Same goes for F2P games. They pour millions (billions) into marketing games, with crazy small profit margins. When a mobile game company earns a million, Meta earns 10 millions (or more). Apple opens up the platform for 3rd party appstores with only 15% cut instead of 30%. Where does this new profit margin go? Into ads. Now companies can afford putting more money into ads, to outcompete others. Others follow suit. Instead of a million, the company now earns 1.01 millon in profit. Meta earns 11 million.

This isn't the ad platforms' fault, but I still find it somehow wrong.

Edit: typos

My ad is just one image and some clickbaity headline. The image is very simple, high contrast, designed to pop out. I'm targeting all kinds of puzzle subreddits. I'm getting just about $0.15 cost per click in US. The budget is quite small, but this helps reaching out to new audiences who spread the game further to their friends. The majority of the growth is still organic, but ads do help. I'm still not sure if it's a net positive though, since I don't have strong monetization in the game, and don't do any fingerprinting of users, or much analytics at all.

But in general we just slap all kinds of videos there. Some perform 2x better than others, impossible to guess whuch ones, but in the end the range of success isn't massive. I haven't marketed many different kinds of products, but here's my take: If an ad is giving something like 20% return on ad spend, getting to 100% can be tough by just improving the ad. What matters more is that it's a product that is easy to sell. We sell escape game murder mystery magazines. Murder mysteries in any form are simply very easy to sell.

I also have a digital daily browser puzzle. I've grown the user base quite a bit by running one simple ad on Reddit with amazingly good metrics.

In the past I worked for F2P mobile game companies. Their business is based on running successful internet ad campaigns.

I've gone through something similar, but for a more functional language (a Scheme). It's interesting how here the biggest wins are from optimizing the objects, while the biggest wins in my case were optimizing closures. The optimizations were very similar.

"Three implementation models for scheme" gives all the answers to make a fast enough scheme, though it has something of a compilation step, so it's not interpreting the original AST.

https://www.cs.unm.edu/~williams/cs491/three-imp.pdf

But a few hours (or days) in, I forget what the problem was. A part of my brain wakes up. I start thinking about what I'm passing around, I start recognizing the types from the context and names...

It's just a different way of thinking.

I recognized the same feeling after vibe coding for too long and taking back the steering wheel. I decided I'd never let go again.

I'm still not sure if I'm missing something, since this felt like a really nasty surprise, since it's basically unusable by default! Or is this php's PDO's fault?

There were social games that used it as a feature, and it was fun when it worked, but it had to be disabled soon as it drained the battery so fast.

If I'm feeling brave, I let it write functions with very clear and well defined input/output, like a well established algorithm. I know it can one-shot those, or they can be easily tested.

But when doing something that I know will be further developed, maintained, I mainly end up writing it by hand. I used to have the LLM write that kind of code as well, but I found it to be slower in the long run.

I didn't receive an answer besides "that's what people like", but I still can't think of (m)any situations where anyone would prefer it.

I don't see any benefit in it knowing anything about me. Instead I'm usually quite vague to avoid biased answers.

So I'm curious to understand: What are the discussions like that people go back to and would lose if they moved to another platform?

In my own game scripting scheme, I use implicit argument passing, like a cancellation token to async calls, and a rendering context used for immediate mode esque rendering.

I'm also running my business on a single server, works perfectly, except for one time when someone tried to find some content with hash IDs through bruteforce. No problem, a tiny VPS can handle one malicious user. Except the amount of errors logged by nginx filled up the disk.