I honestly think mobile ads in free games and other apps are some of the lowest quality piles of garbage I've ever had the misfortune to see, and they are constant. How did we get to this point? Where they are so horribly unbearable and yet so commonplace?
As I commented earlier, pi hole and all DNS solutions will cause the game action itself to fail. As I understand only a faked response to the ad would work.
This doesn't have to be correct.
If the game cannot resolve the ad URL it won't get a stream of course you could implement a check for that but who tf is gonna do that. Right. Noone. You would have to build in the ads or use some other domains not on the blocklist to still give the user ads. And if it's an online only game that displays ads you would have to resort to distributing them via your own domain but after all this is not likely to happen at all! So yeah. Could happen is just very very very unlikely
I have definitely played a few mobile games where airplane mode would just instantly give you a freemium ad reward when the connection failed. It's not common, and you probably won't run into it on anything with a multiplayer backend, but it does happen.
I'm pretty sure I know what I am talking about I manage my own homelab and know this kind of stuff. sure I am not an expert but I still have experience in it. But your argument that nearly "all" of them have is just wrong. There are exceptions of course however not all Devs practically target a group that have a network wide DNS blocker installed. The amount of users would probably be way less than 1%.
Every game I've used utilizing the play framework detects if the ad was served. They will not grant the reward or complete the action. Unless there is a tool that fakes the response from Google's ad network the game action will fail. I'm guessing you are just talking about not getting ads, which yes, is easy and trivial.
Blocking ads is specifically what @[email protected] mentioned in their post, so yes, that's what they're talking about.
You are correct that freemium ad rewards typically don't function if you prevent the ad content from loading. That's a small subset of mobile ads that wasn't brought up prior though. I believe the downvotes are largely a combination of your attitude when replying and your misidentification of the topic at hand.