Homescapes: Save Austin from the Bees (and Also Everything Else)

The ad

Austin, a cartoon butler with a permanently worried expression, is dangling from a rope above a shark. Or a lava pit. Or an actual fire. To save him, you must pull wooden pins in the correct order — which, the ad makes clear, the simulated "player" is somehow incapable of doing.

These ads ran with such volume and in so many variations that by 2020 the UK's Advertising Standards Authority formally banned several of them, ruling that they "misleadingly represented" the actual game.

What the real game is

Homescapes is a match-3 game. Like Candy Crush, but with a renovation wrapper on top. You swap candies. You clear tiles. You unlock a new wallpaper for the east wing.

The pin-puzzle minigame the ads are built around? It exists. Sort of. It's a bonus side-puzzle that appears roughly every several dozen match-3 levels, and is, charitably, 1% of the total game.

Our Lie Score: 10/10

This is the platonic ideal of the misleading mobile ad. Everything in the ad is real in the sense that those art assets exist somewhere in the game files. Nothing in the ad is real in the sense that anyone who downloads the game expecting pin-pulling gameplay will be pulling pins for roughly 1% of their play time.

It is so egregious that a government regulator banned it. Twice.

The context

Playrix, the studio behind Homescapes and its sibling Gardenscapes, didn't invent this trick — but they industrialized it. Industry estimates put the two games' combined lifetime revenue at several billion dollars, a non-trivial fraction of which is attributable, directly, to ads featuring gameplay that is not in the game.

The lesson other studios learned from this isn't "don't lie in your ads." The lesson they learned was "lie harder, and faster, before the regulators catch up."