Official

Revisions to video ads

We've been making changes to the ad formats in iGP Manager and creating more opportunities for rewards via ads around the game. If you have come to expect a consistent number of ads for parts, that is no longer the only ads placement, and the number of parts from that placement has been reduced to open up other rewarded ad opportunities.

Despite our efforts to ignore the reality and provide monolithic ad placements, after years of experience and education from working with various ads partners, we've come to learn that ads are opportunities and should be served up as such, and we must avoid setting the expectation that everyone will always get X per day, for various reasons:

• Firstly, not everyone can receive the same number of ads. Even the same person will have a different number of ads available to them from day to day, and even hour to hour. This resulted in players feeling short-changed if they couldn't receive the same number of ads as someone else. This is 100% outside of our control and depends on advertisers, the demographics they want to target and when they want to show ads. It was almost never a bug when an ad could not be shown, yet was consistently perceived as such due to how it was implemented (setting the expectation that X ads per day would be available). It was our own lack of experience with video ads that led to us implementing it in that way initially.


• Secondly, gameplay is negatively impacted by singular repetitive ad placements. If managers depend on repetitively watching a series of adverts as a substitute for actually managing the team, that's no good! We want the gameplay to be filled with challenges and decisions. It is a manager game, after all.

Existing ad placements have been modified, and new ad placements have been introduced:

• The old parts ad placement now can be viewed a maximum of 3 times, to avoid advantaging or disadvantaging any managers like before


• There is a new placement in the investment dialog that allows managers to get free cash for their team, this will also act to provide extra cash for HQ upgrades (e.g. manufacturing) offsetting a reduction in free parts


• There is a new placement on the training page that allows managers to perform healing on their drivers. This should enable extra training at no extra cost.

Unfortunately, there are no such "rewarded video ad" services for the web. I've asked about this several times with our partners and there is no solution like there is for apps. Much as we can't control the number of ads available to someone, we can't do much about that.

I've been snowed under behind the scenes for a couple of days and didn't get a chance to update this thread until now. I'd like to start by rephrasing what I said in another thread, which I had meant to put here as well:

We may adjust the new placements like healing if it seems right, but we always prefer to start conservatively then crank it up if people find it useful. As some have highlighted it has to be balanced within the game economy overall. The worst way to do that would be starting with a massively overpowered placement, which Parts ads were - let's face it, nobody was bothering to develop the HQ. It completely removed that aspect of gameplay. This is also why it's a bad comparison for the value of any subsequent placements, unless we just want ads to replace gameplay everywhere they are implemented?

One reason we moved some of the ads to reward cash is precisely because it is useful for building the HQ up. We expected some teething pains for anyone who was completely dependent on ads for the functioning of their team, but is that really what we want? Hopefully we can all agree that it is detrimental to gameplay to have such overpowered ad placements.

In addition to these objective factors, there are even greater subjective reasons for these changes. There is clearly far too much expectation of entitlement to ads, and some people actually feel owed a debt of them, arriving at the forum or support like a debt collector demanding their ads, sometimes very rudely. Some have even attempted to blackmail us in to giving them free stuff, e.g. "I'll make my rating 5-stars if you give me my free parts, until then it's 1-star". Far from encouraging us to increase the number of ads available to these users, it convinced us that we had set the wrong expectations and it was time for change.

Even the replies here reassure us that we need to adjust ad placements to reflect what they really are - opportunities from advertisers. Before an advert can be shown to anyone, there has to be an ad network with an advertiser that wants to show that particular user an advert. Again, that has nothing to do with us, but the various ad platforms and the advertisers purchasing ads from them and who they are targeting.

Once the dust settles on the changes, in the long run I am confident that it will improve gameplay.


We've been working to figure out where and why this might happen. I'm pleased to say we've identified several issues that have been addressed for the next release. It will be packaged with the next update which should be available within a week.


I can only apologise if it caused you and others as much inconvenience as it sounds like it has. Ultimately, there is no easy way to make a change to something like this, and for many users the situation was far worse before than it is now. The famous phrase "you can't please everyone all of the time" springs to mind. Though I realise that is not a satifactory explanation, it's probably the closest thing to the reality. We couldn't really avoid not keeping everyone happy whichever way we approached it. The course we've taken now will work out for the best in the long run and keep as many people happy as possible, once it has settled in.