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How to properly cross promote own games?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by ligangwei, May 24, 2019.

  1. ligangwei

    ligangwei

    Joined:
    Feb 1, 2017
    Posts:
    5
    HI, sorry for asking in General Discussion, but I couldn't really find a board that fits.

    I'm planning an video ad delivery module to cross promote in house apps, not unlike those you see in some hypercasual giants. And I'm trying to figure out how viable is it for me to do for my own games.

    Basically the idea is:
    1. My module asks AWS lambda for an Ad to play, all of my app shares some sort of secret, a random key or something that I hash the request with.
    2. I have an authorizer that hashes the request with the same key, grants access if results match.
    3. Lambda queries a dynamo table for available Ads, returns a random one, which consists of a name, a short description, and a link to a texture in an S3 bucket, served with a cdn, perhaps cloudfront.
    4. My app downloads the texture, which is a 1024x1024 atlas that holds maybe 64 128x128 "frames", that's somewhat like 2 and a half seconds' worth of video if I play it at 24 frames a second.
    5. I put it on a prefab that is a world space canvas(or maybe a quad), show the title and short description, and then scroll through the texture by offsetting it's uv.
    6. User clicks it, go to store.
    Now, I have a couple questions for people who maybe have similar experiences.
    1. I'm not worried about execution, there's nothing really complicated in there anyways, but am I going to break my bank? I make small scale games half as a hobby and half hoping something might come off it, so I don't make money yet, not off of this at least. I don't have access to my workplace's billing information, and our use cases are really different anyway, although I do know cloudfront isn't the cheapest cdn by far.
    2. Is this a good approach, is it overkill to play video off of a texture? Am I better off to just download a video? I obviously want the download size to be small, but I don't know what the absolute best way is. Is a heavily compressed lossy video format smaller than a single texture? I don't care about quality(at least not too much).
    3. Is this legal? I mean, this is obviously legal, but am I in violation of some GDPR fine print? These are ads after all. Do I have to declare that I "collect user data" even though all I do is submit the current game's name in order to not deliver ads of the very same game the user is playing.
    4. Should I just flush the whole thing down the toilet and just build the ads into the games, I'll have to update all old games whenever I have a new game out, but it's free.
    5. I haven't thought this whole thing through at all, did I just come up with a very convoluted way to do a very simple thing.
    6. Somehow do it with Assetbundles? Maybe? In which case I only need an S3 bucket and a cdn.
    Thanks!