Throughout this week, we’re reviewing the weird mobile game ads we get served on TikTok to see if we can learn something from them. Wish us luck.
What do you call your strategy game about growing and upgrading a wolfpack? Wolf Game, of course.
This title from Special Gamez has been around since August 2022, and according to Appmagic is earning the UAE-based firm about $1m a month in IAP revenue.
And it’s acquiring players by using some pretty striking TikTok ads – ones similar in tone and style to those we’ve already seen in Mecha Domination. They may even have been made by the same agency.
Except in Wolf Game, you’ve got an animal to work with, so the marketing team has gone all-in on torturing some wolf cubs in exotic ways to get your attention.
In this one, a couple of gorillas stamp and kick a vulnerable wolf cub, then belt it into the top corner of a nearby goal before high fiving:
But don’t worry folks: after the poor wolf cub vomits blood, he gets revenge.
In this second one, those pesky gorillas are at it again, slamming a spread-eagled wolf’s genitals into a tree as a set-up for the revenge to come later:
Or there’s this one, in which a poor little wolf club gets their nose nearly sliced off by a gnarly-looking trap. Again, there’s redemption later when you see the cub get fixed up to some soothing piano music:
There’s a slightly more even fight in the ad below, in which a wolf plays slapsies with a gorilla. The wolf loses, gets sapped of all its power, then returns as a samurai(?) to slice up the primate with a ruddy great sword:
This last one has those gorillas in it once more, but does at least represent broadly what you do in the game – collect resources, level up and take down ever bigger enemies drawn from across the animal kingdom:
Verdict: bloody problematic
What’s shocking about these ads is the gore and animal cruelty. This is an incredibly bleak sentence, but: we’re kind of used to sexism in some mobile game ads, but graphic animal cruelty feels like a fairly new phenomenon.
Is this something that has slipped through whatever ad guidelines exist at TikTok somehow? These ‘wolf cub torture’ creatives must be at least pushing and prodding at a few boundaries, surely.
And yet, of course, I watched all of them just to see what would happen next, so I’m part of the problem.
