Rewarded video is the most honest transaction in these games: your attention for something concrete, with the price stated before you agree. The consent that sits underneath it is less visible and worth understanding.
How the trade works
You are offered something specific, usually a life, a booster or a small amount of currency, in exchange for watching a video of a stated length. You can decline and nothing changes. Compared with the rest of the monetisation in these games, the terms are unusually clear.
From the studio's side it is a way to earn from players who will never buy anything, which is most of them. That is why rewarded video has spread across the genre while forced interstitial advertising has become less common: it earns more per view and annoys people less.
What the consent prompt is asking
Before any of this runs, the game shows a prompt about personalised advertising. The wording varies, but the question is always the same: may your advertising identifier and app activity be used to select which ads you see.
Saying no does not remove advertising and does not remove the rewarded video option. It changes ad selection from targeted to contextual, which means less relevant ads and, for the studio, less revenue per view. The reward you receive is identical either way.
Declining personalised advertising does not cost you rewards, lives or content. It only changes which advertisements are selected. If that trade appeals, it is available and permanent.
Changing the setting later
Both platforms hold the master control outside any individual game, so changing it once covers every app on the device.
- Android. Settings, then Google, then Ads. You can delete the advertising ID entirely, which stops apps from receiving one at all rather than merely asking them not to use it.
- iOS. Settings, then Privacy and Security, then Tracking. Turning off Allow Apps to Request to Track denies every future request automatically and revokes existing ones.
Individual games often keep their own copy of the setting in an in-game privacy menu, which is worth checking as well, but the platform control is the one that actually binds.
Australian rules that apply
Advertising shown in Australia is subject to Australian Consumer Law, which prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct. That matters for a specific and common category of ad in this genre: advertisements showing gameplay that does not appear in the advertised game. Those are not a grey area; misrepresenting a product in an advertisement is unlawful, and the ACCC has taken an interest in mobile game advertising more than once.
Complaints about misleading advertising go to the ACCC, and complaints about advertising content and placement standards go to Ad Standards. Neither is a fast process, but both exist and neither requires a lawyer.
Children and advertising
Where a game is rated for children, both platforms restrict personalised advertising by default and both require a family account configuration to enforce it properly. If a child uses the device, setting up a supervised account does more than a per-app setting will, because it applies to every app they install afterwards.
It is also worth knowing that rewarded video is a purchase-adjacent mechanic even though no money changes hands. It trains the loop of paying for a constraint, with attention as the currency, and for a young player the distinction between watching an ad for a life and buying one for a dollar is thinner than it looks to an adult.
A note about this site
Elvarquen carries no advertising of any kind, has no affiliate links, and receives nothing from any store link on any page. That is not offered as a virtue; it is stated because a guide discussing advertising should be clear about its own position, and because it is a fact readers can verify from the page source in a few seconds.