Intrusive ads between rounds
Full-screen ads pop up after every round, whether you want them or not.
Ads that interrupt you at the moment you fail or finish make your attention the thing sold, and sessions are shaped around it.
What you're actually buying
Nothing. The ad is the price: your time and attention. The only way to remove them is usually to pay.
How it works
In hyper-casual games (very simple games built for quick sessions), play is shaped into rounds of under a minute, built to end in a death or a continue, and either way an ad. Studios tested dozens of prototypes a week and killed anything that didn't retain players. Subway Surfers made every death an ad break, and Hole.io was built purely to harvest ad impressions. The player isn't the customer; the advertiser is.
When it's fine
A single banner on a free browser game is the mild end. Full-screen ads after every round are not.
Where it came from
Banner ads funded the browser-game web from 1999 (Newgrounds, Miniclip). Hyper-casual games (from 2013) stripped the shop out; Flappy Bird was reportedly earning about $50,000 a day at its January 2014 peak before Dong Nguyen pulled it. Subway Surfers (2012) crossed 2.7 billion downloads by December 2019 on App Annie's count.
Historical prices and revenues are in US dollars at the time unless marked A$.
By the numbers
Subway Surfers was the most-downloaded mobile game of 2012 to 2019, crossing 2.7 billion downloads by December 2019.
Voodoo's Helix Jump was the most-downloaded mobile game of 2018, with 334 million installs.
Games that use it
No games in the database use this yet. Well-known examples: Subway Surfers, Hole.io, Flappy Bird, Helix Jump.
Related badges
Covered in Video Games & Money: Ep 31 · Hyper casual, Ep 18 · Browser.