These are all the same “idle strategy” game in different skins, apparently produced by different companies. This is an attempt to collect the names of all of these games.
Premise: idle game, use resources to build units and develop buffs, spend IRL money to eliminate idle wait period / generate resources for unit production/buffs. Pay slot machines to possibly win varying grades of buffs or army leaders.
Players on a server chat together and form alliances to try to beat out other teams. Generally speaking, a small number of whales direct the game while F2P players grind for whales.
The profits are built from people vulnerable to dark patterns and addictive personalities spending thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars on these games. Gatcha-esque games. Many cases on Reddit of people spending thousands of dollars on these games via microtransactions before realizing they got scammed.
All these games begin in different ways but the main stage of gameplay, roughly 1 hour after installing the app, is nearly identical in all games. 100% pay to win. The more money spent, the stronger the advantage a whale has over other players on the server. Some “players” are alleged to be paid workers; some “whales” allegedly receive credit from developers; ads can be found across the net soliciting people to play the games and participate to drive up a sense of community in servers & feed the egos of whales. They're given enough monopoly money to try and entice in-game friends to make microtransactions. I have also been directly contacted on various social media apps by catfish to install their slop idle strategy game who attempt to lovebomb me into making microtransactions.
Large amounts of money are spent to drive people to these games with deceptive ads misrepresenting the true nature of the games. Trying to find data linking these games to each other is nearly impossible but there is evidence of a large amount of money being spent to promote these games. Evidently they must be quite profitable.
List of mobile slop games:
- Whiteout Survival
- hits $3bn in player spending in under 2.5 years
- Apparently the concept is stolen from a PC game called Frostpunk?
- Age of Empires Mobile
- This one shocks me a bit that a reputable game company would lend their brand out for such slop
- Frozen City
- De-extinct: Jurassic Dinosaurs
- Doomsday: Last Survivors
- Palmon Survival
- Kingshot (?)
- Last War Survival
- Last Fortress: Underground
- State of Survival
- Lands of Jail
- The Ants: Underground Kingdom
- Game of War
- Puzzles and Conquest