Top 3 Weirdest Mobile Game Advertisements

Top Three Weirdest Mobile Game Advertisements

Odd as they may be, these ads are getting the job done!

Whether on YouTube or Instagram, I’m sure you all must have seen at least one mobile game advertisement. One common trope with today’s mobile game advertisements is that they tend to mislead their audience. 

You might have come across these weird ads while scrolling through social media: In the ad for the strategy game “Game of Sultans”, a sultan is fat-shaming his daughter; in the match-three puzzle game “Lily’s Garden” ad, women use washing machines as vibrators. The crazy part about both of these is that they have nothing to do with the actual gameplay. If the strangeness of mobile game advertisements has sparked your interest, read on to see three of the most absurd ads and why mobile game companies choose this advertising route. 

Project Makeover

Project Makeover
Image courtesy of Project Makeover

Nothing is quite as bizarre as the misogyny in the Project Makeover advertisements. In one of its adverts, a girl is sitting on a toilet seat when her date arrives. The player has to make her look presentable for the date, only to end up making mistakes, like shaving her eyebrows off and waxing her legs with duct tape. If this isn’t problematic enough, the other ads for the game go even further by showing the main character covered head to toe in mud and wanting to attract a guy’s attention by undergoing a makeover. 

These ads show the main character—a girl—trying to look better for men she either wants or is already going out with. They point out her major physical flaws, like body hair, natural eyebrows or acne, that need fixing. She is always in a chaotic state and progressively gets worse by the end of the ad, so much so that it’s hard not to empathize with her. A Tweet about these ads says,  “Somebody needs to free the girl in the project makeover ads why are they doing this shit to her.”

Episode

Episode 
Image courtesy of u/ADifferentRandomBoi on Reddit

The interactive story game Episode uses sexual elements in many ads to attract customer attention. One of its ads shows the female character in a suggestive pose, with the policeman looking at her inappropriately. In another ad, a man desperately waits for his wife to come out of the bathroom. Unfortunately for him, she has fallen asleep on the toilet, and the only options the story offers are for him to either pee in her mouth or to divorce her. 

The ads always feature some sort of sexual prompts or other out-of-this-world options for players to choose from. Redditors often break down these ads’ strange art styles or simply poke fun at them. 

Merge Mansion

Merge Mansion
Image courtesy of Merge Mansion

Merge Mansion is the final and most famous entry on this list. This match-three puzzle game had such a complex storyline in its advertisements that YouTubers have made videos analyzing them and trying to understand their sequence. 

The game’s story goes like this: Your character is a woman who lost her house in a fire, and her fiancé left her at the altar or died in the house fire—it’s unclear which of the two is the real version of the story. After undergoing all this, she decides to move in with her grandmother, only to discover her grandmother is acting suspiciously. The ads all question the grandmother’s actions, with the game’s main tagline being “What’s grandma hiding?” 

The game developers have their own YouTube channel dedicated to advertisements ready for the players to watch and re-watch to piece together grandma’s backstory. In one ad, the police arrest the grandma, and as the police car drives away, we see that she has “he is alive” written on the palm of her hand while the granddaughter is looking at her in shock. Other ads of this game also show her baking pies suspiciously or entering secret rooms inside the mansion. 

What is going on with mobile game ads?

Now that we have seen three of the weirdest mobile game ads, you might wonder why mobile game companies will use these strange tactics. The simplest and the most accurate answer would be—to attract attention by whatever means necessary. 

If we look at these three cases one by one, Project Makeover’s advertisements are trying to make potential players frustrated. This is a failure-based advertising strategy made to make ad viewers feel like they can do better and thus download the game. 

Episode’s advertising strategy takes a slightly different approach. It reels viewers in with the promise of experiencing a brand-new sexually charged reality akin to the feeling of reading a Wattpad fanfic, also giving them the opportunity to create episodes out of their own stories. 

Finally, Merge Mansion’s attention-grabbing tactic is to build a narrative jam-packed with drama and mystery. 

The success of these strategies is evident in the fact that these games have over 50 million, 100 million and 10 million downloads respectively. These weird ads are getting developers and their games a lot of attention on a wide variety of social media platforms; whether it is just people cringing at the absurdity of the ads or genuine interest, it doesn’t matter! The bottom line for these game developers is that if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.

With odd and cringy mobile game ads successfully translating to downloads, we might be seeing more and more companies adopting this tactic to promote themselves. Hopefully, companies work as hard on creating engaging and safe gaming experiences as they do on peculiar advertisements; otherwise, this attention might be hard to hold on to. 

Also read:

Header image courtesy of Pixabay

SHARE THIS STORY

Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on linkedin
Share on email

RELATED POSTS

Pryon Secures US$100 Million in Series B to Advance AI in Knowledge Management

Pryon Secures US$100 Million in Series B to Advance AI in Knowledge Management

Pryon Inc., a North Carolina-based company specializing in integrating artificial intelligence (AI) with knowledge management, has completed a Series B investment round, raising US$100 million. The funding was led by Thomas Tull’s US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT), with contributions from both new and existing investors, including Aperture Venture Capital,

Amazon Launches Upgraded AI Enhanced Fire TV Sticks

Amazon Launches Upgraded AI Enhanced Fire TV Sticks

Amazon has rolled out a series of updates to its Fire TV offerings. The new features include an improved conversational voice search powered by generative AI and Fire TV Ambient Experience advancements. Among the latest hardware releases are the Fire TV Stick 4K Max and the Fire TV Stick 4K, incorporating the enhanced Fire TV Ambient Experience.

Interactive Learning with Augmented Reality

Interactive Learning with Augmented Reality: Applications, Benefits and Challenges

Ever wondered what it would be like if your textbooks could talk, if the illustrations in your lessons could come to life, or if you could step into history rather than just read about it? Welcome to the world of augmented reality (AR) in education! Like a magic wand, AR can turn the abstract into tangible and the mundane into extraordinary, unfolding boundless educational possibilities.

How AI Threatens Your Password Security

Unlocking the Dangers: How AI Threatens Your Password Security

You may have heard of artificial intelligence (AI) technology’s many cool capabilities, such as assisting doctors or predicting the weather. However, there is something not-so-cool we need to discuss: AI could make our passwords less safe, which is concerning.

What Does Gen-Z Want in a Career

What Does Gen-Z Want in a Career?

Most managers feel that Gen-Z is “difficult to work with”, entitled and easily offended. The prevalent notion is that this generation is prone to distraction, lacks tech skills and is deficient in productivity and motivation. They want to butt heads, have their say and not listen. Harsh, yes. These studies perhaps ignore that most of the Gen-Z workforce graduated and entered the workforce during COVID-19.