Not that I’ve seen, but I know some people who somehow missed the video, and he doesn’t link to it on the website so:
Not that I’ve seen, but I know some people who somehow missed the video, and he doesn’t link to it on the website so:
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!
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.
I’m a software dev and have worked with some of these companies. It’s kind of sad because I liked the idea of mobile games and working with them was a bit like seeing the devil behind the curtains. I dreamt of making cool little games based on fun and unique ideas and quickly learned it’s all a huge well oiled machine chugging through market data to find the most effective money extracting methods they can come up with.
For every bit you think these companies are grimey money chasers, I promise you it’s at least 5 times worse.
Some of the responses here dance around the truth, but none of them hit the nail on the head. This is a bit of an artifact of how the mobile industry works and the success rate vs profitability vs the way ads work on mobile.
Yes, hands down, this is not an effective advertising strategy. Many of these game companies are very successful so it’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because these ads aren’t advertising campaigns.
These ads are market research. The point isn’t to get you to download their game. At all. The point is to figure out what people will engage with.
These ads are all game ideas. Mobile game ideas are a dime a dozen million. They’re easy to come up with, cost a lot to build, and many don’t monetize well and therefore aren’t profitable. Because of that, it’s very expensive and unsustainable to build games and test them and see what succeeds.
Instead, companies come up with ideas, build a simple video demonstrating the idea, and put up ads with those videos. They then see how many people engage with the ads to determine how many people would even visit the download page for that game. Building a quick video is much much much cheaper than building a game. This is the first step in fast failing their ideas and weeding out bad ones.
Essentially the companies have lots of ideas, build lots of simple videos, advertise them all, and see which ones get enough engagement to be worth pursuing further, while the rest get dropped entirely.
But those ads need to link somewhere. So they link to the companies existing games. Because they’re already paying for it. So why not.
But building a whole new game is also expensive. Dynamics in mobile gaming are very odd because of the way “the algorithm” works. It is actually extremely expensive to get advertising in front of enough people that enough download it that you have any meaningfully large player base to analyze at all.
So the next trick is these companies will take the successful videos, build “mini games” of those ads as a prototype, and then put that in their existing game. This means they can leverage their existing user base to test how much people will engage with the game, and more importantly, eventually test how well it monetizes. Their existing users have already accepted permissions, likely already get push notifications, and often already have their payment info linked to the app. It also means they don’t have to pay for and build up a new store presence to get eyeballs on it. Many of the hurdles of the mobile space have already been crossed by their existing players, and the new ones who clicked the ads have demonstrated interest in the test subject. This is why many of the ads link to seemingly different games that have a small snippet of what you actually clicked on.
If these mini games then become successful enough, they will be made into their own standalone game. But this is extremely rare in mobile. The way the store algorithms and ads work make it pretty fucking expensive to get new games moving, so they really have to prove it to be worthwhile in the long run.
So yeah, most people look at this the wrong way - it does actually go against common sense advertising, but that’s because it’s not actually advertising. It’s essentially the cheapest way for companies to get feedback from people that actually play mobile games about what kinds of games they would play.
It’s not advertising. It’s market analysis.
I wish I had a better answer for you… But…
This seems to be some bug in Android 14. I reported it numerous times during the beta program MONTHS ago, and it’s never been fixed. The public release came out and multiple friends have told me they’re having this issue too. It still isn’t fixed.
I don’t know what the fuck Google is doing, but I’ve heard people have this issue with different launchers so I can’t imagine they’ve all got the same bug - this seems to be Google’s fault. The launcher I use has fixed multiple Android 14 bugs, but not this one. I don’t think they can.
Fwiw, you should be able to force stop your launcher which is a little faster than changing launchers and changing back. And it’s a hell of a lot faster than a restart… Pull down notification shade, tap settings, type Kvaesitso in the search bar which should let you tap to get to the app settings, and on that page should be a “force stop” button. Tap that, tap home, and it should be fixed.
I find this shit infuriating and I don’t understand how Google deems this OK. I doubt this gets fixed before Android 15 at this point. Google has their fucking heads up their ass on this one.
I don’t know if it does anything, but there’s an issue about it here: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/302132145 Commenting/subscribing/etc might help get this more attention.
YouTube purchases also don’t work beyond 480p on any desktop except for Mac Safari. These companies are fucking insane.
or other expensive setups
As much as I lost trust in his bullshittery a long time ago, his need to mention the cost of critical safety systems is what stuck out to me the most here. That’s how you know the priorities are backwards.
This whole thread is a whole lot of hullabaloo about complaining about legality about the way YouTube is running ad block detection, and framing it as though it makes the entire concept of ad block detection illegal.
As much as you may hate YouTube and/or their ad block policies, this whole take is a dead end. Even if by the weird stretch he’s making, the current system is illegal, there are plenty of ways for Google to detect and act on this without going anywhere remotely near that law. The best case scenario here is Google rewrites the way they’re doing it and redeploys the same thing.
This might cost them like weeks of development time. But it doesn’t stop Google from refusing to serve you video until you watch ads. This whole argument is receiving way more weight than it deserves because he’s repeatedly flaunting credentials that don’t change the reality of what Google could do here even if this argument held water.
At least that makes sense and has a logical reason