Now of course many of those ads lie by exaggeration. What is a boring click fest in the real game becomes an epic combat sequence in the ad. But some advertising companies went further: They put completely different gameplay in the ads, gameplay that had absolutely nothing to do with the game in question. By the time the player interested in that ad gameplay has downloaded and played the game and finds out that the game is something very different, the advertising company has already got the money.

One of the games that got advertised with completely misleading gameplay is Hero Wars, which is yet another boring "collect heroes and auto-combat monsters" mobile game. For quite a long time this game has been advertised with ads showing a puzzle gameplay, in which the player needs to pull levers in the right order to "defeat the goblin". In the ad, the player always gets it wrong, which encourages the viewer to think "I can do this better!" and download the game. Only that, until December, those puzzles weren't in the game at all. But over time Hero Wars attracted so many players who wanted to play these puzzles, and kept complaining about those not being in the game, that since end of last year some of those puzzles got actually added to the game.

Now this must be the weirdest way to design a game I ever heard: You design gameplay A, advertise it by showing gameplay B, have an algorithm tell you that B is more fun than A, and then add a diminished version of B into your A gameplay.