Lists

These games are not accused of faking their gameplay. Their ads showed the game. What they left out was that the game sells random items, and a UK regulator has held that this omission makes an ad misleading. Three things this group establishes, and they apply well beyond the titles listed here. Silence counts: an ad for a game containing loot boxes must say so. Bad disclosure counts as no disclosure: light grey text on a moving background, on screen for two seconds, was ruled insufficient. And a store listing is an advertisement: the ASA ruled on app store pages, not just video ads, which means the page you land on after clicking is held to the same standard as the ad that sent you there. Worth noticing who is here. Licensed racing titles, a mainstream pool game, a golf simulator from a major publisher. Not a pin-pulling ad among them. This failure mode is not confined to the studios with the worst reputations, and almost every ruling in this group traces back to complaints from a single academic researcher in game regulation.

The most interesting group on this site. In each of these cases the publisher did not withdraw the ad. It changed the game so the ad became true. The pattern is consistent. The advertised mini-game already existed somewhere deep in the content, rare enough that almost no player reached it. After criticism or a ruling, it was moved earlier and made more frequent. The ad did not change. The product did. This is why any accusation of misleading advertising has a shelf life. Mobile titles are live-service products, updated continuously, so a studio can align the game with its marketing at any point in a release cycle. A complaint that was accurate in 2020 may describe a game that no longer exists. Every entry here is dated for that reason, and if you install one of these today you may well find the advertised mode waiting for you in the first hour.

Divorce, betrayal, a cheating partner, a humiliation avenged. These ads sell a story, not a mechanic, and they are aimed at people who would never search for a puzzle game. The gap varies more than you would expect. In some cases the drama is genuinely in the game and only the interaction is faked: the plot plays out as chapters you unlock, not as the choices the ad hands you. In others the storyline does not exist at all and the character in the ad never appears. That distinction matters if you are deciding what to install. An ad that dramatises a real story is overselling. An ad that invents one is something else. Each entry here says which of the two it is, and what the source for that is.

The heaviest accusation on this site, and the hardest to prove. Here the claim is not that the ad exaggerates the game, but that the footage belongs to someone else entirely: a PC strategy title, an indie RPG, a different studio's work. Two things make these cases difficult. Ad videos are usually unlisted, so there is no public URL to point at, and anyone documenting a case needs a capture taken at the moment the ad played. And mobile user acquisition runs through affiliate networks and outside creative shops, so the publisher named in an ad did not necessarily make it. At least one publisher has answered a complaint by saying it only stands behind its official advertising and not material from unofficial sources. That defence is real, and it is the reason every entry in this group is written in conditional terms, with the source of the report named. None of these has produced a ruling or a lawsuit. Treat them as documented allegations, not findings.

Swapping coloured tiles in a grid does not make a compelling four-second video. So the ads for these games show something else: a rescue puzzle, a two-choice dilemma, a marriage falling apart, a makeover with dramatic before and after. Underneath, the loop is the same in every case. You clear a match-3 level, you earn a currency, you spend it to advance a renovation and unlock the next chapter of a story. The story in the ads is sometimes real and sometimes invented, but the interaction shown almost never is. This is the group where publishers have most often closed the gap after the fact, by adding the advertised mini-games into the game and making them appear early enough that players actually see them. That makes the accusation a moving target: an ad criticised in 2020 may describe the game accurately in 2026.

This is the widest gap in mobile advertising. The ad shows lane-based shooting, numbered gates, waves of enemies, a lone survivor dodging and firing. You install it and you get a city with build timers, a hero roster, an alliance chat and a shop. The mismatch is deliberate and it targets a different audience than the one already playing strategy games. Action creatives reach people who would never click an ad for a base builder, and enough of them stay to make the spend profitable. The genre now runs some of the highest-grossing titles on either store, so this is not a fringe tactic used by small studios. If you install one of these expecting the ad, here is what to check before spending anything: whether progress is gated behind timers you can pay to skip, whether the advertised sequence exists at all or only as an occasional side mode, and whether the alliance system makes leaving costly later. The games are not necessarily bad. They are simply not the game you were shown.

You know the one. A character is trapped, or about to drown, or standing under something heavy. Metal pins hold back lava, water or treasure. Pull them in the right order and the character lives. Pull the wrong one and the ad shows you failing, usually with a red cross and a taunt about your IQ. The format works because it is a complete puzzle in four seconds, it invites you to correct someone else's mistake, and it demands no knowledge of the genre. It spread far beyond the studio that popularised it, and it is now used by games that share nothing else: match-3 puzzles, aquarium decorators, city-building strategy MMOs. It is also the format with the most regulatory history behind it. When an advertising regulator first ruled against this style in 2020, the games did contain the puzzles, but only a handful across thousands of levels, placed far enough in that almost nobody reached them. Some publishers responded by moving the mini-games earlier and making them more frequent, so that the ad became true after the fact.

These are the only cases on this site where an advertising regulator examined the ad, compared it against the actual game, and ruled against the advertiser. Everything else here rests on press coverage or player reports. Every ruling listed comes from the UK Advertising Standards Authority, which means two things. It binds only the UK, so the same creatives often keep running everywhere else. And it applies the CAP Code, whose test has tightened over time: an early ruling asked whether the ad showed mechanics that exist in the game, while a later one asked whether the ad reflects the game's core playing experience. Under the second test, showing real gameplay is not a defence if that gameplay is a side activity. Two defences have been tried and rejected. A small-print disclaimer saying the footage may not represent actual gameplay does not cure a misleading ad. And describing an ad as a cinematic representation of the game's themes does not exempt it if a viewer would read it as gameplay.