Do ya'll remember EVONY? I don't know if anybody ever cared about the game itself, but the ads... the ads are a magnificent, breast-y story of A/B testing that goes all the way to double D's and beyond It started innocuously enough. which do you think got more clicks? 🍒
"It appears we are getting more clicks on the boobs. What should we do about this?" "Well, we don't know for sure if it was the boobs. Try more boobs." "More boobs?" "More boobs."
"Wow! The sexy yearning queen is getting more clicks!" "Add more tits. Make it sound like a porno." "But we're not a porno?" "Who cares. Need. More. Clicks."
"You know what?" "What." "Let's not even bother with talking about the game, or pretending that the setting or context has anything to do with it." "That's... bold."
After that came the cambrian explosion of titty ads
"Initially, the goal was to get the game in front of as many people as possible," says Darold Higa, a lead producer on Evony who joined the company in 2010. "The ads were very successful in bringing people to the website."
I dropped by evony dot com to see how they're doing, and it looks like they've since dropped the booby positioning. Or maybe that's just the site, and the ads are still doing it? I don't know
Cracked did an infographic / post about it back in the day
but I think the best thing that came out of all of this was the Plant vs Zombie ads that followed
I'm also pretty sure that Evony's success or perceived success directly influenced Game of War, which put Kate Upton in a Superbowl ad in 2015 https://x.com/KateUpton/status...
There's also a Game of War ad with Mariah Carey, which is pretty funny. I'd love to hear from people who worked on these ads
it's very interesting to think about all the factors that have led up to this – from fantasy fiction (Lord of the Rings, for eg, popularized by the movies) to iPhones... https://x.com/MariahCarey/stat...
how much money do these mobile games have…?