No ads, not even between rounds

Look at the shape of a mini game session. A round of Snake or 2048 is over quickly, and it often ends before you expected it to. A full screen ad holds the screen until it decides to let you close it. Put one between every couple of rounds and the waiting stops being a rounding error on the session. It turns into a real share of the time you spent, and on a short wait in line that share is most of what you came for.

The cost is not only the seconds. Reel Games works like a vertical feed: you swipe up to the next game and it launches with no loading screen in between. That only feels right if the gap between two games stays near zero. Drop a countdown into that gap and the whole motion stops being a feed. It becomes a queue, and you start deciding whether the next game is worth the wait.

Interstitials get placed at the moment a game ends, because that reads like a natural break in the session. It is also the exact moment you were going to tap replay. Losing a board leaves you with a specific thought, the one about what you should have done on move nine, and that thought has a short shelf life. Sit through something else and it is gone. You are not replaying. You are putting the phone down.

Here nothing is scheduled against that moment. You lose, you go again, or you swipe up and land on something different with no loading screen. Progress keeps tracking across the collection and scores post to the global leaderboards when you have a connection. The only thing that ends a session is you deciding to stop, which is a strange sentence to have to write about a game.

An app with no ads is funded by the people using it. Reel Games is free to download and 12 games are free with no credit card. Reel Games Pro opens the complete library and every game added after you subscribe, and new games are added regularly. It is $3.99 monthly or $9.99 yearly, with a three day free trial, and you can cancel whenever. That is the whole business model.

The other half of an ad business is knowing who is watching. That is what makes the inventory worth anything, and it is why ad supported games tend to want an identifier and a profile. Reel Games asks for neither. Its privacy policy commits to collecting no name, no email address, no location, no contacts and no advertising identifiers: an account is a randomly generated username, and the only thing stored against it is your high scores, so the leaderboard has something to rank. There is nothing to sell, because no profile is built. Leaderboards still need a connection to sync, and a purchase needs one to go through.