Five ways ‘fake’ mobile games fail to meet advertised expectations

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The mobile game advertisements that pop up all over social media platforms may promise better, more complete games than they actually deliver. Researchers at Penn State studying these “fake games” — or those that promote inaccurate depictions of their gameplay and development — identified five characteristics that gamers could use when deciding how much time and money to invest in a mobile game.

They reported the details of these shared characteristics in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.

“The mobile games market is a multi-billion-dollar business, and recently free-to-play mobile games have accounted for a large segment of the industry,” said co-author Yubo Kou, the Haile Family Early Career Professor in Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. However, not all the mobile games are made for players to have fun, or even real. Instead, the whole point is use advertisements to trick users to click on the install button. This research investigates the fake game phenomenon through a mixed-methods study, in order to what makes a game fake and how it impacts users.”

Sam Moradzadeh, lead author and graduate student at Penn State, and his adviser Kou used Community Notes, a community-driven fact-checking function on X, to find 15 games flagged as being fake. They downloaded and played the games to identify characteristics that qualify the games as fake, and then they analyzed more than 2,500 player reviews to uncover themes and understand how these games affected gamers.

The five characteristics that these games shared:

• Gameplay disguise: Advertised game mechanics and visuals do not appear in the actual game.
• Narrative pretense: The stories and narratives that appear in game advertisements may be absent or significantly different than those featured in the game.
• Popular externalization: Advertisements feature popular trends or celebrity endorsements of gameplay experiences not found in the actual game, or using copyrighted assets from popular games that may breach intellectual property rights.
• Ruleset distortion: A game’s expected difficulty, as well as the skills and methods needed to progress through levels, differs from what is advertised.
• Incentive illusion: Advertisements make game rewards and advancement seem easier than they actually are to lure players.

Despite these games differing from what they advertise themselves as, the researchers said they are in a legal gray zone. The majority of fake games tended to be free-to-play, meaning anyone can download and start playing the games on their smartphones without making a purchase. Revenue comes from in-app purchases and advertisements, rather than purchasing the game outright.

“Fake games can potentially expose users to felt manipulation, negative emotions such as frustration and anger, as well as privacy and financial risks,” Moradzadeh said. “Federal Trade Commission rulings fall short when there is no initial cost for the purchase perceived. In other words, since the majority of fake games are free-to-play, it creates a loophole in rule enforcement against these games, as any in-game microtransactions are presented as optional.”

Just because a game is considered fake today does not mean it has to remain that way, the researchers said.

“Fakeness is a fluid state — developers can actually implement the promised content at any time with any patch or update cycle,” Moradzadeh said. “Nowadays, most mobile games are considered live service games, meaning they are developed to be continuously updated. For this reason, they have the opportunity to align their games with their promotion at any time.”

The U.S. National Science Foundation supported this work. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.