Mobile Failbait: Provoking a Response
I’ve played a variety of mobile games over the years, but especially as the handheld computers we all carry with us have gotten more powerful, the games have in turn increased in scope, complexity, and visual fidelity. We’re in an era now where – just in the mobile space – we have more games available at our fingertips than anyone can reasonably play. The reason is obvious: estimates put the value of the mobile game market in North America at $25.2 billion in 2020. For a little perspective, that’s over one third the price of Microsoft’s recent purchase of Activision Blizzard. From one year, in one region of the globe. And I’m certain that number has only gone up. There’s a large amount of money up for grabs, and a lot of people want a piece of the pie, so it’s only reasonable that in order to attract attention from spenders players, mobile developers have to stand out, have to make use of the ever-increasing power available to the average consumer. And that costs money, so they need to make sure their marketing is on-point in order to get a return on their investment.
Maybe I’ve missed it up until recently, but it seems like the favored tactic here lately is what I’m going to term “failbait”. And so we’re all on the same page, the definition of failbait, as I’m using it here is: marketing built around the idea of provoking a response in the consumer as a result of showing a failure state that most reasonable viewers feel they would be able to overcome. In simpler terms, it’s when “gameplay” shows a player failing when the victory condition seems obvious. It’s those ads where the player is meant to match three tiles, but keeps choosing the wrong ones when the right one is clear, with some kind of call to action like “can you do better?”. I’ll pick on Royal Match here a little, as I tend to see those ads more than most – they are constantly putting the king in life-threatening positions and then killing him off as a means to push the consumer to download and do it better themselves.
I get that marketing is all about trying to provoke a response in the consumer. It’s about generating revenue somehow, either by driving someone to spend money or expose themselves to ads, or even just get people talking about a product. I just can’t recall a time before the last year or so where the method of provoking that response was to show someone failing at using the product. It’s kind of weird on the face of it. Are they trying to suggest that it’s difficult? No, clearly not. Are they suggesting its broken? Also no. They’re just showing someone being unable to succeed at what appears to be a relatively simple task. Why does this work?
I think that failbait taps into a few things that we might not even be fully aware of. First, our competitive nature. We see someone doing a thing and we feel a need to try it for ourselves. And when the solution seems obvious and they don’t appear to see it, doing better seems like a simple feat. We like success, and the easier the success the better. Second, people have a deep-seated need to correct others. It manifests everywhere. It’s the source of the “ackchyually” meme. And when it’s served up on a silver platter the way it seems in these ads, it’s hard to resist. We think to ourselves, “no one could actually be that bad at this, could they?” And yet we love the idea of so easily fixing what someone else appears to have gotten wrong. Finally, we like being the hero. Video games generally are built around this concept, but these ads make the act of saving someone the central theme. The Royal Match king is literally in danger of losing his life, and we’re provided with the opportunity to save him. It’s a little ridiculous that he's placed in these situations, but it doesn’t matter because we get to be the hero and save the day.
I’m sure there’s more that goes into why these ads provoke us the way that they do. No doubt some psychologist can identify other desires that are tapped into. It’s just kind of crazy to me how prevalent this type of advertising has become. Clearly it must be a success on some level for them to continue. At the very least, it’s gotten me talking about it.
Is this a good thing though? I suppose that depends on your perspective. It’s not harming anyone as far as I can tell. Does appealing to base desires like this create a problem? Hard to say, but it’s not like marketing teams haven’t been doing this for years and years. This is just a recent evolution of that effort. It’s interesting to think about though, and has me wondering what other methods of advertising games are effective, and why. And maybe just being aware of that is enough to allow us to better control how we respond to advertising generally.