Back in 2016, mobile games developer Playrix released “Gardenscapes.” Featuring a butler who guides the player through a match-three adventure to fix up a cartoon garden, it was soon named a top-100 mobile game on the various app stores. A few years later, it was so successful that Playrix released another game, “Homescapes.”
In 2016, their advertisements were generally pretty accurate to the gameplay. Almost a decade later, the “Scapes” mobile game franchise is known for its advertisements — specifically, how fake they are.
Their most iconic type of ad features some combination of a (sometimes pregnant) woman and child freezing in a shack, mind-numbingly frustrating gameplay, and either an ending minigame or a fake minigame that tricks the user into clicking onto the “Homescapes” app store page.
This exact scenario is replicated, over and over, for hundreds of various mobile games. Funny enough, though, it’s not one that appears in any of these games.
The ‘freezing woman in a shack’ phenomenon is not the only fake mobile game trend. Another common trend can only be described as ‘a bunch of guys shooting guns at a bunch of other guys,’ another is 3D animated dramatic shorts that usually involve cheating, pregnancy and/or a woman covered in mud, yet another is ads where a character has to fight other characters based on the number above their head. With the refinement of Sora AI and other video-generating sites, there has also been an influx of AI-generated testimonials and skits based on these various mobile games.
Very rarely, these advertisements will have small text that informs the viewer that what they’re watching isn’t actually the gameplay. Even then, it’s still usually disguised at the bottom of the page.
The most sickening part about fake mobile game ads, somehow, isn’t even the deceptive marketing. No, it’s the absolute quantity of them.
Scrolling online has never been totally ad-free, especially once influencers started getting brand deals and sponsorships. However, in 2025, the internet often feels like the aftermath of a zombie virus, trying to navigate between the content I want to see and the thousands of shambling corpses that want to steal my time and data.
The “Nigerian Prince” scam operates by the scammer sending an email claiming to be foreign royalty, asking for your bank account information so they can ‘move a large amount of money overseas’ with the promise of a reward. The scammer then takes the money, and the scam-ee gets scammed. These phishing emails will often contain major grammatical and spelling errors. While it might seem like a mistake, these errors are included for a very specific purpose — to weed out the people who might see through the scam.
False advertisements operate similarly. They aren’t necessarily looking to fool me into downloading the game, because they are overwhelmingly targeted towards players who will be gullible enough to spend exorbitant amounts of money on ‘free’ mobile games.
Fake game ads are just the most recent link in a decades-long chain of false advertising. Fast food chains, for instance, will use things like cardboard, paint and glue to make what they’re serving look more appealing in advertisements.
Ads are exhausting. It takes a physical strain on me to share internet space with them, let alone physical space. Searching online for news sources leaves you with a screen full of banners and pop-up videos. Scrolling through a social media feed means every third post is an ad, and every fourth is an undisclosed sponsorship. Every major city is filled with billboards. YouTube fills minutes-long videos with video ads that together last twice as long as the video itself.
There are some solutions, though they treat symptoms, not the problem itself. On my computer, I use the Firefox browser with uBlock Origin. I hit “not interested” whenever possible and don’t play mobile games with advertisements.
To say the least, it’s incredibly frustrating that the onus is on me to make my internet experience tolerable.
