It seems like if what you’re showing is what you understand they find appealing and fun, then surely that’s what should be in the game. You give them that.
But instead, you give them something else that is unrelated to what they’ve seen on the ad? A gem matching candy crush clone they’ve seen a thousand times?
How is that model working? How is that holding up as a marketing technique???
My guess to why the ads are so different:
The firms making the ads are probably completely separate from the developers. Could be just random people from fiverr making the ads. They get barely any gameplay footage, so they just come up with some random gameplay that looks fun in an ad.
I guess the game developers might be some random people from fiverr as well.
As to why it works: no idea. I guess some people just don’t care, and given how cheap these games are to make they probably just need a few people to break even.