RPG in Disguise
Hero Wars: The 1,000 Ads That Don't Exist in the Game
Hero Wars has run over a thousand distinct ad variants, most of them featuring gameplay that the actual game does not contain. It is possibly the most prolific campaign of advertising fiction in gaming history.
The ads
There are, by several public counts, more than 1,000 distinct Hero Wars ads. A small sampling of things the ads claim Hero Wars is:
- A pin-pulling physics puzzle
- A character-drawing rescue game
- An auto-scroller where you pick paths
- A strategic lane-defense game
- A bridge-building engineering puzzle
- A "help the princess escape" adventure
Hero Wars, the game, is none of these things.
What the real game is
Hero Wars is a gacha RPG. You collect heroes, level them up, and watch them fight other heroes automatically on a battlefield you do not directly control. There are guilds, raids, a resource economy, and a soft paywall at around hour 20 of play.
None of the ads show this because — by the studio's own revealed-preference logic — the real gameplay doesn't convert as well as a stickman getting crushed by a falling boulder.
Our Lie Score: 9/10
The only reason it's not a 10 is that Hero Wars, amazingly, has occasionally run honest ads showing the real game. These ads appear to be part of an A/B test, and the studio appears to lose that test every time.
Industry lesson
Hero Wars is the purest example of what the mobile advertising industry has become: a market where the ad and the product it advertises are effectively two different products, with two different teams, optimized against two different metrics. The ad team optimizes for install rate. The game team optimizes for revenue. What the ad shows is determined entirely by what makes people click, regardless of whether that thing is in the game the click leads to.
This is why you keep seeing a finger pulling a pin over a lava pit.