There is nothing wrong with YouTube ads. They have helped countless content creators build careers through monetization. However, the ads for Mafia City, Homescapes and other stupid games are the worst. The absolute worst.
The games feature YouTube ads involving a person unable to solve an insanely easy puzzle or needing to make some mundane decision that can provide amazing rewards. Who watches one of these ads and is motivated to download these crappy games?
Let’s start with Mafia City. This is one of the games that you will constantly see YouTube ads for. In them, you watch various characters being faced with multiple choice decisions that either see them rise up the ranks or fail. The on-screen text is clearly written by non-native English speakers and is riddled with errors. Best of all, this decision tree has nothing to do with the actual game, but more on that later.
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The Mafia City ads are so bad they have actually become immortalized in memes around the world.
Homescapes is just a stupid fucking game based on the ads they post on YouTube. You navigate a character through comically easy puzzle that the person in the ad is never able to solve. These advertisements are infuriating. No one would ever get this wrong, not even Mr. “person, woman, man, camera, TV” Donald Trump. Yet the person in the ad is unable to complete the mission. Just thinking about it pisses me off.
These games don’t look remotely fun. Why anyone would download them is a mystery. But that’s not even the half of it. These shitty games with YouTube ads are bait and switch propositions. You don’t even get to play the boring game you were promised. You get a much worse freemium game.
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Uncovering fake shitty games with YouTube ads
Want to know more about these shitty games using YouTube ads to market their product? Reddit is the place to go. There is a ton of information on games promoting themselves as one thing in ads only to be something entirely different. Some misrepresent gameplay, like Mafia City and Homescapes, while others will just steal images and video from other games and claim it as their own.
Nothing can really be done about this. YouTube doesn’t care as long as the checks cash. You can’t even report an ad on the platform via the app. That’s annoying, but it still doesn’t answer the real question:
Who is downloading these dumbass games?
It can’t just be teenagers and children. There are people over the age of 21 who see one of these games with a poorly made YouTube ad and download it. The games are actually big business. YR Media breaks it down a little more in this article. Long story short, dumb adults watch a crappy YouTube ad for a game and then install it.
Games like Mafia City and Homescapes make FarmVille look like freaking Zelda: Ocarina of Time by comparison. Maybe it’s just a sign of the times we live in. Idiots can be reached far easier today and game companies know this. They pander hard to the lowest common denominator. And it works.
The only thing worse than this is the fact the Republican party operates using basically the same playbook. Misleading ads hiding a crappy platform that people are too dumb and/or lazy to see through. The same moron that thinks the YouTube ad for Mafia City looked like fun also gets an equal voice as you when it comes to politics. What a time to be alive.
