Abstract
Mobile games are released through crowded app store platforms where competition is intense, and discoverability is a critical problem. In this environment, attracting new users is increasingly driven by advertising. This article examines one prominent format: playable ads, interactive advertisements embedded within mobile games. This article reports on a study of 100 unique playables collected from iOS games, analysing their characteristics, content and interface design. We show how circulation, understood as the movement of users between apps, is structured through the temporal and affective techniques of playable ad design, often in ethically problematic ways, while also conditioned by broader industrial dynamics such as the heavy ad spending of large game app developers and publishers. We argue that the ability to circulate constitutes a form of circulation power and that discoverability in digital games is fundamentally tied to this capacity.
Introduction
Mobile game apps have emerged as significant cultural and economic forms. Distributed predominantly through the Google Play and Apple App Stores, mobile games account for a substantial portion of global gaming audiences and revenues, comprising a $126 billion market (Statista, 2025). Now well into their second decade, app stores, once celebrated for democratising game distribution and lowering barriers to market entry, have revealed significant challenges for distributing games. While comparatively lower price points and the ease of publishing have enabled more developers to release games, they have also led to intense competition and market saturation. As a result, visibility and discoverability have become critical challenges for all but the most established game developers and publishers. In this crowded marketplace, the discoverability of games increasingly relies on advertising, particularly strategies focused on user acquisition (UA) – methods by which game developers attract players. This dynamic is so pronounced that, as ad executive Eric Seufert notes, approximately 95% of ads in mobile games are for other games (MacKenzie, 2024). In this way, game advertisements have become a primary mechanism of what Aphra Kerr calls circulation (Kerr, 2017), facilitating the promotion and consumption of mobile games within a highly competitive platform ecosystem.
If game advertisements function as a means of circulation, this article asks: how does circulation happen? As current research on digital advertising has highlighted, which ads appear – and to whom – is largely shaped by opaque algorithmic systems (Angus et al., 2024). Yet there is analytical value in asking: how do ads circulate at the level of the interface? How are they encountered and experienced? What kinds of affordances do they offer in shaping user engagement (see, e.g. Carah et al., 2022)? Guided by interface ‘walkthrough’ methods – broadly encompassing software studies, human geography and media studies approaches (Ash et al., 2018; Light et al., 2018) – we examine how specific design and interface elements shape the process of moving users through games and apps. This analysis focuses on one prevalent type of mobile game advertisement: the playable ad. Playable ads are a form of display advertising that incorporates interactive elements, such as snippets of gameplay representative (or, problematically, not representative) of a game's content (see Moradzadeh and Kou, 2024). While other forms of display advertising, such as video display ads, are also widely used for user acquisition (and often feature as a component of a playable ad), playable ads are particularly noteworthy because they leverage the interactive affordances of mobile game play.
We begin by situating this research within three bodies of literature: scholarship on digital advertising, particularly work examining the affordances of different ad formats (see, e.g. Carah et al., 2022); app studies scholarship that interrogates how apps, and the wider platforms surrounding them, exert a particular techno-economic logic on the production, distribution and use of software (see, e.g. Jia et al., 2022; Nieborg and Helmond, 2019; Nieborg et al., 2020; van der Vlist et al., 2024); and the existing literature on the role of advertising within game distribution and monetisation (Moradzadeh and Kou, 2024; Nieborg, 2017; Tyni et al., 2025). From there, we introduce the concept of circulation, informed both by work on media circulation within media industry studies (e.g. Hesmondhalgh, 2019; Lotz, 2026) and by perspectives that frame circulation as a process of mediation and movement of users across media (e.g. Ash, 2015; Hesmondhalgh and Lotz, 2020; Seaver, 2018; Prey, 2018). We then outline our methodological approach, guided by walkthrough methods for studying interfaces at a technical level, to analyse a dataset of 100 unique playable ads for 64 different games, collected from iOS mobile games. Our findings are organised across three dimensions of the playable ad: ad characteristics, ad content and ad interfaces. Through this analysis, we argue that circulation – the movement of users across digital games – is shaped at the micro level through experiential interface techniques within playable ads but also conditioned by the broader industrial and political-economic dynamics that structure how those ad interfaces are designed and encountered.
Background and related work
Digital advertising
Advertising is central to the digital economy (Hwang, 2018), now constituting a $1 trillion market globally (WARC, 2025). The development of digital advertising models by platform companies has transformed business practices in the advertising industry (McGuigan, 2023), with these platforms playing a central role in mediating relationships among advertisers, agencies and ad buyers. Although there is some diversity in the global advertising ecosystem, a small number of platform businesses dominate the market, most notably Meta, Alphabet and Amazon which collectively capture over 50% of the advertising market (WARC, 2025). These companies operate extensive advertising networks across platforms such as Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, YouTube and Google Search (Kininmonth and Lobato, 2023; van der Vlist and Helmond, 2021).
Beyond Meta and Alphabet, which dominate search and display ad markets, companies from a range of other sectors operate digital advertising services. Companies increasingly ‘wall off’ their ecosystems, monetising their ‘first-party’ data – that is, how users have interacted with their own proprietary platforms or software (e.g. a website and app). As one industry commentator put it, ‘everything is an ad network’ (Seufert, 2021). Retailers from Walmart and Costco, to gig economy platforms such as Instacart and Uber, and videogame companies like Zynga and Activision-Blizzard, are now capitalising on the data generated through users’ interactions with their own ad services to inform targeted advertising services and strategies.
While ad platforms differ in both scale and scope, they share several common affordances. First, most operate programmatically, with ease of purchase often framed as a key selling point (Kininmonth, 2022). Second, much of the advertising, especially on mobile apps, is designed to provoke a direct response, prompting immediate actions such as purchases, subscriptions, sign-ups or app installations. While digital ad networks are broadly united by the aim of selling access to algorithmically segmented audiences, ad formats – that is, the specific ways advertisements are structured and delivered to users – often differ in function and design, shaped by the affordances of particular platforms and devices. For instance, Instagram's integrated retail features allow users to browse products and access storefronts without leaving the app (Carah et al., 2022). Likewise, YouTube offers skippable and non-skippable video ads tailored to user behaviour, often embedded between or within video content (Banerjee and Pal, 2023). Ad affordances extend to digital games, which are becoming an increasingly significant source of ad inventory.
Apps and app studies
These advertising dynamics unfold within a specific sociotechnical context: the mobile app economy. Mobile games are, fundamentally, apps – software distributed predominantly through centralised platform marketplaces (e.g. the Apple App Store and Google Play Store). To be sure, there is significant literature on the way people experience apps (e.g. social media apps) and the various social, political and communicative affordances they have (for an overview, see, e.g. Goggin, 2021). Beyond this, studies have sought to understand the material-technical dimensions of apps as a specific form of software (Dieter et al., 2019; Gerlitz et al., 2019a, 2019b).
One strand of app studies, particularly relevant to this article, draws on platform studies and political economy approaches to think through the way that apps, and the wider platforms surrounding them, exert a particular techno-economic logic on the production, distribution and use of software. A growing body of scholarship has examined how platformisation reshapes the app economy, concentrating power in the hands of a small number of proprietary app ecosystems – ecosystems that grow through a range of technical standards, corporate acquisitions and outward-facing partnerships (see, e.g. Nieborg and Helmond, 2019; van Der Vlist et al., 2024). Differently, work has focused on the question of distribution – particularly, how apps distributed through app distribution platforms generate dependencies on those platforms. This dependency has consequences for the composition of the app economy: empirical studies of national app store catalogues reveal that a small number of large, predominantly US-based firms dominate both revenues and visibility. This dynamic has been theorised as ‘app imperialism’ (Nieborg et al., 2020) and as an intensification of longer-standing structures of ‘empire’ (Nieborg, 2021) – a concentration of power that Joseph et al. (2023) show persists across ostensibly diverse national storefronts. In contrast to the distribution of many individual apps through marketplace infrastructures, a distinct strategy has emerged in the form of the ‘super app’ – a single, highly integrated platform that bundles diverse services within one application (Jia et al., 2022), which can be understood both in terms of its technical features and through the lens of corporate and financial power (van der Vlist et al., 2024).
This literature on apps – particularly app economies – provides context for the present study. The structural dynamics that characterise app store markets – platformisation, market concentration and infrastructural dependency – are precisely the conditions under which mobile games are developed, distributed and monetised.
Digital game advertising
Digital games have long been a space for experimentation in advertising. As Nieborg (2007) notes, the industry has envisioned games as offering engagement far beyond the ‘passive’ consumption of traditional media advertisements. This vision has materialised through in-game advertisements integrated into virtual environments – for example, Burnout: Paradise featured billboards for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign (Itzkoff, 2008) – and there is a history of advergames developed explicitly for promotional purposes (Roettl et al., 2016). More recently, branded in-game content, such as Fortnite's collaborations with film IP like Marvel and Star Wars, has been hailed as a new advertising frontier (Ball, 2022), and games remain a site for political advertising, as seen in the Harris-Walz campaign's themed Fortnite map in 2024 (Tassi, 2024). However, while branded integrations have gained traction, programmatic buying and selling of targeted ad inventory within game environments remains largely speculative. Venture capital interest in gaming-focused adtech companies reflects investor optimism, although widespread adoption is still evolving (see Egliston, 2026). Recent industry analysis suggests ads will come to support monetisation of subscription services such as Microsoft's GamePass (Mobile Dev Memo Podcast, 2024).
While imaginaries of in-game advertising haven’t fully materialised as such, advertising in games has taken a different yet significant trajectory, fulfilling two functions: monetisation and discoverability in mobile games. Advertising is typically not the primary revenue mechanism for mobile games; the adoption of in-app purchases by Apple in 2009 enabled the dominant ‘freemium’ model, with advertising entering as a supplementary revenue stream. While some studios have turned ads into significant earnings – Hipster Whale reportedly made $10 million in ad revenue within 90 days of releasing Crossy Road (Reynolds, 2015) – the overall market remains comparatively small, generating around $9 billion in 2024, less than 5% of worldwide ad spend (Clark, 2026), reflecting the fact that game ads largely circulate within the games ecosystem itself. More significantly, advertising serves as a critical discovery tool (Kerr, 2017; Nieborg, 2017): developers place ads in other apps to attract new users, particularly high-spending players, in a process known as user acquisition. Given saturated app store markets, ad space has become fiercely competitive (Seufert, 2014), and many developers now rely on hyper-optimised, data-driven advertising practices that have transformed professional norms of game development (Swartz and Scott, 2019) – Scopely's Monopoly Go!, for instance, generated $2 billion in revenue within 11 months but reportedly spent $500 million on UA advertising (D’Anastasio and Burke, 2024). Cultural policymakers have also recognised this importance, with Canada's Ontario Digital Media Fund introducing a Discoverability and Commercialisation Program to subsidise UA costs (Ontario Creates, 2022), and similar measures in Australia through VicScreen's Production Fund for Games (VicScreen, 2021: 3) and Screen Queensland's Games Grants (Screen Queensland, 2025).
Despite advertising's growing importance to mobile game economics, it remains relatively underexplored academically. Nieborg's (2017) foundational work examines UA mechanics and the implications of shifting unit economics. More recent work has mapped the ‘advertising stack’ underpinning game marketing (Egliston, 2024), and production studies have highlighted the interplay between creative production and advertising optimisation (Tyni et al., 2025). Research has also addressed regulatory implications: Xiao (2025) showed only 7% of social media ads for loot-box games complied with EU and UK disclosure requirements across Meta-owned platforms and TikTok, while Moradzadeh and Kou (2024) examined ‘fake’ games in advertising where interactive ads misrepresent actual content.
This emerging body of research addresses economics, legality and design in game advertising, yet there remains a need to better understand the advertising affordances shaping user acquisition. Consistent with studies of social media advertising (Carah et al., 2022), game advertising warrants attention to medium-specific affordances. In this article, we focus on playable ads: a now-common display format in mobile games that invites users to engage with a brief instance of gameplay within the ad itself. Within industry circles, playables are tailored to mobile interface conventions, blur the boundary between gameplay and marketing and are lauded for delivering higher conversion rates (IAB, 2019). They demonstrate how advertising is shaped by both platform affordances and vernaculars of interaction native to games and for this reason form the focus of our analysis.
Circulation and power
Circulation – the processes through which cultural goods are marketed, distributed and made available to audiences – has long been recognised as a key site of power in cultural production. In legacy media, circulation power was concentrated in networks, studios and publishers who determined how, where and under what conditions audiences encountered cultural goods (Hesmondhalgh, 2019). Under platform-based conditions, this power is exercised differently, through algorithmic recommendation, discovery interfaces and monetisation structures (see, e.g. Lotz, 2026).
In the context of digital media, the interface is a key site through which circulation is enacted – where users encounter, navigate between and are directed towards cultural goods. Interfaces are widely understood as sites of power more broadly, shaping the capacity of individuals and collectives to exercise agency (see, e.g. Ash, 2015; Cheney-Lippold, 2011), and research in this vein highlights how interfaces motivate and constrain user capacities in ways that frequently reflect the economic priorities underpinning their design. When this understanding is brought to bear on circulation specifically, a growing body of work demonstrates how interface design shapes the movement of users into and between digital ‘spaces’, often for commercial ends. In games, studies have shown how interfaces enrol players into ongoing engagement across game franchises (Ash, 2015) and into broader platform ecosystems (Egliston, 2018, 2020). In adjacent areas of digital media research, work on algorithmic circulation – for instance, Seaver's (2018) study of music recommendation and Prey's (2018) analysis of Spotify – demonstrates how personalised content flows circulate users through an app's interface. Similarly, Hesmondhalgh and Lotz (2020) examine smart TV interfaces, showing how material-technical design features shape audience access to content, while also foregrounding the commercial arrangements that underpin that access.
This article takes circulation as its central concern in the mobile games industry. If circulation is key to the dynamics of mobile game markets (Kerr, 2017; Nieborg, 2017), then it is important to ask how specific mechanisms of circulation operate and with what consequences. We extend this understanding of circulation in mobile games by framing circulation – and the power to circulate – as a mediated capacity: the ability to shape users’ encounters with digital technologies. In particular, we ask: how do playable ads mediate circulation?
Research design
Critical interface methods
To orient our analysis towards the material and technical features of playable ad interfaces, this article is guided by interdisciplinary ‘walkthrough’ approaches to studying digital media interfaces. Walkthrough methods can generally be characterised as structured approaches to examining how digital interfaces guide, constrain and shape user interactions, often by assuming a user's position and attending to the sociocultural and material dimensions of technology. Rather than systematically applying any single approach, we selectively drew from two prominent approaches to orient our observation and analysis of playable ad interfaces, consistent with previous work (Joseph and Bishop, 2024).
The digital cultural studies approach developed by Light et al. (2018), grounded in actor-network theory, guided our attention to the material and mediating dimensions of interface design – how features, flows and interactive elements shape the conditions of use – while remaining sensitive to the economic and cultural forces that inform them. Specifically, and consistent with our research questions, we focused on what Light et al. term the ‘technical walkthrough’, which provides a granular analysis of how an app functions (Light et al., 2018: 891). We used this to home in on the core features and experience of playable ads. The post-phenomenological approach articulated by Ash et al. (2018) provided a complementary orientation, directing our attention to how interfaces and their constituent design elements modulate user behaviour through affective and sensory means. As Ash's earlier work on game interfaces (Ash, 2015) highlights, such design choices – while affective and phenomenological – are also shaped by exogenous political-economic forces, including the capital, infrastructure and scale available to major firms, and any interface analysis must remain attuned to these wider conditions of production. Together, these frameworks informed what we attended to during data collection and the kinds of observations we recorded, while the analysis itself followed the iterative qualitative coding process described below.
Sample and ad elicitation
Our study sample consists of 100 unique playable ads for 64 individual games, collected between June 2024 and February 2025. 1 Ads were gathered from mobile game apps published on the iOS App Store, using the second author's iPhone 11. To locate suitable titles, we first searched iOS App Store user reviews of top free games to find games that contained ad-related complaints and supplemented this with Reddit and Google searches to identify ad-heavy games, curating a list of games representing broad genres and publishers. Although playable ads also appear in non-game apps, we focused on their use within mobile games, as this allowed us to examine connections between the ad and its host game (e.g. genre alignment or in-game rewards for interacting with ads).
While mobile games are widely distributed across both iOS (App Store) and Android devices (Google Play), we limited our sample to iOS/App Store games. Although the two app distribution platforms differ in their developer policies and review requirements, both are oversaturated markets where user acquisition depends heavily on advertising (see Moradzadeh and Kou, 2024; Nieborg, 2017). Moreover, most games in our dataset (92/100) were cross-published on both platforms, mitigating the risk of platform-specific bias. Nonetheless, we acknowledge this as a limitation and emphasise the need for future research that systematically compares playable ads across platforms. Our aim in this article is not to provide a representative account, but to explore the affordances and conventions of playable ads on the iOS App Store, one of the largest market segments in the global games industry.
Ads are a common feature of mobile games, but studying them presents methodological challenges for researchers. Chief among these is the absence of a single, exhaustive archive of advertisements. While regulations such as the EU Digital Services Act have mandated transparency repositories (which have been used in previous work; see, e.g. Xiao, 2025), these are often incomplete (e.g. TikTok's ad archive excludes US ads), limited in functionality (e.g. Google's repository offers only basic search tools) and most relevant for our purposes, incapable of capturing the interactive affordances of playable ads. At best, repositories contain video recordings of playables, which cannot reproduce the user experience or demonstrate the interface dynamics central to circulation. To address this, we developed a process of ad elicitation. This involved actively engaging with popular casual mobile games in genres such as puzzle, hyper-casual and simulation (where ads are common). By playing these ad-reliant games, we were able to elicit and collect playable ads that reflect broader trends in mobile game advertising.
Analysis and coding
The primary data collection was conducted by the second author, who recorded observation notes alongside videos and screenshots during the walkthrough process. These notes documented details relevant to the study, such as ad duration, frequency of appearance and descriptive observations of the ads themselves. To analyse the material, we drew on existing approaches to the study of game interfaces as ‘texts’, including prior work on game advertising (Moradzadeh and Kou, 2024). Our analysis followed their iterative coding process – each author independently familiarised themselves with the material, generating initial codes from recurring features and patterns (e.g. ad length, genre or interface design). We also produced analytic memos during this stage to capture reflections and emergent ideas that informed the later development of broader concepts.
Through comparison and discussion, we refined these codes into higher-order categories that structured our analysis. Specifically, we organised findings around three key dimensions of playable ads – ad characteristics, ad content and ad interfaces (see Table 1) – within which we coded relevant data points. To ensure reliability and comprehensiveness, all three authors revisited the dataset multiple times, checking consistency and confirming that no significant features were overlooked.
Dimensions of playable ads.
Findings
Ad characteristics
Data in the ‘ad characteristics’ category centred around the duration of the playable ad, the game being advertised and how frequently each ad appeared. Across the 100 unique playable ads in our sample, several notable patterns emerged concerning their placement, duration and frequency.
Playable ads were triggered within the source games in various ways: in order to receive an in-game reward, automatically upon completion of a level or randomly throughout the gameplay experience (see, for instance, in Tiny Tower (NimbleBit) where the player could trigger an ad in order to receive a reward once daily; Figure 1). The trigger for a playable ad shaped how the user was invited – or required – to interact with it. This was usually enforced temporally, by only allowing players to leave the playable ad after a particular time period had passed or by only granting a reward if a player had watched the ad in its entirety.
Invitation to ‘collect’ a daily reward by watching an ad in Tiny Tower.
When experienced in full (i.e. interacted with until the ad became unplayable), playable ad durations ranged from as short as 19 s (A92, Travel Town – Merge Adventure; Moon Active) to nearly 5 min long (A91, Township; Playrix). The average ad duration was approximately 1 min and 42 s. Notably, 14 of the playable ads implemented a design where the user was required to engage with the ad for a minimum amount of time in order to receive a ‘reward’ in the source game. Most ads were non-skippable until the user had engaged the ad for a certain period of time, at which point a ‘skip’ or ‘exit’ icon would appear. On average, the user could not exit or skip a playable ad until 36 s had elapsed, creating a significant window in which attention was effectively captured.
While some playable ads simply implemented required minimum time, others sought to make engaging with the ad until its completion appealing through offering rewards linked to the source game, such as virtual currency or additional interactions with limited in-game content like daily wheel spins. This reward threshold created a temporal enclosure around the player's time and attention, locking them into a minimum engagement duration before they could return to the source game or receive their incentivised payout (Figure 2). Ads which appear throughout gameplay in a source game introduce friction, technical obstacles which interrupt the user experience of the source game. This friction is managed through the payoff in-game reward. In this sense, ads were not an isolated event appearing between moments of gameplay in the source game – but rather, they were linked with the in-app purchase monetisation strategy of the source game to further compel engagement.
Attempting to close A77 (Royal Kingdom Ad 5) before reward timer ended would result in not receiving reward within the source game (Tiny Tower).
The frequency with which certain ads appeared was also notable. Of the 100 unique playable ads, 50 were shown more than once during the data collection period, and some ads appeared across multiple source games. Certain ads dominated the dataset through repeated appearances. The most heavily advertised game was Royal Kingdom (Dream Games), a match-3 puzzle game that was released during our data collection period on 21 November 2024. Playable ads for Royal Kingdom appeared in nine unique forms, which collectively appeared 25 times across eight different source games (A73-A81). In contrast, Dream Games’ earlier and hugely popular title Royal Match appeared only once (A82). This disparity is likely a result of the Royal Kingdom's recent release, coinciding with an aggressive marketing push. As shown in Figure 3, Dream Games' ads were the most frequent across the sample. Dream, a company valued at almost $5 billion, was followed in the sample by large companies like casual game development studio Say Games and Playrix. While we cannot speak to the efficacy of the ads for these companies, frequency suggests that mobile game developers are willing to invest significantly in ad spending, and it follows that ad impressions are likewise significant.
Frequency of ad by game developer.
Ad content
Data in the ‘ad content’ category focused on ad format (such as whether an ad was entirely playable or a combination of playable, gameplay footage and cinematics), the function of that format (i.e. the kind of conversion the ad was seeking to achieve) and the genre of the game being advertised.
The market for digital advertising is built upon the promise that advertisers can purchase a specific outcome or ‘conversion’, for instance, that users will buy a certain product, sign up for a certain service or install a certain app. In mobile game advertising, advertisers may purchase a number of different conversions including game installs or the purchase of in-game items (e.g. advertising to players of a certain title to buy a loot box). While it is not always possible to determine the exact conversion an advertiser was optimising for in a given campaign – as Seufert (2023) notes, moving a user into an app may be only one step towards a more specific goal, such as a particular purchase (part of a wider conversion ‘funnel’) – we observed that all playable ads in the sample appeared to be primarily geared towards driving game installs.
This was demonstrated by the consistent deployment of the App Store during playable ads. In every ad in the sample, the game's App Store page appeared at least once (up to a total of 38 times in one ad, Coffee Mania – Sorting Jam, A19, Crazy Labs; Figure 4). This usually occurred at the end of the playable before the ‘exit’ icon appeared, allowing the user to return to the source game. However, in some cases, the App Store page was deployed aggressively, triggering whenever the player touched the screen and thus rendering the playable unplayable. The player simply had to wait for the time-gated ability to exit the ad to unlock. In the case of A19, the ad remained playable, allowing the researcher to interact with the repeated App Store page appearances until they had completed the ad's content.
Coffee Mania – Sorting Jam interface.
Playable ads exhibited a mix of interactive or ‘playable’ elements, cinematic elements (which were not gameplay-focused, such as animations or video footage of celebrities discussing the game), and footage of simulated gameplay. Hybrid formats, where ads combined gameplay footage and/or cinematic sequences with playable interactions, were the most common (n = 60). For instance, an ad for casual/merge game Merge Mansion (A54; Metacore) opens with animated cinematic footage of a woman crying in a church on her wedding day following the apparent death of her partner, who shortly thereafter appears at her home to threaten her. The ad then changes to gameplay footage demonstrating a simulated player solving puzzles by combining different objects together to create new objects, the game's core mechanic. Almost 1 minute into the ad, the format again shifts to become playable, allowing the player to interact with the ad by merging items to solve puzzles as demonstrated in the gameplay footage. While the cinematic footage in this example (and others) appears disconnected from the actual gameplay and playable elements, it nonetheless gives the impression of a wider narrative surrounding the game. This sense of narrative, however tenuous, encourages players to engage with the game itself, showing how playable ads draw on multiple formats to prompt installation.
The genres represented within the playable ads were relatively narrow. The majority of ads fell into casual or hyper-casual genres: match-3 and merge games, simulation games and puzzle mechanics featured prominently (Figure 5). These genres, which have relatively low barriers for entry and are played by large audiences, allow users to quickly grasp the gameplay loop within the ad itself. The ads thus double as both promotional material and onboarding tutorial – a short, self-contained instance of trial gameplay.
Playable ads game genres.
While we did not conduct a comparative study between playable ad content and the actual games being advertised, it is expected that many were loose representations rather than reflective of genuine gameplay, common in mobile game advertising (see Moradzadeh and Kou, 2024). For instance, via the second author's familiarity with Gardenscapes (Playrix; see Figure 6), it was apparent that the advertised gameplay (a series of puzzles in which the player alleviates the suffering of a mother and child; A31–33) is inconsistent with the game itself, which is for the most part a straightforward match-3 game through which the player earns ‘stars’ then spent on repairing a manor home's garden. This discrepancy was especially evident in cases where puzzle-like sequences or ‘fail’ scenarios were used to create urgency or engagement, even if those sequences were not core parts of the game's design.
Screenshots from Gardenscapes playable (A31) and Gardenscapes actual gameplay, demonstrating a discrepancy between advertised and actual gameplay.
Playable ads generally appeared in source games in the same or similar genre. Ads, particularly when triggered randomly or between levels, introduce friction to the gameplay experience. There is a tension here between the source game's goal of encouraging the player to return to the game (via, for instance, the promise of a reward) and the playable ad's goal of engaging and converting a player. There were also notable instances where the genre of a playable ad was incongruent with the source game. For example, a playable ad for children's educational game ABCmouse (A1) developed by edtech company Age of Learning appeared in the simulation game Good Pizza (Tapblaze), presumably aiming to capture the parent audience. In other cases, the disparity raised more serious issues around classification and content: a playable ad for MeChat – Interactive Stories (A48; PlayMe Studio), which is rated 17+ on the App Store and features sexual content, appeared in the 12+ rated casual game Tiny Tower (NimbleBit). Not only was this content jarring for the player, but it also highlights that playable ads are not consistently subject to the same regulatory classification frameworks as games themselves (cf. Xiao, 2025). While it is unclear whether such mismatches were the result of targeting parameters linked to the author's Apple App Store account (e.g. age-based personalisation), these cases nonetheless raise broader questions about whether playable ads should be required to meet the age rating of the source game in which they appear. This is especially important given that many younger players are unlikely to have their own iOS accounts and instead play on shared family devices (Livingstone et al., 2015), meaning they may be more frequently exposed to content misaligned with their age rating.
Ad interfaces
Playable ads operate as interfaces that structure user habit and attention. But rather than treating the interface as a static object or a container of discrete technical ‘parts’, we follow accounts from human geography that conceptualise the interface as processual – of mediation and modulation of bodily, sensory and technical processes (Ash, 2015). In this sense, the ad works by guiding, nudging and conditioning action through the interface.
Across the 100 playable ads, there were a variety of commonly deployed visual and textual interface elements, particularly the use of iconography, visual styling and emotive language. Iconographic elements such as skip and ‘exit’ icons, App Store banners and timer countdowns appeared relatively uniformly across the sample. The visual grammar of the ads typically involved lurid colours, exaggerated animations and often gendered or sexist tropes (such as ads which foregrounded women's appearances as part of a ‘fail’ outcome, for example, in Winked, A99; Nanobit).
In gameplay footage, which demonstrated a simulated ‘player’ engaging with the game's core mechanics, these simulated players were frequently shown to make errors ending the game. In these instances, words like ‘FAIL’ or ‘YOU LOSE’ were often presented in bold, animated typography (Figure 7). These interface features frame failure as something correctable, achievable only by the player downloading the full game and ‘doing better’ themselves, by using emotive language to invite conversion.
The simulated player ‘failing’ a level in Royal Match (A82) gameplay footage.
However, given that playable ads are inherently interactive, such semiotic elements are not the only drivers for conversion. Playables also afford affective interactions in order to move players from the ad (and, of course, the game they were already playing) to the advertised game.
Many playable ads employed a tutorial-like structure, guiding users through simplified versions of core game mechanics in order to engage and orient the player immediately. Phrases like ‘Tap to place!’ (Figure 8) were common, often paired with animated hand icons and arrows to direct the player's interaction. These were rarely open-ended: players were led down a linear path with minimal decision-making, and once they had reached the end of the tutorial-style content, they were directed towards the App Store. Playable ads rarely offer genuine gameplay, underscoring how these ads are designed to onboard users.
The ‘tutorial’ instructions in Goods Frenzy (35).
Many playable ads employed multi-step interaction loops. Following a cinematic and/or gameplay footage, players would complete a mini tutorial, watch an in-game reward tally up and be prompted through multiple confirmation screens before reaching the install page. These stages introduced a sense of progressive commitment: by the time the install prompt arrived, the player had already invested time and energy in the game.
Time played a particularly crucial role in shaping user experience. Rather than being treated as a discrete unit of measurement (i.e. a set time to ‘complete’ an ad, as previously discussed), time here functioned as a sensational or felt quality or phenomenality (Ash, 2015). Some ads deployed urgency mechanics such as flashing countdowns, limited-time deals or sequences that suggested rapid progression through levels. Others enforced delays by removing the ability to skip for a fixed number of seconds or by launching the App Store automatically when the screen was touched. In both cases, time became a managed variable: compressed to heighten stakes and prompt quick decisions or extended to maximise exposure. These techniques foreground how ad interfaces manipulate temporal experience as a key part of the conversion process.
Underlying many of these elements was the manipulation of friction, deliberate moments of challenge or smoothness designed to guide user behaviour. Generally, interacting with the playable ads was frustrating, tedious and certainly not fun. Some ads (e.g. Satisroom: Perfectly Organised, A84) did not give clear instructions on how to complete the playable's task, and others (e.g. Bus Escape: Traffic Jam, A5; ABI Global) were designed to be impossible to complete, encouraging potential users to install the game in order to complete the challenge. Others removed friction entirely: transitions between the ad and the game's App Store page were seamless, icons such as the ‘skip’ button appeared in similar places onscreen across all playables, and the tutorial structure of many ads offered a sense of progress without challenge.
Some ads took a more aggressive approach to forced interaction. Skip buttons were hidden, disabled or replaced with UI elements that mimicked ‘exit’ icons but actually redirected to the App Store. As discussed previously, sometimes touching the screen would trigger the game's App Store page or redirect the user to the App Store itself. These tactics often provoked frustration but are likely effective in increasing click-throughs (even if accidental), reinforcing a model where attention is extracted through deception regardless of the friction experienced by the player. Indeed, these deceptive patterns are also connected to the broader phenomenon of widespread advertising fraud in the mobile ecosystem (Hwang, 2018). This suggests that these interface-level manipulations are not isolated design choices by ‘bad actors’, but rather a result of a wider systemic problem – widespread metric inflation and misaligned incentives that warrant further scrutiny.
Six ads in the sample were what we characterised as ‘fake playables’. These were ads that appeared to be playable, using conventions familiar across the broader set of playable ads: loading screens, gameplay footage shifting into a tutorial-like interface and invitations to interact (e.g. ‘Click to drive the car!’; Car Jam: Escape Puzzle, A11; Topsmart Mobile Ltd). However, interacting with the ad was impossible, and in all six cases, touching the screen simply triggered each game's App Store page. ‘Fake playables’ thus represent an additional layer of deception, where rather than misrepresenting the content of the game itself, they misrepresent the very possibility of interaction. This is distinct from previous accounts of ‘fakeness’ in game advertising, which emphasise misleading depictions of gameplay (see Moradzadeh and Kou, 2024).
Discussion, limitations and conclusion
This article has explored the format, content and interface design of 100 playable ads in mobile games on the iOS App Store. Our analysis highlights how circulation, understood here as the movement of users across digital games, is actively shaped by both micro-level interface techniques and broader industrial or political-economic dynamics, such as the capitalisation and advertising capacity of the firms behind them.
At the level of interface, playable ads rely on a repertoire of affective and temporal techniques (e.g. reward anticipation, friction management, guided interactions and urgency mechanics). These tactics – whether through delayed skip buttons, misleading interaction prompts or automatic App Store redirects – operate as mechanisms of affective and habitual modulation, calibrating user attention and guiding them towards conversion. In this respect, circulation is not simply a matter of visibility, but of shaping what users do, how long they stay, and when they act. This echoes work on digital interfaces as sites of power, structuring not only what is seen but how it is experienced (Ash, 2015; Cheney-Lippold, 2011). At the same time, many of these techniques align with what has elsewhere been described as ‘dark patterns’ (Zagal et al., 2013): design strategies that deliberately mislead, constrain or coerce user behaviour.
But beyond being coercive in a way that is purely problematic yet ultimately smooth, friction is key. These ads do not just interrupt gameplay; they are often lengthy and jarring. What are we to make of this? Playable ads are widely used as a mechanism of circulation, yet they are not especially ‘good’ or enjoyable. On the one hand, friction drives engagement – there is almost a desperation to ‘escape’ the ad by completing the playable. On the other hand, whether the ad is effective, entertaining or even representative of the game itself is beside the point. What matters is that each encounter is part of a wider process through which ad networks gather information about consumer preferences and practices, data that can then be harnessed within the broader buying and selling of ads (Egliston, 2024; Tyni et al., 2025). In this way, the disruptive, frictioned qualities of playable ads are not a failure but a feature.
These observations about the ad interface also raise questions about production. While playable ads resemble many common UX/UI practices (both conventional and controversial), the conditions under which they are produced remain largely invisible. Increasingly, playable ads are outsourced to specialist developers and work-for-hire contractors, often mediated through platforms like Fiverr (DeJong and Iantorno, 2024). These platforms not only facilitate subcontracting but also enable the offshoring of labour to firms in the global South, where production costs are lower. We know little about the labour practices that underpin these design choices, which represent an important area for further research. More broadly, this invites us to expand what we ‘count’ as game production. Keogh (2023) argues that the videogame industry should be understood less as a unified sector and more as a wider range of practices and forms of labour that exceed the boundaries of formal studios. Situating playable ads within this expanded understanding of production allows us to see them not simply as promotional artefacts (that may be ethically dubious in nature), but as a form of game work in their own right.
At a broader level, our findings show that circulation is unevenly distributed. This is fundamentally a political-economic question. The interface techniques documented above do not operate in a vacuum – they are shaped by structural conditions such as a firm's capitalisation, corporate strategy and capacity for sustained advertising expenditure, all of which determine which games achieve visibility and which do not. Companies like Dream Games, which appeared frequently in our sample, dominate advertising space – something made possible by substantial capital investment (as one of the world's largest mobile game developer-publishers).
This resonates with media industries research showing that circulation power rests with those who can afford to purchase sustained visibility (Hesmondhalgh and Lotz, 2020). Even within environments nominally open to any developer or publisher, free from the formal gatekeeping of licensed media relationships characterising the legacy media industries, distribution is far from egalitarian. Circulation, as Lotz (2026) observes of media distributed through platform-based channels, favours those with the capital to sustain visibility through advertising saturation, sponsorship or algorithmic optimisation. The mobile game ecosystem exemplifies this: the App Store functions as a platform on which almost any developer can publish, yet the games that circulate most widely are those backed by firms capable of funding large-scale user acquisition campaigns.
Indeed, the absence of ‘formal’ gatekeepers – what may once have been a publisher (see Kerr, 2017) – does not produce equitable circulation. The circulation power of a game, then, is less about the inherent quality of its design or its advertising than about the resources available to secure placement. This has important implications for cultural policy (e.g. existing initiatives in Australia and Canada focused on content discoverability), raising questions about how discoverability is structured, but also for the kinds of content that players encounter.
More broadly, ethical concerns also emerged. Many playable ads presented gameplay that diverged substantially from the actual game, by exaggerating features, omitting core mechanics or deploying cinematic scenarios with little relation to the user experience. These ads often disabled skip functions or tricked users into clicking to the App Store. Particularly troubling was the rise of deceptive playable content such as misleading gameplay or ‘fake playables’, which not only manipulate user expectations but also complicate existing regulatory frameworks. The question of what counts as truthful representation in a playable ad remains unresolved, and future legal and policy analysis could usefully examine how consumer protection laws apply to these interactive formats. That said, the persistence of these practices is perhaps unsurprising given what existing scholarship identifies as structural problems in advertising governance: platform governance choices are shaped by advertisers and other corporate interests (Joseph and Bishop, 2024; van der Vlist and Helmond, 2021), platform companies that are simultaneously major advertising businesses are effectively left to self-regulate (Flew, 2021), and advertising standards are in many jurisdictions set and enforced by ad industry bodies rather than public regulators (Woods and Antoniou, 2026). Across the industry, and its variety of ad formats, these arrangements collectively limit the capacity for robust enforcement (as this case of game app ads exemplifies).
This study offers an initial exploration of playable ads and circulation, but it has limitations. First, our dataset was limited to iOS games, leaving out Android and regional differences in ad delivery and reception (apps were downloaded from the Australian App Store). Future research should conduct comparative analyses across platforms and jurisdictions with distinct regulatory frameworks (e.g. China and EU). Second, playable ads are delivered via opaque algorithmic targeting systems – shaped by device type, purchase history and behavioural profiles – which we did not directly examine. Future work could investigate how targeting infrastructures structure ad visibility, building on studies of social media and programmatic advertising more broadly (Angus et al., 2024). Third, while we analysed the structure and surface of playable ads, we did not examine the industrial processes behind their creation – such as A/B testing, analytics or third-party ad production firms. These processes, especially as they become automated through AI, warrant closer ethnographic and industry-focused study.
Looking ahead, playable ads represent a small but strategically important share of global advertising spend. Their role is expanding: internal documents from the CMA's review of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision-Blizzard anticipate growing ad revenue streams tied to GamePass, suggesting a platform future where ad-supported gameplay becomes standard (see CMA, 2023). As this model scales, playable ads may bleed into other game formats beyond mobile, embedding advertising more deeply into the design of games themselves. This is already visible on Roblox, one of the world's largest game platforms, where ads are used not only to promote branded content but also to acquire and move users between games hosted on the platform, with ad placements notably purchased using in-game currency, itself a source of revenue for Roblox.
The rise of AI-generated ad creative marks another speculative frontier. Ad networks are beginning to deploy generative tools to create and deploy variations of ads at scale, potentially intensifying the trends documented here. While these tools might reduce costs for smaller developers, they are more likely to reinforce existing hierarchies – benefiting companies with the infrastructure to algorithmically optimise conversion. Future research should attend to how generative ad systems reshape authorship, targeting and the aesthetics of game promotion.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (grant numbers: DE240101275, FT220100076).
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.