning vehicle. They may never intend on building the game. For example, if a company is thinking about game A, they may run ads, see it doesn’t work, kill the project, and start considering game B. Now they already have data on how game As ads ran, and they can use their original ads as a “control” and try different variants to see what does better, and then use that data to determine how to best advertise game B. Or they may test game B against game A. Then they might see that it’s doing worse than A, and try something else.

Third, some of this may be chasing measuring “seasonality”. Game genres trend back and forth over time. They may use an old ad they put together to test the waters now to test the water again.

Fourth, I’m not totally convinced these are always studios running the ads. These might be publishers that never intend on building the game, but are trying to find info on what types of games are trending and what genres they should be invested in. Or they might be the advertising networks just running bullshit ads to gauge how much they should bid for ads in a particular genre. Or maybe it’s some giant joint venture like Tencent who owns tons of studios and is gaging what they should be recommending their studios work on.

Data is extremely valuable. In many forms. And many people will pay for that data. And this type of data is such an accurate gauge of actual user behavior because it is literally actually current user data.

Ottomateeverything ,

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.

Ottomateeverything ,

Of course! Glad my arcane knowledge of a shitty industry could be… Helpful? :)

Ottomateeverything ,

Is it though? IANAL, but I feel like this is, at the very least, a gray area.

You can’t purchase anything. The ad didn’t say anything except maybe “play now”, and there is a game and it may even contain a mini game of sorts that’s kinda the ad… The “harm” is like 3 seconds of your time. The “product” doesn’t not do what it says because… It doesn’t exist…

I dunno. Maybe it is. I feel like this is one of those things where “we all know it is” but “legally they probably wiggle their way out of the legal definition, and what are people going to do? Sue them for 5$?”

Not that I agree with it, don’t get me wrong. I think we all know it’s fucking scummy bullshit. But I’m not sure you’d win a court case over it and what harm you could argue it caused you etc.

Ottomateeverything ,

Yeah. All of this rings really true. I find it really sad because not long ago it felt like a lot of games cropped up from small indie groups. Hell, many of the big names now like blizzard were formed by small groups of friends. But it feels like in the 2010s, big entertainment money got involved and now it’s a festering cesspool.

Ottomateeverything ,

While all these “tricks” and “engagement” chasing things are true, that’s just mobile gaming in general these days. It has nothing to do with whether they ran “fake ads” or not. Most successful mobile games are stuffed full of loss aversion, fomo, “time saving”, and “fake sale” monetization.

They’re not making fake ads to get you into those systems. The games just do that and the ad you clicked was trying to see if you were interested in the game in the ad. Even if the game you were linked to doesn’t match.

Ottomateeverything ,

I don’t remember having seen any actually successful lawsuits about this. There have been a few about the fake sale price thing etc, but I haven’t seen anything about these ads for games that don’t exist. Happy to admit I’m wrong if anyone has any proof, but as far as I’m aware, that’s never happened.

These games do end up adding mini games of the advertised game, but that’s not because they’re trying to cover their ass. It’s because the ads are for games they’re considering making, and if the ads do well, they know people will click to the store page. The next step is to build it as a mini game inside another game to get more data on engagement with the actual gameplay mechanics to see if people would actually play and keep playing the game. It’s much cheaper and more efficient to do that as a smaller part inside an existing game instead of building a whole new stand alone game. If they mini game does well, they may move it standalone, but if not, it may just stay as a part of the larger one depending on how much it costs to maintain there.

Ottomateeverything ,

Firstly, this is easier said than done.

User reports are a dangerous step to take, because once they prove they do it, any company can just review bot their competition claiming it’s fake.

They could technically police their own ad networks, but most of these networks are not Apple’s so they can’t. They’d have to just hire people to go play games to get ads to click on to then take down games.

And then what’s the point? Apple is just money chasing like every other company, and most of the huge game companies do this. They’d be shooting themselves in the foot and hurting their own revenue. As much as they like to tout that they protect users, that’s something they like to say because it serves them. At the end of the day, their own best interests are far more important to them.

Ottomateeverything ,

I’m not sure exactly what use of “expensive” you’re getting at, but my primary point was that it’s more expensive to build the full game than it is to develop a 30 second video of it. I don’t cite actual numbers because this is being done by absolutely monstrous companies with millions of dollars to throw around and smaller companies that only have advertising budgets of 5 or 6 figures. It’s also being done for larger scale games like RPGs and smaller scale games like the water drop puzzle stuff.

But we’re talking about 30 second videos, and building 30 second videos can be done by a single artist within a month, maybe a couple months if we’re being generous. This is like, maybe like a 30k investment. And you can get reasonable data out of like 50k in advertising.

But there’s no way in hell your developing these games on an 80k budget. Most of these games are built by multiple engineers, multiple artists, multiple designers, multiple managers, and multiple marketing people. You can’t pay a single one of them on 80k.

These games generally cost millions and millions to build. A single million dollar ad campaign will give you TONS of data. The other thing is that’s work that has to be done anyway so you don’t lose anything by just doing it first to see if it works before building.

If you have a more specific, question, I’m happy to try to outline something else or give numbers based off my experience. But these happen at many different game scales and it’s just hands down cheaper to do a subset of the work.

Ottomateeverything ,

Because no matter how “easy” you think it is to build said game, it’s always easier to build a video. You don’t have to make the whole thing. You don’t have to use unity. You don’t have to have actual mechanics. You don’t need save states. You don’t need an app store listing. You don’t need other screen shots.

But no matter what, when you release the game, you’re going to want to make these ads. So why not just make the ad, then run it, and see if it’s worth it?

As simple as you think it is to make these games work, it’s always cheaper to not do the whole thing and just do a subset. Hell, even making the game and just only doing one level and not making any controls is easier and would still be more than enough to make the video.

The number of people that see it as a scam game is nothing next to the target audience when it’s released. It’s a drop in the bucket. So it’s well worth the savings.

Ottomateeverything ,

As I mentioned in other comments, I’m a software dev that’s worked with companies that were doing this, that were talking to other mobile game companies that were doing this. I hate to say “trust me bro” but, this stuff isn’t something they’re like happy to publicly advertise so it’s not like it’s written up somewhere, AFAIK.

Ottomateeverything ,

Yeah, I hate that this is the state of mobile gaming. And it’s seeped into other game spaces as well. I find it really sad and pathetic, but once big money crept in, it feels like that’s all most games are. It’s basically just pushed me harder towards indie games, and luckily that’s easier to find and discover these days.

Thank you!

Ottomateeverything ,

You might be right though… whatever kind of sea of games I think itch is, the mobile sea may be a lot worse.

It definitely is. I think it’s really hard to comprehend how much garbage is floating around mobile app stores. In recent times, it’s gotten to the point where if you release a new game, even people searching for your exact game name might not find it just because of how much stuff they have to sort through and how much they have to “suppress”. It’s hard to tell how much stuff you’re really up against in those stores because it’s so hard to even see a portion of it. There’s just so much and everything relies on algorithms and recommendations.

Mobile games are also mostly played by hyper casuals, and the space is dominated by dopamine hit money extractors, so people that don’t want that basically left, and everyone that remains is expecting it. If you don’t think you fit into that model, I would also recommend itch or steam because the user bases there will likely match your target audience better, and there’s less stuff to compete with there.

Ottomateeverything ,

Sounds like you’ve got the right mindset and sounds like you have your head on your shoulders. Best of luck!

Ottomateeverything ,

Yeah, I think you’re totally right. I didn’t mean that it started in 2010s, more that it was basically the norm by then and it’s a giant cesspool now. But looking back, my wording wasn’t super clear on that distinction. I do think it was around in the 2000s, but its gotten much worse with time.

I’m also super frustrated as a gamer, but to your point, thank god the indie scene is running strong.

Ottomateeverything ,

What’s even funnier: there are many of these now that are fake. IE, a bunch of you tubers / tiktokers have done videos where they play games to see if they’re real. Then some company goes to make a fake ad, so they take the you tubers video and just put their ad video there instead. So then there are ads with them saying “woah this game is real!” but it’s a fake video of a fake ad. It’s turtles all the way down.

Ottomateeverything ,

There’s a psychological phenomenon around this but I forget the name for it. But yes, there’s evidence that seeing someone play poorly, and thinking “oh that’s easy I could do that” actually does motivate you to want to do it. Like a weird “prove I’m better” self ego stroke sort of thing. And these ads very much are intentionally playing into that.

Ottomateeverything ,

Yeah, I don’t feel foolish at all. I’ve explained this in other comments.

In summary:

I’m not claiming literally every instance is exactly what I’m describing, but it is a very common pattern.

Many of these ads are slight variations to test which performs better.

Many of the “which performs better” are run against long standing ads they’ve had to learn about how to advertise. They may never intend to release the games being advertised. They may know the ad does well, but they built a prototype game and it didn’t monetize, so they’ll never finish it or already killed it. But that doesn’t stop them from running the same ad but with a different visual theme to see which visual theme is more popular right now.

Some of these ads are not run by dev studios but by advertisers or publishers.

Markets are not static - interest in themes, visual styles, and game genres are all extremely “seasonal” and keep changing. They do not “know their market extremely well” because interest keeps shifting. Companies will constantly run ads just to gauge what genres they should be thinking about and to track trends over time. IE, they may run the same exact strategy game ad for many years straight to determine the long term stability of strategy games. Without caring about the specific game idea in the ad itself.

I don’t feel foolish, nor do I think it’s “clever”. I just know from first hand experience that this is how the market works.

Ottomateeverything ,

Why does any dev in the mobile need to deal with companies like this??

I didn’t say I “needed” to. And my job did require it at the time. The circumstances of my employment are kind of out of the scope of this discussion and it’s pretty much entirely irrelevant. I was just stating where I got my information from.

you can just self publish and that’s what people do daily.

Sure. You can. People do. Mobile it’s way less successful though. And I didn’t say anything about what an indie devs options are. You’re reading something very different out of what I’m saying and I don’t know what it is or where you’re getting it from.

Lots of self published games and apps exist and more are available every day.

Exactly. That’s part of what’s going on here.

I am concerned with the larping you’re doing here.

Larping? What am I role playing? And we’re on the internet, so this definitely isn’t “live action” by any means. I don’t understand what you think is going on here.

Why are you trying to scare people ?

Me stating what goes on inside the industry is not “trying” to do anything. I’m just explaining what I’ve seen in it. Whether they choose to be “scared” or not is their own perogative. Would you say I’m trying to scare people if I said many people have died in Gaza in the past few months? It’s just stating what’s happening.

Ottomateeverything ,

The same half dozen vertical slices or renders have existed for years so why have exactly 0 been realised as games?

Already covered above. They likely prototyped it and it didn’t monetize well or something so they axed it.

Because they aren’t games they are bait and switch adverts.

Or they’re neither, and they’re just trying to gauge the market. But sure, you can believe whatever you want.

There’s no market research campaigns and you’ve provided no fucking evidence for your claims at all.

You haven’t either. You’re just assuming a) the worst and b) something that makes objectively less sense - if your whole premise is they’re advertising something fake, how would this even work as bait and switch if people see that’s not what the ad links to?

Your thesis is bunk and I think so are your claims to be a dev too.

And your thesis is “I feel like it’s bait and switch, so it is” and you have no claims of credibility. Nothing I say will prove to you that I’ve worked for some of the largest corporations in the US, so I can’t change your mind.

Ottomateeverything ,

These are all examples of exaggerated and misleading ads. Hell, the heading you linked to is literally called “exaggerated ads”. That’s not “this game does not exist at all” ads, it’s “this isn’t how the game actually plays” ads. The examples this article gives are the like weird “Omg he got me pregnant” ads that then link to a match 3 game and the like. These are a different thing than things like the OP linked which are entirely irrelevant and link to random unrelated games.

The article is from and advertising company that is selling customers who have an existing game who want to improve ad conversions and then lists techniques for doing so. They do not explain the outcome the OP is asking about. Not would they outline the strategy I’m talking about since what in referring to is a process by which you would test new game ideas. That’s not something the company you linked to would be involved in.

There are many many many types of advertising campaigns in mobile gaming. And they serve different purposes. The stuff your outlining is different than the OPs question and my response. They exist in the same market and one existing doesn’t mean the other doesn’t.

Ottomateeverything ,

Can’t find the other comment you made about this anymore, but this is an advertising company that’s helping devs advertise their games, so yeah, it’s not going to talk about advertising non existent apps for market analysis. Instead it talks about twisting games to advertise them with exaggeration and weird hooks to try to convince people to download them… Which is another shitty advertising practice in mobile gaming (yeah, there are a lot of them, shocker) and not really pertinent to the topic/OP.

I also find it funny you left the highlight showing you probably searched exactly for something that proved your point, but it’s listed “exaggeration” in the heading which is entirely different.

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