Ads that hide a match-3

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.