Playing Free2Play mobile games I used to get pestered frequently by various games asking me to give them money. "Pay now, and get energy to play some more! Pay now, and get in-game resources!", the typical monetization schemes for "free" games, some very much in your face, others far more discreet. One learns to ignore them and play those games for really free, or if they are blocking your progress too much without payment, you just uninstall the game. But I've noticed that there is some development: More and more frequently games don't ask me for money, but instead offer the same energy or resources in exchange of me watching some advertisement. Watch a short video for some *other* mobile game, and get the same sort of reward you used to have to pay for, albeit usually in smaller portions.

Of course I understand what is going on here: The devs of game A get some of the advertising budget of game B for every player they can persuade to watch the advertising video of that game. It is another form of micro-payment, but this time really, really micro, and just demanding time from the player instead of money. Or in advertising speech, "eyeballs".

In 2015 in the US a whopping $30 billion was spent on mobile advertising, and that is expected to grow to $42 billion in 2016. That'll pay for a whole lot of micro-payments for Free2Play games. But I'm questioning the wisdom of this, because I see two fundamental problems here: The first is diminishing returns, the more you are asked to watch advertising, the less impact that advertising has. The game can't control if you are actually watching, or whether you basically trade 30 seconds of time looking elsewhere for your free energy or resources.

The second problem is that this business model is in danger of becoming circular: Game A gives you free stuff in exchange for watching a video advertising game B, while game B gives you free stuff in exchange for watching a video advertising game A. The overall effect is that neither game A nor game B is making any money, because people watch adverts instead of paying anything.

There are now over half a million games on the Apple app store alone, and a similar number (of often the same games) on Google Play, with about 200 games getting added every single day. That makes the 6,000+ games on Steam look like a meager offer. But as much gaming, and especially mobile gaming, has become main stream, there are natural limits to growth, both in the time people have available to play and in the amount of money they are willing to spend on games. A few people have gotten very rich selling mobile games, but a much larger number of people has gotten nowhere and lots of game studios have had to shut down. The richer game companies giving their advertising budget to the poorer game companies serves to spread the wealth around a bit more, but it isn't creating any more wealth.

I'm sure this trend of getting stuff for watching adverts will continue for some while, but at some point advertisers will realize they aren't getting enough bang for their bucks, and mobile games will turn to the next big idea in monetization.