Most video game advertisements naturally show the gameplay at its most exciting, thrilling, and successful. Yet there is one common type that doesn’t. Imagine an ad for a platformer where the character misses an easy jump and falls into a pit, a fighting game where they try and fail to pull off a single special move, and so on. That is the changing but obvious world of fake mobile game ads, where the ‘player’ engages in either simple puzzles or a Space Invaders style descending enemy wave game and almost invariably loses pathetically.

See, there’s a reason for this and that’s because the actual game is nothing like the ads. Most of the games depicted in these commercials are city builders with everything taking forever unless you speed the process up with real money. Not very photogenic. The actual ad mode is relegated to a small minigame so that it’s not technically false advertising.