How We Score the Lies

What “the lie” is, exactly

We score the gap between the gameplay shown in the ad and the gameplay a brand-new player experiences in the first 30 minutes of the actual installed game. A few things follow from that framing:

• Cosmetic exaggeration doesn't count. Brighter colours, faster animations, over-acted player avatars, ragebait-loud failure sequences — these are universal in mobile UA creative. We don't ding a game for that. We ding it for showing a mechanic that isn't there.
• “Eventually unlockable” still counts as a lie. If the advertised mechanic exists but is gated behind ten hours of unrelated gameplay, the median installer never sees it. That's not advertising the game — that's advertising a screenshot.
• First 30 minutes, fresh install. The score reflects what a new player sees, not what a level-200 veteran might find buried in a side mode.

The 1–10 scale

1–3 · Honest exaggeration

The ad shows the actual game with the volume turned up. Characters react bigger, fights resolve faster, the failure state is more dramatic than an average run. But if you install the game and tap the obvious button, you are demonstrably playing the thing in the ad.

Example: Most ads for Raid: Shadow Legends (score 4 — borderline) overstate the cinematic combat and downplay the menu-driven gear grind. The lie is mostly in the tonal packaging; the underlying turn-based RPG fight is exactly what you get on the first launch.

4–6 · Bait-and-pivot

A real, named mechanic from the ad is in the shipped game, but it occupies less than ~20% of the actual play loop. The ad uses it as bait for a different game underneath.

This bucket is where we put games whose real loop is decent — even good — but whose ads are hawking a sliver of side content as if it were the whole product.

7–9 · Decorative lie

The advertised mechanic appears in the game only as a one-off tutorial, a brief intro sequence, a rare bonus minigame, or a feature locked behind ten-plus hours of unrelated progression. A fresh installer would have to actively go looking for it.

Example: Whiteout Survival sells itself as a snow-survival door-runner. The base-building exists; the door-runner framing is a brief tutorial before the game converts into a 4X war strategy with timers and gem-purchase resource bottlenecks.

Example: Fishdom ads show pin-and-pipe rescue puzzles. The shipped game is a match-3 with aquarium decoration; the puzzle minigame surfaces every several dozen levels as a brief side activity.

10 · Genre fabrication

The kind of game shown in the ad is not the kind of game you downloaded. Not a small fraction of it, not a hidden side-mode of it — a different genre entirely. Reserved for the most egregious gap between marketing and product.

Example: Mafia City ads show third-person action-RPG combat and street-fighting transformations. The shipped game is a generic strategy builder with timers, troop training, and an alliance war loop. There is no action-RPG anywhere in the build.

Example: Homescapes (“Save Austin”) ads centre an entire campaign on a pin-pulling rescue puzzle. The shipped game is a match-3. The pin puzzle exists as a rare bonus minigame, but the ad isn't selling “a match-3 with occasional pin puzzles” — it is selling the pin puzzle as the game. The UK Advertising Standards Authority banned several variants on exactly this basis.

What we cite, and what we don't

A score is not an opinion poll. Every entry is supposed to be defensible from at least one of the following:

• Regulatory rulings. The UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), Australia's ACMA, and the US FTC have all issued formal findings against specific mobile ad campaigns. When one exists, we cite it.
• Industry analysis. Mobile Dev Memo write-ups, Naavik teardowns, GDC talks, and verifiable studio interviews all count. These tend to be the most reliable source on actual play loops, since they're written by people who've shipped similar games.
• Independent gameplay verification. Long-form playthroughs of the actual shipped game, dated within twelve months of the entry. We prefer creators who explicitly compare ad versus reality on camera.
• Aggregated player testimony. A consistent pattern across hundreds of one-star App Store / Google Play reviews, plus threads on r/gachagaming, r/iosgaming, and ResetEra. We treat these as supporting evidence, never as the sole basis for a score.

We do not score from TikTok rants, single negative reviews, or “I heard from a guy” forum posts. If a claim isn't checkable against one of the four sources above, it doesn't make it into an entry.

Things we deliberately do not score

• Whether the underlying game is good. A 10/10 Lie Score is not a verdict on game quality. Homescapes is, by its genre's standards, a competent match-3. The score is about the gap between ad and game, not about the game itself.
• Monetisation aggressiveness. Predatory IAP design is its own subject. Conflating it with ad deception muddies both.
• Studio intent. We do not know, and will not pretend to know, whether a given creative was a deliberate bait-and-switch or a marketing department that got carried away. We score the artefact, not the motive.

When scores change

Mobile games are live software. Ads rotate. New game modes are added. Sometimes a studio quietly bolts the advertised mechanic into the actual game six months after a regulator complaint. When that happens, we update the entry, lower the score, and add a dated note to the bottom.

The original entry text and the original ad video stay in the archive — the lie was true at the time, and that history is the point of the museum.

A standing invitation

If you think a score is wrong — too high, too low, or based on out-of-date footage — we will read your case. Email contact@fakeadgames.com with the entry name and what you'd revise. We have already updated entries based on reader corrections, and we will keep doing so.

The aim isn't to win the argument. It's to keep an honest record of an industry that, for a decade, was very dishonestly advertising itself.