Ayo Omolewa, aka @ayoships, posted this viral video to Instagram that explains how Block Blast, a free-to-play, ad-supported game, uses various shady in-game tricks to force players to lose so the game can show ads, to the tune of an estimated $127 million in the first half of 2026:
It turns out how well you do in the game has less to do with your skill and more to do with how much you’re worth to them in ads.
Omolewa reverse engineered and decompiled the game using AI tools and found it gathers a lot of data about you as a player and uses that data to make the game easier or harder, even forcing unwinnable sequences, so it can display more—and more profitable—ads when it determines you’re most likely to watch one—like when you’ve just lost after beating your high score and it offers a “revive” option if you watch an ad. (Omolewa wrote a detailed technical explanation of his findings. I encourage you to read it even if you’re not technically minded. It is very readable and includes a couple of neat interactive examples.)
Two thoughts:
One, I find these in-game tricks to be decidedly unsavory. Block Blast isn’t the only app engaging in such underhanded behavior, of course: it’s rampant in the ad-supported mobile games industry, and is perhaps even worse in games with in-app purchases, which are even more incentivized to get you to make a purchase. Once you’re identified as someone willing to watch ads or make purchases to ease or extend your gameplay, the more likely such opportunities will be presented. I find the entire thing distasteful, and that’s before we get into the psychological tricks these games often employ to keep you playing.
Two, this is a great use of LLMs. It’s faster and more efficient than manual decompiling, and the result is an exposé of sorts of the various dirty tricks game developers use to bilk you out of your time or money. It’s a tremendous educational tool on both dimensions.
These tools also threaten to upend and eventually displace developers across the game—heck, the app—industry. LLMs make it astoundingly easy for unscrupulous developers to rip off entire apps with just a few prompts. Some developers have become reluctant to #BuildInPublic or share beta versions of their apps out of fear that they will be quickly cloned and released before the originals are even made available. One developer used AI to clone a dozen apps that mimic Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office apps, and subsequently declared “software is over.”
It’s fashionable these days to be either an irrationally exuberant supporter or an intractably alarmist detractor of LLMs. I prefer a more modulated position from which I can appreciate their benefits even as I acknowledge the harms. Whether you think LLMs are good or bad, you’re right. To repurpose Hamlet’s philosophy, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”