this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
543 points (97.5% liked)
Asklemmy
44147 readers
1361 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Plant malware?
Generally they're not malware
Not malware, just ad revenue generators. Although I guess this depends on how widely you define "malware" since many of them are probably scraping, at a minimum, usage statistics while you play and possibly also device data and who knows what else.
You get 1-2 minutes of gameplay in between each ad and all of the "levels" are probably generated once by a program (rather than a human actually designing the level layout/challenges) to minimize startup costs. I'd be willing to bet that if you traced the ownership structures for the types of games the OP is talking about you'd find a handful of megacorps owning hundreds of them and just reusing assets and programming as well.
Then of course there's the sinister preying on your psychology in subtle ways to keep you invested just enough to sit through the ad the play the next level.