In the challenging business around mobile games, ads have emerged as a popular way of making money, especially for smaller independent developers. It’s easy to see why. They pay well, partly thanks to the success of other service-based games (many of which are not themselves ad-supported). They offer a well understood and relatively predictable revenue stream that is very easy to integrate in any game, often with minimal or no design changes. In an era where everyone is talking about confusing metrics and reworking designs so they’re more suitable with the free to play model, showing ads can be a convenient fallback that gives piece of mind from all that.