The goal of those wildly inaccurate ads is simply to get the person to click the ad and download the game, and hope they'll stick around and keep playing the game even if it's nothing like the ad depicted it to be.

The goal of mobile game ads is to get a new player who will spend some average amount that is less than it costs on average to get a new user.

Cost to get user < Revenue per user = profit

Basically:

1. Make your game look way better than it is
2. Advertise to millions
3. Hope thousands download
4. Even if those thousands quit almost immediately, you still got to show them 1 or 2 ads.

Here's a video of two people talking about how their pretty hilarious journey of how they did something similar as a joke and accidentally ended up making quite a bit of money: https://youtu.be/E8Lhqri8tZk (seriously worth the watch)

It isn't just iOS that does this... It is to entice people to download/install. Then when people view the app it will show XXXX number of downloads.

What it doesn't tell you is how many uninstalls there were/are.

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There are two major things going on.

First and most weird, many games don't focus on advertising themselves. Instead, they pay online marketing companies to find them customers. Those companies then produce videos, put them on various online services, and try to get people to sign up for the game.

This provides an odd incentive problem. The marketer's goal is to get you to install and play the game long enough to get it to count as a successful customer acquisition. They are not in the business of getting players to stick with the game. Because of that, they may feel free to completely lie about the contents of the game, so long as it gets sales.

The second issue, though, is why some game companies lie about what's in their own games themselves. It turns out that online game marketing is a big numbers game. You show a million ads, 0.01% of people click on the ad, you adjust the ad, 0.02% click on the ad, you just doubled your ad's effectiveness. Wow! Because of this, there are a lot of marketing companies and standard practices out there, and it turns out that making good ads is hard. So, instead, everybody makes the ads that they know work. For example, the "watch somebody pull keys wrong so the lava falls on the treasure" ad format is pretty effective, so everybody started using it, despite what their actual game was about. If you like the game, it doesn't matter that the ad didn't match up, and if you don't like the game, it also doesn't matter. Mobile companies actively discuss the pros and cons of these misleading ad strategies, not as an ethical issue, but just as another strategy in a numbers game: https://www.mobileaction.co/blog/user-acquisition/gardenscapes-ad-strategy/

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