To be honest, I'm not entirely sure. What I've gathered is that while they may be dumping lumps of money at these campaigns over the analysis' lifetime (like, hundreds of thousands to a few million dollars), they're not spending nearly as much as they would on the actual released product and it's lifetime (likely millions or tens of millions). Because of this, even if they do, they're only "poisoning" a fraction of their end-target player base... The mobile market is fucking huge. And a lot of these companies are gargantuan.

The other thing is I don't think most people understand what's really happening. Many people will be like "I clicked an ad and it went to the wrong thing" and move on. They also may not even remember the game by the time it releases. Except for some of the heavily heavily repeated ones. And even if so.. Would you try again eventually? If they repackage the same idea in different art assets and theming or names, would you even know?

I think this also points to something else that I've thought a bunch about that is semi related... Are they just poisoning mobile game ads in general? Have people run into this so much that they don't even trust ads anymore? I know that at this point I just generally don't believe any of them and I click things less than I did before... Are other people following this same trend? Is that aversion uniformly distributed or is it going to start clogging up the data and undermine the actual purpose of these ad streams?