two & a half gamers -🎮 9 Playables, 9 Lessons: What’s working in playable ads right now

Summary

The most freeing idea in playable ads keeps proving itself: your playable doesn’t have to match your actual game. This month a zombie survival game ran a football playable, and an isometric strategy game ran a non-isometric one. The crew breaks down nine playables and the lessons underneath them.

Matej Lančarič and Ondrej Mosberger are joined again by Robin Kuyer for the “everyone brings playables” format. They cover ZomLine Survival’s World-Cup-timed football playable (a themed playable bolted onto a 4X game — nothing to do with the core, and that’s the point), the perennial themed-playable truth (it either performs brilliantly or does nothing, with slot/casino games running Christmas playables all year), the frustration-as-motivator debate (Ondrej’s 3D-Tetris-on-a-Clash-of-Clans-lookalike playable that’s built to make you fail), the mini-game-per-mechanic strategy (Happy Nation/Miniclip’s nonogram — if your app has many mini-games, build a playable for each and measure which end-screen choice players tap), visual rewards vs literal rewards (Epic Stickman’s one-click combat that pays off with a cutscene, not a chest), the textbook hand-holding playable (Estoti’s Frostworld), and Matej’s picks — Smash Fest (which he crowns the trend everyone should follow), Rogue Legend (a smooth tower-defense playable with no logo or download button at all, for a game that looks nothing like it), and a wild Bart-Simpson-plus-undressing screw-puzzle hook fronting a 4X game (IP infringement and all).

Plus a genuinely useful tangent from Robin on how network preview templates clash with playable UI, and how Unity tracks users bouncing between CTA and end-card.

The through-line: run different playables to capture different users, don’t fear a mismatch between ad and game, and let the physics (or the frustration, or the reward) do the work.