Nobody really expects the ads for a mobile game to resemble in any way the actual game, do they? Why do I care so much when TW:BG advertises a game that doesn’t exist?
TW:BG is a base building game, where you click stuff and drag stuff onto other stuff to upgrade it into better stuff. Opening up new areas requires using your merged troops in a non-interactive battle with some enemy troops. You can purchase heroes that will do an initial action in a battle. Marvel’s Black Widow is given for free, and they also currently have a Hasbro Transformers collaboration running, so they have connections.
The game isn’t significantly different from the hundreds of similar games available. I hadn’t come up against the pay-to-continue wall yet when I just got bored with it. Tactical battles interest me. AFK battles, not so much.
THIS isn’t the TopWar: BattleGame that interests me. I want what THIS guy is playing.
So… this is a game where you use rafts to harvest wheat? BTW, the guy got fired for playing this game, even though apparently he controls TW:BG’s Twitter account.
So this is a game where your guys ride floating battlebots around and eat up islands? I guess the guy got rehired?
I started looking for the ads in my Twitter feed — which was difficult, as I wrote a TamperMonkey script to remove ads from my Twitter feed. But, sometimes it doesn’t work, and then I see these really glorious ads and follow the saga of the PR guy who was fired for playing his company’s game at work, but still freelances the social media but what REALLY makes me curious is, what game is he playing that isn’t TW:BG? Because Top War is nothing like this! But clearly he is playing this better, more fun game — for one, he is holding his phone in landscape position, while TW:BG is a portrait-mode game. And of course, none of the things that he is narrating are in the actual game.
A comment on YouTube says it well:
As a person who is actually making these fake game videos for marketing purpose, I very much hate it too! My everyday work is to come up with fun videos that look nothing like the actual game, goal is to lower the cost per install as much as possible. As a true gamer and game creator myself, I hate these videos so much, I die a little inside every time I finish making one. There’s nothing I can do to change the industry, and this is what happens when the marketing guys are in charge of the game development. “let the number speak for itself” kind of people are ruining it for everyone with their spreadsheets.
Lucci Hs, YouTube comment
And this is the root of my problem. Game companies hire ad agencies to make videos to promote their game, but the ad company, or the game company, says — we can’t show how the game actually plays, because nobody would download it. Let’s produce a video of a fun game that people might like to play, and see if people will still play when they go to download it.
Because the app store entry for the game, shows the game as it is. The actual Twitter feed for the game shows the game exactly as it is. It’s just this one dude, out in the cold, desperately playing a game that doesn’t exist, always being fired and re-hired, that keeps the flame of the TopWar: BattleGame that could have been alive.
I really hope he’s doing well.
I tried to find the full commercials online, but the only source seems to be from YouTubers ragging on them for deceptive advertising. I don’t know if they have more information about the poor PR dude.
Geez. Where would you even start? Honestly, the actual game screens from the top of the post look orders of magnitude more appealing to me than PR-generated hype. I mean, they don’t present a game that would particularly appeal to me but they do look like a coherent game I can understand.
That first picture of the wheat… My first and second impression was that it was two cheap bathroom plungers on a shagpile carpet. It wasn’t until I read the part where you talk about using rafts to harvest wheat that I even saw that thing I thought was the plunger handle was actually a tiny person.
Then, what kind of sales pitch is “It’s a perfect day to harvest some wheat”? I’m guessing whoever wrote that tagline wasn’t going for the recognition factor it gave me, namely “A perfect day for bananafish”, so what the heck are they expecting people to think? Do mobile gamers really yearn to be out there in the midday sun in their pleather jackets, driving a combine harvester? It seems like a highly unlikely fantasy life to me.
And finally, if someone told you a game was so addictive people were losing their jobs because they couldn’t stop playing it, wouldn’t that make you stay as far the hell away from the thing as humanly possible? When did “addiction” and “unemployment” become life goals?
The thing that really amazes me about all of this, particularly given the quote from the person who does it for a living, is that these kinds of images actually work. I’d have thought they’d make sales drop through the floor.
The WORST part about it all is that, since I have been liking and retweeting these deceptive ads, is that Twitter now thinks I really, really want to see more of these ads. So when I’m on my phone or a computer without TamperMonkey, TW:BG ads are, like, 50% of the ads I see.
The guy narrating the fake game just cracks me up 🙂