Players rebuke clumsy ad strategies, even in popular games | Mobile Premier League

Online game company Mobile Premier League (MPL) this week released a new study in which it reveals a trend in the reviews of some of the most popular mobile games: Namely, that many of the gamers who play these titles are unhappy with in-game advertising. Players can have similar negative reactions to things such as updates and technical problems, but the distribution of their positive and negative sentiment can reveal different sentiments towards different gameplay approaches.

For its research, MPL selected the top 5 most downloaded games from Google Play as identified by AppRadar’s 2024 report, and then analyzed the 75,000 most relevant user reviews of those games. An MPL spokesperson summed up the general sentiment of these reviews in a statement, “The data reveals that volume of downloads doesn’t necessarily correlate with player satisfaction. Games with similar market penetration can have drastically different player sentiment profiles.”