Skip to content

🧠 New CREATIVE Trend Everybody will COPY in 3..2..1

September 17, 2026 · 36 min

Show notes

Century Games has found a 4X creative direction nobody else is using yet, and the crew is betting the whole category copies it within a month.


Matej Lančarič, Jakub Remiar, and Felix Braberg run September's creatives. They retire Golden Goblins from the top slot (with the sharp lesson from Idle Zombie Miner: copy a dying game's creatives and you die with it), pass through the Idle Lumber studio's gross-but-working Top Tycoon fish-sushi concepts, SayGames' Tower War and its new Pocket Sort, the Pantheon clones everywhere, XP Hero's continued "steal the 4X creatives back" campaign (Last Asylum's, King Shot's "no ads," feeding crocodiles, even Smash Fest), and Butcher Hero's peak (grindy, no new content, and every second Reddit post is how to hack the APK).


Century's Top Force runs civilization-style mass-battle creatives — armies, numbers, control-the-troops, a Lords Mobile flashback upgraded with toy-soldier visuals — that look nothing like the industry's hunting-bears template, and Century got there by testing ~500 unique concepts.

The crew also covers Last Beacon (the renamed Endless Sea, pre-registration, trying every concept ever made), Cube Land's creative glow-up (200 new, revenue up), the Wool Crush wildcard (yarn + arrows + bus jam + save-the-cat in one, 2,000 creatives on an old game)


Two conclusions: it's now hard to find a creative that isn't AI (the show is splitting into two AI episodes and one "normal" per cycle), and watch whether Top Force's mass-battle concept spreads. The crew's bet: it will



This episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.

http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100

--------------------------------------

PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.

Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/

They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.

- Scale fast

- Keep your shares

- Drawdown only as needed

- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you

+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors

---------------------------------------

For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.

Our sponsor FastSpring:

Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 years

They power top mobile publishers around the world

Launch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.

---------------------------------------

This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let’s not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.

Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠


Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA


---------------------------------------

Matej Lancaric

User Acquisition & Creatives Consultant

⁠https://lancaric.me

Felix Braberg

Ad monetization consultant

⁠https://www.felixbraberg.com

Jakub Remiar

Game design consultant

⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar

---------------------------------------

Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!

Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!

Please share feedback and comments - [email protected]


All episodes of two & a half gamers

Settings

Display

Language

Decides which stations you see first on the home page.

History

Recently played stations and episodes and your latest searches are only stored in this browser.

Notifications

A short notice when a podcast you follow has a new episode. Turn off single podcasts with the bell on their page.

Account

Save favorites – in the app and on the website.

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Open search
Space
Play or pause
← →
In the player: back 15 s, forward 30 s (episodes) · in a row: next tile
↑ ↓
In a row: target within the tile
Home / End
In a row: first or last tile
Esc
Close window or menu
?
This overview
Now playing

Go to station page

Play next

    Add episodes with “Play next” – they play after the current episode.