The free games on your phone rig themselves too. We didn't make any of this up. Every claim links to its source.
A developer decompiled one of the most downloaded mobile games in the world and walked through the code.
Then we pulled the app apart ourselves. The code is encrypted, but every rule's name ships in plain text. One is literally called Ecpm_player_high_death — a rule about killing the players worth the most in ads. 443 more sit next to it.
Our teardown: 444 rule names, no decryption → Source: the decompile video by @thedonayo →EA researchers published a system that adjusts game difficulty with one goal: keep you playing longer.
They say it ran in multiple EA games and raised engagement by up to 9%.
Source: Xue et al., "Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment for Maximized Engagement in Digital Games," WWW 2017 →A second EA paper argues that fair matches don't always keep people playing, and proposes matchmaking tuned to maximize engagement instead.
Source: Chen et al., "EOMM: An Engagement Optimized Matchmaking Framework," WWW 2017 →Granted a patent for matchmaking designed to drive in-game purchases, like putting a new player up against an expert who uses an item the new player can buy.
Activision said it came from an R&D team and was never used in a game.
Source: US Patent 9,789,406 and Activision's statement to GameSpot →AppLovin's MAX, an ad platform many mobile games run on, can report what every single ad impression earned, as it happens.
That's how a game can know your price per ad. A website can't: Google only tells us totals, so our price for you is an estimate.
Source: AppLovin MAX impression-level revenue docs →We run the same kind of rules. The difference: we print the receipt while you play, and the rules on it are our actual code.
Play #001 · BlocksRigged isn't affiliated with any company or game named here. Each receipt summarizes the linked source; where a company disputed or limited a claim, we say so.