Ugh, if they make an ad that has non-game game-play that gets a lot of clicks... why not make that game instead/too?

I've heard that they do metrics on the ads to pick particular pseudo-games to implement.

But they don't make money on clicks, they make it on whales, so they are also going to get rid of pseudo-games that can't get whales to spend more microtransaction money.

> But they don't make money on clicks, they make it on whales, so they are also going to get rid of pseudo-games that can't get whales to spend more microtransaction money.

This video did a very good job of explaining it, to me, someone who never plays mobile games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhajAqI66nU (https://archive.org/details/youtube-NhajAqI66nU).

tl;dr: it's all about getting whales into the game. The type of games people will download based on ad game-play are not the most monetizable (b/c whales). So the main game is a highly monetizable city-builder (which whales spend on), with the ad's minigame somewhere (which at most only has a few minutes of playtime). The ad's mini-game is often developed as a concept for the ad first, then only actually implemented later after A/B testing the ads. It doesn't matter that most people will get frustrated and delete the game when it's not as advertised, because the people who do that aren't whales.

Does anybody know how much money someone has to spend to be considered a mobile gaming whale?