“Oh yes, it has the juice.”

May 4, 2024 12:29 PM

In this video ad, the Hero Wars mascot Galahad finds himself in dire straits as but a human plough-horse upon the field. His captor, half-cow, half-human woman, brands him on the buttock with what looks like our old friend the purple devil emoji—rather a “naugty” [sic] act. Suddenly set upon by wolves, the cow lady is compromised—and Galahad steps up to become white knight, fending the beasts off with his axe. The cow lady and her new hero Galahad elope to her encampment, where she carries him around like a baby, and spots him for sit-ups. Needless to say, the episode of the bovine damsel does not occur in-game. from The Weird World of Hero Wars Ads: Sex Sells [Splice Today]

For examples see: Hero Wars Ads As Art

posted by chavenet (18 comments total)

As the TVTropes entry Lady Not-Appearing-In-This-Game (a reference to Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Film from Monty Python and the Holy Grail) points out, this sort of thing has been going on for a long, long, time.
posted by dannyboybell at 12:39 PM on May 4 [3 favorites]

And Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:59 PM on May 4 [2 favorites]

Don't Tell Your WIFE About This Game!
posted by justkevin at 1:12 PM on May 4 [4 favorites]

I watch Youtube videos (and do about half my browsing) on a Chromebook that is reset frequently (at least weekly) to have no memory of who I am, and I see those repulsive Hero Wars ads All The Time. Those and 4Patriot (ugh) and Google Fiber (fine) must be the ones plowing the most money into making impressions onto any eyeball they can get.
posted by intermod at 1:29 PM on May 4 [5 favorites]

The bait-n-switch sexy thing is dumb but seems like such an hoary trope that it's hardly worth commenting on.

What gets me are the ads that show what looks like it could be an entertaining game mechanic but has nothing to do with the game being advertised and is apparently not a game that even exists.

And you think, "Why don't they just make that game that looks like it could be fun?" And the sad depressing reason is "That game doesn't have any dark mechanics we can use to bleed money from people who are vulnerable to that sort of thing."
posted by straight at 1:44 PM on May 4 [10 favorites]

Except what they actually say is somehow even worse: "That game isn't monetizable."
posted by straight at 1:46 PM on May 4 [1 favorite]

And instead of "people who are vulnerable to that sort of thing" they say "whales" so you assume they are rich people you don't need to feel bad about manipulating to take their money.
posted by straight at 1:49 PM on May 4 [4 favorites]

The thing about these ads, which I encounter often on YouTube is that, while I sometimes stop to watch them to see what new misogyny they will throw up, they never make me remotely interested in playing the game, much less actually downloading it. I realize that I am not their target audience, but you would think that, with all the algorithms going around, I'd stop seeing the ads or they would stop paying for the ad space....
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:22 PM on May 4 [1 favorite]

And you think, "Why don't they just make that game that looks like it could be fun?"

Good news!
posted by 1xdevnet at 2:33 PM on May 4 [6 favorites]

They're coming for Royal Match ads next!
posted by Morpeth at 2:41 PM on May 4 [4 favorites]

Fantasy adventures full of daring-do and alluring but dangerous giant women! Sexy beast women and sexy tree women and cruel fickle temptresses! Violence at every turn and the constant promise of sex as a reward!

Is it weird these themes could just as easily describe stories popular in Amazing Tales or any number of other pulp magazines from 80-90 years ago? The misogyny of marketing to emotionally confused boys by reinforcing dehumanizing views of women hasn't changed much in 100 years.
posted by Avelwood at 4:02 PM on May 4 [5 favorites]

If I had the time to kill and full access to the archives of The Long Beach Press-Telegram, I'd do a post about the bizarre series of sexualized ads that appeared in that paper when I was a kid. They were in the weekly TV schedule booklet (remember those, fellow olds?) and they promoted a local newscast. If there was going to be a special report on Russian spies in the US, the ad would show some busty blonde wearing dark sunglasses and a trenchcoat that was open to reveal she was wearing a bikini. If there was going to be a report on exploding phones, the ad would show some girl in lingerie, making an O-face while she held a smoking phone. Perhaps my memory is playing tricks on me, but there may even have been an ad for a report on nuclear plant safety that showed a babe in a bikini running from a mushroom cloud. This went on for months. It was pre-internet, so there's no record of it online and I have no way of knowing if there were any complaints. When I imagine the ad exec behind the campaign I can only picture Herb Tarlek. (Remember him, fellow olds?)

Those ads were fairly straightforward, compared to these. They were just, "OK, here's this week's special report... Now, how do we get a babe with big boobs in there?" These Hero Wars ads are much more kinky, with lots of sexy mommy stuff. And yeah, it is a weird bait and switch. You're suckering people in with promises of sexy mommy stuff, and then in the actual game there are no sexy mommies! It seems like there's a big market out there for sexy mommy games, so I don't know why these people don't just make more sexy mommy games instead of using sexy mommy stuff to sell not-sexy-mommy games.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:57 PM on May 4 [6 favorites]

Jazz Emu: Who The Fu*k Is Playing These (SLTwitter)
posted by knoxg at 7:11 PM on May 4 [4 favorites]

Heh, when I clicked knoxg's link I got an ad for a game featuring three women clad in the worst "sexy female armor" I've ever seen.
posted by soundofsuburbia at 12:31 AM on May 5 [2 favorites]

So I actually have been wondering about the false advertising in free-to-play games for a while - also things like claiming that certain items produce randomized results when the results are absolutely not randomized (items that in theory produce 1-10,000 of an item but rarely produce more than ten, for example).

But I actually think that there must be something on freemium games, because they are tricking you with false advertising to enter a game that is actively striving to get your money with the false advertising. For example, there’s no way for people to know they can’t access that content, but will people know that? Or will they be susceptible to advertising about “secret areas” for people who pay?
posted by corb at 1:11 AM on May 5 [3 favorites]

It depends on the game. A lot of the games let you play for so long "for free," and then you have to wait for the meter to fill up, or pay to top it off to keep playing. For example, I'm into the Honkai games (Genshin Impact, Star Rail). Doing stuff that makes your character more powerful's time gated, and resin/trailblazer power time gated, unless you pay. They're also Husbando/Waifu collector games. My kid's got a coworker who spent $1000 on Aventurine in Star Rail. Now these games do have real gameplay, and the story quests aren't time gated (and Genshin Impact's got a feaking huge open world to wander around in now), but the core's pay money to play more often.
On the other end's Warframe, where just about everything's attainable in game, but you can also buy it in the cash shop. It's strictly time vs. money. (And to make it more interesting, players can sell stuff, so you can play and accumulate things, sell them to other players, and buy what you really want.)
Then there's the whole loot box thing, which is how a lot of games make their money these days.
All of these games have decent gameplay, though, and can get people to play them for what they are. What the articles are about is using sexy ads that's really misleading about what the underlying game's about. Not only does the game not deliver what the ad's promising, the game's something entirely different.
posted by Spike Glee at 8:07 AM on May 5 [4 favorites]

I had never seen any of these and can't imagine being bombarded by images of infant warriors with milk mustaches from their armor-clad, lycanthrope surrogate nursemaid mother figures...

a testament to the utility of a fine filtering browser like Firefox Focus if you ask me.

I'd be especially peeved if the advertised free download made no connection to the implied storyline -- how would I ever know if lycanthrope milk renders one an infant werewolf?
posted by in_lieu_of_fiction at 11:37 AM on May 5 [2 favorites]

For a while Reddit was serving these ads up to me and I would just boggle at what new insanity was being served up to try and coax me into playing what I was pretty sure was a terrible game. Never once did I click on them to find out exactly how the game would fail to resemble these videos. I just enjoyed them as weird little Terry Gilliam pisstakes on the whole genre of “shitty generic orc basher”.
posted by egypturnash at 8:26 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]