Opinion: The Big Business of Mobile Games

This week mobile game developer SayGames LTD made headlines following what appeared to be a shameless rip-off of last year’s surprise indie hit Unpacking by Witch Beam. The concept behind Unpacking is relatively simple; you unpack boxes and track the life of a girl who accumulates belongings as she moves through the phases of life. It’s a pretty fun point-and-click zen game that was naturally going to spawn imitators. SayGames’s version was too close for a lot of people with Unpacking Master being an ad-ridden version of the same game and the original developers are not making the money they deserve for coming up with everything that SayGames was profiting on.

This highlights one of the biggest issues with the modern mobile video game market: ads on content that is vaguely copyrighted. For example, SayGames has an unlicensed Lego building game, down to the fact that commercials show the kits in multiple bags that are numbered with instructions. There are so many games flooding the top 50 (33 out of 50 as of writing this) on Google Play’s store that are rudimentary puzzle games that feature mandatory ads after each level. They take many forms like Sudoku puzzles, solitaire, match three puzzles, merge games, word searches, generic versions of plinko, and generic versions of carnival games.

Ultimately, the free market will decide if these games are worth keeping this high up and if the ads are too much to deal with, however overabundance of ads is not necessarily the issue. The broader issue is games that offer the player the chance to win real money in exchange for their time playing the game. When one plays any of these games, most of the ads they see will be for other third party games, a lot of which offer real cash prizes should the person win. I downloaded two of these apps, both of which I found were made by the same developer (Shape Keeper LTD), and decided to put them to the test to see how realistic the ads are for the games.

The first game is called Lucky Money and the first thing that the player is greeted with is a chance to invite other people to play the game in exchange for tokens. The player is immediately given a free scratch card that, should they win, will give them 20,000 tokens. Not surprisingly, when one scratches off this card, they immediately win and get an extra 5,000 additional tokens. After that happens, the player is given a stack of cards for the day. When they press the little information button to explain, they see and ad. After six cards, they need to watch another ad to get the next batch, however the player will win every single card that they are given up until that point. There is also a spinning wheel that gives additional tokens and each spin requires an ad view or spending 4,000 tokens. For the sake of this experiment, I used all three ad-sponsored spins. There is also a slot machine which also requires ad views or tokens to use. It is worth noting that of the eight ads seen so far, all have been for apps that promise monetary payout should the player win. Since play has begun, there has been exactly one “game” that did not net some kind of in game currency.

After completing the initial batch of games, I had 53,750 tokens and $9.25 in tokens that seem to indicate real money, since 100 of those tokens equates to either a $100 Amazon card or $100 dispensed via PayPal. Tokens can also be redeemed for cash rewards; three million of these tokens is two dollars. There are also mallets that one collects that can be used to break open eggs that contain token prizes. After another batch of six cards, a free bonus card, and a half hour of my time, it became apparent that this game was designed to front load the rewards and keep the player right on the cusp of winning further rewards to motivate them to keep watching ads. To date, the funniest ad is for a game called Real Cash Game which claims to be different from the rest of these games by making it easier to withdraw the money. It is worth noting with the bonus cards that they are four row scratch-offs with the final row locked behind an ad that the player collects by doing other scratch-offs. The final row seems to not be worth it, since there was only one time that watching the ad to open up the final row actually netted any kind of prize.

As one gets closer to the end of the stack of scratch-offs, the ad viewing increases. Typically, one will view at least one ad in the middle of a batch, and the amount unlocked by viewing ads decreases from six to four. After hitting the wall where I had to wait a cooldown period, I was at 191,250 tokens, 27 dollar tokens, and had watched 36 ads. The amount of dollar tokens both offered as prizes and actually won had lowered from full dollar amounts to under half a dollar by the time I reached the end. Token prizes had also lowered from tens of thousands to under five thousand per game.

The second game (Pusher Mania) is a lot simpler in terms of mechanics. The coin/token system works similar and the game plays like the arcade coin pusher game that people have been playing for almost 60 years at this point. Instead of the version one plays in person where they have to time sending a token or a coin down a ramp into the area where there are other coins in an effort to make the coins fall down, the player simply needs to press where they want to drop the coins. Much like the other game, there are green dollar coins and yellow tokens that can be converted into money once they reach a certain threshold. There are also slots that are activated if a coin falls off the platform into a little moving bucket and ads to activate special powers, spin the slot again if it does not net a prize, and reload coins to continue playing the game. This game is less fun, nets less coins, and after about 45 minutes of playing had netted only 4,620 tokens and 21.19 in dollar coins. However, like Lucky Money, the longer I played, the smaller the prizes given.

The mechanics of the game that are not seen are relatively simple, keep the player winning but lower the payout amounts as they progress. This will keep them coming back to watch ads, therefore the developer keeps making money, even if people are not actively paying to play the game. IronSource, a service that provides the ads for mobile apps and games, says that on average an ad impression that is unfulfilled (meaning that the player does not click on the ad to actually download the game) pays two cents. If that data is extrapolated out using what was observed from my experience playing the game, my time netted the developer 72 cents. Google Play lists this game as having over ten million downloads.

Ultimately the issue comes down to Google Play and the App Store on iOS not properly moderating the apps that are going up on their platforms. There is a reason that a blatant rip-off of a well-known game that won Game of the Year at Australia’s Game Developer Awards and is in solid contention for Steam’s end of year awards is being released on the store and other games that are specifically designed to generate money off players are permitted to stay on the store, even if they make claims they have no intention of following through on. If Google and Apple are unwilling to act to keep subpar products off their store, the consumer should be aware of the fact that these apps do exist with the intent to make money off their time. To an extent, a person who is playing mobile games should reject games that are filled with ads. Just because a game tops the charts on an app store does not make it of quality, it could just be a cash grab.