Every since I played Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, I get pummeled with ads for City Girl Life. I suppose that the ad AI in the world has decided this is my thing. I was doing pretty well at ignoring it, but today in a fit of weakness I went on Facebook and then didn’t even have to strength to avoid it when it was right there in my face again, so I decided to play it.
Like Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, the City Girl Life game is a free-to-play game, with in-app purchases. Fine, I think, I’m not going to buy anything in-game anyway, instead I’m just going to suffer a broken and frustrating game experience, because this is what mobile and social games are, after all.
The game loads and when finished the first thing you get to click on in the game is this screen:
It’s also the last thing I’m going to do in the game, because I’m not even going to make the two clicks to disable my ad blocker for this.
I guess it boils down to everyone has their limits, and having in-app purchases and ads on a Facebook game cross over the limits for me.
However, on mobile games apparently I have a different set of standards. I’ve actually seen games like Bitcoin Billionaire work banner ads into rewards for gameplay, where a magic genie sends you an email which contains a call to action where you can enable a banner ad for 30 seconds and collect a bonus in the process:
Since you’re on a tablet and in an app, you don’t have an ad-blocker going, so I suppose I should be thankful that they don’t just pop ads over the top of it.
And also this extremely innovative game mechanic which foregoes all pretense, it just threatens to take something away, and you can pay it off with secondary shiny currency/real money or watch a video ad. It also cheats and leaves behind a full page all-clickable ad with small close box, at the end:
The stuff in Vegas isn’t even this brutal.
Also, please see this opening discliamer in Bitcoin Billionaire:
Yes, I am supposed to believe that making your first virtual billion of fake bitcoins by tapping on the screen a lot and watching ads is euphoria-inducing.
Look, I am “playing” Bitcoin Billionaire because it calls itself an “idle clicker” game and since that is what the world has made me into, quite literally, I figure I should try it.
In Bitcoin Billionaire your avatar sits alone in a room and clicks on a mouse repeatedly. You control this character by tapping on the screen repeatedly. Boxes come from Amazon (in the game and not in the game who even knows anymore) and why oh god why
At least Cow Clicker had cows and not a weird fake “currency” that’s based on a real fake “currency” that isn’t a currency that no one really understands which was invented by a person that no one on the planet knows in real life. Also, there should be a game called Cat Clicker. Maybe I’ll make a game. I’m not searching for that because of course it has to already exist.
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