Nobody really expects the ads for a mobile game to resemble in any way the actual game, do they? Why do I care so much when TW:BG advertises a game that doesn’t exist?
TopWar: BattleGame (the actual one)
TW:BG is a base building game, where you click stuff and drag stuff onto other stuff to upgrade it into better stuff. Opening up new areas requires using your merged troops in a non-interactive battle with some enemy troops. You can purchase heroes that will do an initial action in a battle. Marvel’s Black Widow is given for free, and they also currently have a Hasbro Transformers collaboration running, so they have connections.
The game isn’t significantly different from the hundreds of similar games available. I hadn’t come up against the pay-to-continue wall yet when I just got bored with it. Tactical battles interest me. AFK battles, not so much.
THIS isn’t the TopWar: BattleGame that interests me. I want what THIS guy is playing.
https://twitter.com/TBattlegame/status/1499237442020601856
So… this is a game where you use rafts to harvest wheat? BTW, the guy got fired for playing this game, even though apparently he controls TW:BG’s Twitter account.
https://twitter.com/TBattlegame/status/1478264759220723713
So this is a game where your guys ride floating battlebots around and eat up islands? I guess the guy got rehired?
I started looking for the ads in my Twitter feed – which was difficult, as I wrote a TamperMonkey script to remove ads from my Twitter feed. But, sometimes it doesn’t work, and then I see these really glorious ads and follow the saga of the PR guy who was fired for playing his company’s game at work, but still freelances the social media but what REALLY makes me curious is, what game is he playing that isn’t TW:BG? Because Top War is nothing like this! But clearly he is playing this better, more fun game – for one, he is holding his phone in landscape position, while TW:BG is a portrait-mode game. And of course, none of the things that he is narrating are in the actual game.
A comment on YouTube says it well:
As a person who is actually making these fake game videos for marketing purpose, I very much hate it too! My everyday work is to come up with fun videos that look nothing like the actual game, goal is to lower the cost per install as much as possible. As a true gamer and game creator myself, I hate these videos so much, I die a little inside every time I finish making one. There’s nothing I can do to change the industry, and this is what happens when the marketing guys are in charge of the game development. “let the number speak for itself” kind of people are ruining it for everyone with their spreadsheets. Lucci Hs,
And this is the root of my problem. Game companies hire ad agencies to make videos to promote their game, but the ad company, or the game company, says – we can’t show how the game actually plays, because nobody would download it. Let’s produce a video of a fun game that people might like to play, and see if people will still play when they go to download it.
Because the app store entry for the game, shows the game as it is. The actual Twitter feed for the game shows the game exactly as it is. It’s just this one dude, out in the cold, desperately playing a game that doesn’t exist, always being fired and re-hired, that keeps the flame of the TopWar: BattleGame that could have been alive.
I really hope he’s doing well.
I tried to find the full commercials online, but the only source seems to be from YouTubers ragging on them for deceptive advertising. I don’t know if they have more information about the poor PR dude.