two & a half gamers
- Episódios
- 527
- Publicação
- várias vezes por semana
- Último episódio
- 12 nov 2026
Sobre o podcast
This is a no BS gaming podcast. We share insights, knowledge and fun gossip relating to the topics of User Acquisition, Game Design and Ad monetisation. You will find here actionable insights in a fun and relaxed atmosphere. A safe space where we mimic the honesty of a 4am conference discussion. Enjoy & let us know your feedback!
Episódios 527
🧙 Solo Dev Journey #3: From spending $1.5K to $11K a Day in 60 Days, SAME Payback
This is the game I talk about :https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eyaegmoranm.onemagearmy&hl=enhttps://apps.apple.com/us/app/one-mage-army-clone-merge/id6808660778Download now! Solo Dev Journey …
Notas do episódio
This is the game I talk about :
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eyaegmoranm.onemagearmy&hl=en
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/one-mage-army-clone-merge/id6808660778
Download now!
Solo Dev Journey #3, and this one starts with your comments. Yes, soft launch is coming (the Soft Launch Bible already exists, and three new games are in the pipeline).
No, I’m not “Peter Sagan rich”: I planned to spend $40K last month and spent $150K, because I scaled like an idiot. I also show the honest version of the last nine months: Robot Breaker growing, the servers cooking, spend paused and restarted, valleys of death, organics gone and a lot of money lost. All of that is why One Mage Army is working now.
One Mage Army went from $1.5K to $11K a day in spend within 60 days with the same payback period, and revenue went from a few hundred dollars a day to $8–9K. Here’s how. A weekend roller coaster: raise budgets on Thursday, peak on Saturday, scale back on Sunday. Five channels (AppLovin, Facebook, Google, Mintegral, Unity), where a handful of new creative winners 4x’d Facebook spend and 2x’d AppLovin. On AppLovin, CPI campaigns now outspend CPM billing across four worldwide D28 blended ROAS campaigns, split between Android and iOS. Creatives last 1–2 weeks, so I ship new ones every week with Playable Maker, Layer and my Claude/ChatGPT plus MCP setup. On the product side I skipped Mixpanel and shipped a new hero and a Halloween offer instead, and IAP tripled. A grandma hero, born on Florian’s channel, is coming as a monthly event that isn’t pay-to-win. Retention on iOS: D1 56%, D7 24%, D30 ~5%, with no end-game yet.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: $1.5K to $11K a day, same payback
01:13 – Sponsor: Potensus
02:21 – Your comments: soft launch, the Soft Launch Bible and “Peter Sagan rich”
03:30 – $150K in a month, Robot Breaker’s valleys of death and cooked servers
05:30 – Skipping Mixpanel: a Halloween offer and new hero tripled IAP, plus the grandma event
08:00 – The weekend roller coaster: Thursday up, Saturday peak, Sunday down
09:30 – Channel mix and AppLovin: why CPI campaigns now beat CPM billing
11:00 – Creatives last 1–2 weeks: my AI creative stack, and D1 56% retention
📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS
— Scale only what pays back; the same payback at 7x spend is the real signal
— Push spend into the weekend, when players actually play
— Shipping content and offers can beat shipping analytics when you’re small
— Expect creatives to fatigue in 1–2 weeks, and ship new ones weekly
🎙️ HOST
Matej Lancaric – UA consultant, co-founder of Playable Maker, developer of One Mage Army and Robot Breaker
🙏 SPONSOR
Potensus – premium ad network with direct brand deals (Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, Vodafone) and Playable Maker-built formats: https://potensus.com
What do you want in Solo Dev Journey #4: soft launch, creatives, or live ops? Tell me in the comments.
Subscribe for more UA, creatives and mobile game growth: https://www.youtube.com/@twoandahalfgamers
#mobilegames #solodev #gamedev #OneMageArmy #RobotBreaker #UA #useracquisition #ROAS #AppLovin #Mintegral #creatives #AIcreatives #indiegame #twoandahalfgamers #Potensus #PlayableMaker
🧱 Block Blast Exposed: The 45M DAU Game that prices YOU before you even play!
Block Blast is one of the biggest games on mobile: ~45–50M DAU (peaking around 60M), 100% ad revenue, built by Hungry Studio. A viral teardown by an independent researcher claimed to show what happens …
Notas do episódio
Block Blast is one of the biggest games on mobile: ~45–50M DAU (peaking around 60M), 100% ad revenue, built by Hungry Studio. A viral teardown by an independent researcher claimed to show what happens server-side, and enough of you sent it to us that we had to talk about it. According to the teardown, your Block Blast isn’t the same game as the one on the phone next to you.
Hundreds of traits from a pool of 700+ get downloaded after install, outside what app review ever sees. Then an on-device model reads 27 inputs (country, recent ad prices, RAM, install source, even your first high score) and prices you. I
n the example, the same phone was worth a $25 eCPM in the US and $8 in Brazil.
We also look at the ~$1M/day ad revenue, Hungry’s Nebula portfolio growing out of Block Blast (Rotate Rings in the main menu), and why this only works on cores you can control mid-game. Felix calls it the biggest Robin Hood mechanic he’s seen. Jakub says every ad-based studio is about to copy it.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: forcing ads is softer than forcing payments
02:19 – Block Blast: 45M DAU, Hungry Studio, 100% ad revenue
06:08 – The viral teardown: 700+ server-side traits, invisible to app review
09:23 – Pricing you: an on-device eCPM model, $25 in the US vs $8 in Brazil
13:18 – The lethal puzzle: 10% past your high score, 20% impossible pieces
15:37 – Picking your fail point, difficulty experiments, the churn predictor
19:25 – ~$1M/day in ads, and the Nebula portfolio growing out of Block Blast
20:41 – Takeaways: which cores can copy this, and starting from monetization
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
--------------------------------------
Today's episode is brought to you by PvX Partners. Developers now have a new way to fund their marketing: PvX Card.
If you're scaling your gaming business and need more capital for UA, here's the deal: your credit limit grows with your marketing performance — the higher your ROAS, the more credit you have available. Repayment terms run from 60 to 120 days and scale with your ROAS, so you can match repayments to your game's payback period.
It's dynamic, it's flexible, and it scales as fast as you do.
Check out PvXPartners.com/cards and scale your UA with PvX Card
---------------------------------------
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
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]
🛟 Township First, 4X at Level 16: The Biggest 4X Innovation Since Top Girl
Remember the raft-rescue playable from our last Playable Trends that turned out to be 4X? This is the game: Wild Water World, from the team behind Lands of Jail, and Jakub calls it the biggest 4X innovation …
Notas do episódio
Remember the raft-rescue playable from our last Playable Trends that turned out to be 4X? This is the game: Wild Water World, from the team behind Lands of Jail, and Jakub calls it the biggest 4X innovation since Top Girl. The first days are a minigame simulator: fishing, scavenging plastic while dodging sharks, a Dave the Diver-style dive, all of which you automate within 20 minutes. Then it turns into Township, with resource conversion orders, ship deliveries and auto-production (2 hours free, then rent or buy).
The 4X map only opens at level 16, about 3–4 days in, and it’s stripped down: no player towns, four clans on the whole map, a neutral Pirate Legion, bases you flag instead of farm, and clan leadership that switches automatically every few days by strength (so dead clans don’t stall), probably filled with bots early on. It’s far more approachable than the Kingshot or Last War maps.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: already bigger than Lands of Jail
01:10 – The WTF playable from Playable Trends is back
02:16 – The biggest 4X innovation since Top Girl
03:30 – Minigames first: fishing, ocean scavenging, diving (then automate everything)
07:26 – The Township loop: orders, deliveries, auto-production, and no soldiers
11:37 – The 4X map at level 16: no player towns, 4 clans, Pirate Legion, auto clan leaders
17:23 – Numbers: 500K installs/day, Asia-first, US 1%, the 4X top charts
22:53 – Creatives: 6,000 ads, shelter renovation, and Matej’s own AI versions
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
--------------------------------------
Today's episode is brought to you by PvX Partners. Developers now have a new way to fund their marketing: PvX Card.
If you're scaling your gaming business and need more capital for UA, here's the deal: your credit limit grows with your marketing performance — the higher your ROAS, the more credit you have available. Repayment terms run from 60 to 120 days and scale with your ROAS, so you can match repayments to your game's payback period.
It's dynamic, it's flexible, and it scales as fast as you do.
Check out PvXPartners.com/cards and scale your UA with PvX Card
---------------------------------------
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
---------------------------------------
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]
🎒 SchoolCraft Party: 4.5M DAU, Fake Players, ~$70K/Day Ad Stack That Could Easily DOUBLE
All three of us review SchoolCraft Party, a 7-year-old blocky action sandbox that is hitting record numbers. It looks like Minecraft, plays like GTA Vice City from Wish, and every “player” walking around with a …
Notas do episódio
All three of us review SchoolCraft Party, a 7-year-old blocky action sandbox that is hitting record numbers. It looks like Minecraft, plays like GTA Vice City from Wish, and every “player” walking around with a country flag and a name is a bot.
The numbers: launched in 2018 (it used to be called Nightclub Craft), with spikes in August 2022 and last Christmas. It is now at a record ~4–4.5M DAU and still ~250K downloads a day, almost all from tier 3–4 markets (Indonesia, India, Brazil, Mexico, Philippines, Russia, Turkey, Vietnam, Pakistan). Felix’s estimate is ~$70–75K/day from ads, from a small Ukrainian team running on AdMob with only Google, Unity and AppLovin in app-ads.txt. His plan: move to MAX, add Pangle, Mintegral, Moloco, InMobi and GAM, and set smarter cooldowns to double ad revenue.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: double the ads, 6x the users
02:19 – Gameplay: Minecraft looks, GTA Vice City loop, watch 10 ads to remove ads
07:45 – Every player is a bot: the offline game pretending to be online
16:24 – ~14 rewarded placements, and Google’s three-ads-in-a-row lock-in
19:02 – Only 3 ad networks in app-ads.txt: Felix’s plan to double ad revenue
22:39 – Numbers: 4.5M DAU, 250K downloads a day, tier 3–4, ~$70–75K/day
24:37 – A 262M-view YouTube short, 5 creatives, and Matej’s 6x UA plan
30:26 – Blocky art = cheapest CPI, the reskin portfolio, Nightclub Craft rebrand
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
--------------------------------------
Today's episode is brought to you by PvX Partners. Developers now have a new way to fund their marketing: PvX Card.
If you're scaling your gaming business and need more capital for UA, here's the deal: your credit limit grows with your marketing performance — the higher your ROAS, the more credit you have available. Repayment terms run from 60 to 120 days and scale with your ROAS, so you can match repayments to your game's payback period.
It's dynamic, it's flexible, and it scales as fast as you do.
Check out PvXPartners.com/cards and scale your UA with PvX Card
---------------------------------------
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]
🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: AppLovin Prints $2.2B (84% Margin), Apple Blames Gaming, UK King & DarkWar Ads ban
Felix is back on the Friday news with three stories that matter for mobile gaming. First, AppLovin’s Q3 2026: record revenue of $2.2B (+55% YoY), $1.4B net income (66% margin), $1.8B adjusted EBITDA (84% …
Notas do episódio
Felix is back on the Friday news with three stories that matter for mobile gaming. First, AppLovin’s Q3 2026: record revenue of $2.2B (+55% YoY), $1.4B net income (66% margin), $1.8B adjusted EBITDA (84% margin), $5.9B revenue in the first nine months, Q4 guidance of $2.3–2.4B, $1.4B in buybacks this quarter and $3.2B more authorized. The gaming business grew nearly 50% YoY while the new generation of ad models is only partially deployed. With MAX in their pocket, you don’t bet against AppLovin.
Second, Apple passed 1.5B services subscribers but missed on services revenue ($30B vs. the $31B expected), and the stock fell 4% after hours. The CFO blamed a slowdown in mobile gaming and App Store business model changes in certain countries. Felix’s take: gaming isn’t slowing down, it’s moving payments off-platform to avoid the 30%. Third, the UK’s ASA banned ads from King, Scopely, the Dark War Survival publisher and others for misleading gameplay, ads seen back in April. With big studios shipping 12–35K new ads a month that each live a few days, banning specific ads does almost nothing. We close with the weather: Meowdoku tops both US stores, Grand Games holds #2 and #3 on iOS, and Rotate Rings, Block Blast and Royal Smash sit near the top of Google Play.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: Apple’s 1.5B subscribers and the services miss
00:30 – Felix is back: three stories and the weather
01:00 – AppLovin Q3: $2.2B, 66% net margin, 84% EBITDA margin, $3.2B buybacks
03:30 – Apple blames the mobile gaming slowdown, or is it D2C?
05:30 – UK ASA bans King, Scopely and Dark War Survival ads, a drop in the ocean
08:00 – The weather: Meowdoku, Grand Games, Rotate Rings, Royal Smash
📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS
— AppLovin’s gaming business is re-accelerating, and new ad models are only partly rolled out
— Apple’s “gaming slowdown” looks more like revenue moving to web shops and D2C
— Banning individual ads doesn’t touch studios shipping tens of thousands a month
— Puzzle dominates the top charts: Meowdoku and Grand Games lead
🎙️ HOST
Felix Braberg
Subscribe for weekly mobile gaming news, UA and ad monetization: https://www.youtube.com/@twoandahalfgamers
🚜 Bulldozer Master: ~$70K a Day & Looks like a weekend prototype
Two Gamers again, and this time we review Bulldozer Master from Supercent, the Korean studio behind Pizza Ready. It looks like something vibe-coded over two weekends, and it works anyway. Jakub plays the loop …
Notas do episódio
Two Gamers again, and this time we review Bulldozer Master from Supercent, the Korean studio behind Pizza Ready. It looks like something vibe-coded over two weekends, and it works anyway. Jakub plays the loop: dig ore blocks, carry them Golden Goblins-style to the refinery, sell, and upgrade move speed, hammers and furnace. Then you rent heavy machinery that runs on fuel (hydraulic breakers, drill crushers, exo-carriers), hire workers who need pizza breaks, and prestige into company upgrades. It’s simple, idle-friendly, and built directly from its own ads.
The creatives are the real story: 2,700 of them, Trackstar-style truck ads, AI videos of drilling gold walls, a Chrome Valley Customs look, a Bumblebee from Wish, and even a Kingshot salad, spread across AppLovin, Mintegral, Unity and Facebook. Matej also shares how Mintegral became one of One Mage Army’s best channels within a week. The formula: take a 4X creative, build the gameplay around it, then scale and profit.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – 50K DAU in the US
01:12 – Two Gamers: “games don’t need to look good, they need to scale”
02:47 – Core loop: dig, carry, refine, sell (Golden Goblins with a bulldozer)
05:16 – Machinery rental, fuel, workers, pizza breaks and prestige
12:30 – Numbers: 200K/day, 600K DAU, Pizza Ready’s half a billion downloads
17:18 – Felix from Wish: 29 rewarded, 1 interstitial, ~$70K/day
19:27 – Creatives: Trackstar, AI gold drilling, Bumblebee from Wish, 2,700 ads
28:36 – The formula: 4X creative → gameplay → scale, plus a channel mix beyond AppLovin
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
--------------------------------------
Today's episode is brought to you by PvX Partners. Developers now have a new way to fund their marketing: PvX Card.
If you're scaling your gaming business and need more capital for UA, here's the deal: your credit limit grows with your marketing performance — the higher your ROAS, the more credit you have available. Repayment terms run from 60 to 120 days and scale with your ROAS, so you can match repayments to your game's payback period.
It's dynamic, it's flexible, and it scales as fast as you do.
Check out PvXPartners.com/cards and scale your UA with PvX Card
---------------------------------------
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, Matej Lancaric
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]
🎮 Playable Trends: The Playable that NEVER ends
Our monthly Playable Trends is back. Matej, Ondrej and Robin each bring three playables that caught their eye and take them apart. Matej opens with Royal Kingdom’s “harder than you think” ball-physics level …
Notas do episódio
Our monthly Playable Trends is back. Matej, Ondrej and Robin each bring three playables that caught their eye and take them apart. Matej opens with Royal Kingdom’s “harder than you think” ball-physics level (save three characters, no snakes for once), a raft-rescue survival playable that turns out to be a 4X game, and Paper.io 2 using a Pocket Champs-style hook without hiding which game it is. Ondrej brings three from Voodoo: a Pixel Flow-style conveyor sort that is honestly harder than you think (he still can’t beat it), a satisfying ball-drop sorter you finish just by tapping, and a room-based platformer that sent us straight back to Dangerous Dave.
Robin shows a sushi reskin of Pixel Flow (Ondrej rebuilt it in Playable Maker), Car Evolve’s slingshot upgrade loop, which ran five minutes before the CTA appeared (Robin fed the source to Claude to start with 5M coins), and Last Asylum running four different mechanics for the same game: Township-style building, Kingshot-style tower defense, roguelike survival and 4X. Last Asylum has gone from a handful of playables to ~1,200 in 30 days, and Kingshot still makes far more money. We close by filtering Sensor Tower to Asia (spoiler: good playables work everywhere, maybe with more family drama and a bit more grind) and looking at seasonal creatives: Golf Clash running Halloween for a year, and a Christmas video still live in July because it was the best performer.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: the playable that never ends
05:23 – Matej: Royal Kingdom’s “harder than you think” physics level
10:26 – The WTF pick: a raft rescue that’s secretly 4X, plus Paper.io 2 with a Pocket Champs hook
17:23 – Ondrej’s Voodoo trio: impossible color sort, ball conveyor, Dangerous Dave vibes
24:25 – Robin: Pixel Flow, but sushi
27:13 – Car Evolve: 5 minutes before the CTA, and we hacked it with Claude
32:25 – Last Asylum: one game, four mechanics, ~1,200 playables in 30 days
40:18 – Asia vs West playables, and do seasonal creatives actually work?
📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS
— Reskin a proven mechanic (Pixel Flow → sushi) and you have a new ad
— One game can be sold through four mechanics; each one attracts a different player
— “Harder than you think” works only if it is actually hard, but finishable
— Mechanics travel across markets; difficulty and grind may need tuning for Asia
🎙️ HOSTS
Matej Lancaric, Ondrej Monsberger, Robin Kuyer
🙏 SPONSORS
Potensus – premium ad network with direct brand deals (Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, Vodafone) and Playable Maker-built formats: https://potensus.com
PVX Partners – fund your UA with PVX Card, credit that grows with your ROAS: https://pvxpartners.com/cards
Kinoa – AI operating system for live ops, segments and game ops: http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100
FastSpring – the no-drama D2C for mobile publishers: https://fastspring.gg
Data courtesy of Sensor Tower
Seen a playable we should cover? Drop it in the comments or the Slack channel.
Subscribe for more playables, creatives and UA: https://www.youtube.com/@twoandahalfgamers
#playableads #playables #mobilegames #creatives #UA #useracquisition #Voodoo #RoyalKingdom #LastAsylum #PixelFlow #PaperIO #PlayableMaker #SensorTower #twoandahalfgamers #Potensus #PVXPartners #Kinoa #FastSpring
---------------------------------------
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]
---------------------------------------
If you are interested in getting UA tips every week on Monday, visit lancaric.substack.com & sign up for the Brutally Honest newsletter by Matej Lancaric
Do you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask Matej AI - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai
🚙 30 Rewarded Ads, No Daily Cap: How Hill Climb Racing 2 Monetizes 2.5 Billion Downloads
A rare live episode. After almost five years of podcasting, we finally tackled one of the games we had been saving for the right moment: Hill Climb Racing 2 from Fingersoft, part of a franchise with more than …
Notas do episódio
A rare live episode. After almost five years of podcasting, we finally tackled one of the games we had been saving for the right moment: Hill Climb Racing 2 from Fingersoft, part of a franchise with more than 2.5 billion downloads across Fingersoft’s games. Felix and Jakub are joined in person by Oona from Fingersoft (ad monetization manager) and Denise Farley from Google (EMEA monetization) to go through the game design, the ad setup and the UA flywheel behind one of the most downloaded games on the planet.
Jakub starts with the design: physics-based arcade driving, many layers of power progression, car upgrades as a soft-currency sink, and a parts gacha that drives most of the IAP revenue. That puts HCR2 at roughly 70/30 IAP vs ads, while the first game is still almost all ads. Then Una covers the ad monetization: almost 30 rewarded placements, some with no daily cap and no limits for payers (“purchasers buy and then they watch”), an ad progression bundle in the style of Monopoly Go chain offers that lifted day-1 rewarded impressions for new users by more than 10%, interstitials that are delayed after every rewarded view, and tests where delaying or removing interstitials barely changed retention. Denise and Una also explain how Fingersoft dropped geo-based mediation groups for 5 tiers based on impression value, built behavior-based custom CPA events to feed back into UA, and use hybrid mediation and ad preloading in AdMob.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: the ad progression bundle
02:12 – Live from Mount Olympus: meet Una (Fingersoft) and Denise (Google)
03:51 – Game design: physics, progression layers, the parts gacha, 70/30 IAP vs ads
08:55 – Ad progression bundle: +10% day-1 rewarded impressions for new users
09:46 – ~30 rewarded placements, no caps for payers, events like the Halloween pumpkin smash
14:42 – Interstitials vs retention, rewarded cooldowns and the meta rewarded placement
19:48 – Behavior segmentation, custom CPAs and 5 tiers based on impression value instead of geo
23:19 – Hybrid mediation, preloading, and why creatives must match the store page
📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS
— Payers are also heavy rewarded watchers, so don’t hide ads from them
— Delay interstitials after each rewarded view to steer players to the higher-paying format
— Segment by impression value, not geo; some tier-3 users bring tier-1 eCPMs
— Your ads and your store page have to show the same game
🎙️ HOSTS & GUESTS
Felix Braberg, Jakub Remiar
Una – Ad Monetization Manager, Fingersoft
Denise Farley – Monetization, Google (EMEA)
Subscribe for more game deep dives, ad monetization and UA:
https://www.youtube.com/@twoandahalfgamers
#mobilegames #HillClimbRacing2 #Fingersoft #admonetization #AdMob #rewardedvideo #hybridmonetization #useracquisition #gamedesign #mobilegaming #gamedev #SensorTower #twoandahalfgamers
🦆 Duck Survival: The Legend of Mushroom Team Plays a 4X Game Without the 4X Map
Two Gamers this time (our half is on the other side of the world), and we play Duck Survival from JoyNet Games, the studio behind Legend of Mushroom. We expected a 4X game. There is no 4X map, but nearly …
Notas do episódio
Two Gamers this time (our half is on the other side of the world), and we play Duck Survival from JoyNet Games, the studio behind Legend of Mushroom. We expected a 4X game. There is no 4X map, but nearly everything else from 4X is there: a roguelite tower-defense core lifted from Kingshot’s creatives (move your duck, build towers and walls, call the waves, pick 1 of 3 skills, autoplay), with the full Legend of Mushroom meta on top.
Then the creatives: 4,700 of them and only 70 playables. There’s 4X slap-slap fake gameplay, Dark War-style transformations, high-production AI, and the same AI Japanese actor (most likely a LoRA) in almost every ad. Matej shares how he localized his own Gandalf video with Korean and Japanese soldiers.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: very deep game, very nice core
01:29 – Two Gamers only: Duck Survival from the Legend of Mushroom team
03:15 – Core loop: roguelite tower defense modeled after Kingshot’s creatives
09:13 – The meta: Legend of Mushroom template, capture mechanic, gachas, server gating
20:06 – Numbers: Western launch, then Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and an iOS-heavy Japan
24:12 – JoyNet portfolio vs Legend of Mushroom, and why it won’t fly in the West
29:05 – Tower defense top 10: Lucky Defense, Bang Bang Survivor, Clash of Creatures, Arknights
33:46 – Creatives: 4,700 ads, 70 playables, 4X fake gameplay, the AI Japanese actor
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
Today's episode is brought to you by PvX Partners. Developers now have a new way to fund their marketing: PvX Card.
If you're scaling your gaming business and need more capital for UA, here's the deal: your credit limit grows with your marketing performance — the higher your ROAS, the more credit you have available. Repayment terms run from 60 to 120 days and scale with your ROAS, so you can match repayments to your game's payback period.
It's dynamic, it's flexible, and it scales as fast as you do.
Check out PvXPartners.com/cards and scale your UA with PvX Card
---------------------------------------
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]
🧩 Zero Logic, 2.5M DAU: Brain Puzzle 2 Makes $83K/Day With the Dumbest Ad Setup We’ve Ever Seen
Fresh back from Istanbul, we review Brain Puzzle 2: Logic Twist, a game where the word “logic” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Jakub plays it live so Matej doesn’t have to: three-minute riddles …
Notas do episódio
Fresh back from Istanbul, we review Brain Puzzle 2: Logic Twist, a game where the word “logic” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Jakub plays it live so Matej doesn’t have to: three-minute riddles, point-and-click solutions with zero logic, a shark fail state, and an interstitial after every win.
And it works. Launched June last year by a Chinese studio, it is now at 2.5 million DAU, 500–600K downloads a day, and roughly $83K/day in ad revenue on a pristine tier-3 mix
The UA engine: ~4,000 creatives in 30 days (570 playables, 3,000 videos), mostly AppLovin and Mintegral, with 10–20 cent CPIs, makeover and body-shaming concepts that bring Matej back to 2018 “who is the killer” ads, and a spend roughly equal to revenue at an estimated 15% margin.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: guess the daily ad revenue
01:20 – Back from Istanbul; meet Brain Puzzle 2: Logic Twist (ad simulator, sorry, “riddle”)
04:20 – Jakub plays it live: shark fail state, door levels, the dumbbell, interstitial on every win
07:37 – The ad setup: 5 rewarded placements, interstitials from level 7, no cooldowns
11:39 – The business model: tier-3 installs, 10–18 interstitials, $1.40–$3 eCPMs
12:18 – Numbers: 2.5M DAU, 500–600K downloads/day, 75% women, $83K/day revenue
16:03 – UA spend, paybacks and retention: D7 13%, D60 ~1%, 140 levels, Brain Test comparison
19:08 – Creatives: 4,000 in 30 days, makeover ads are back, AppLovin + Mintegral, 10-cent CPIs
25:06 – Margins (15%), the Chinese studio behind it, “would you change the UA strategy?”
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
--------------------------------------
Today's episode is brought to you by PvX Partners. Developers now have a new way to fund their marketing: PvX Card.
If you're scaling your gaming business and need more capital for UA, here's the deal: your credit limit grows with your marketing performance — the higher your ROAS, the more credit you have available. Repayment terms run from 60 to 120 days and scale with your ROAS, so you can match repayments to your game's payback period.
It's dynamic, it's flexible, and it scales as fast as you do.
Check out PvXPartners.com/cards and scale your UA with PvX Card
---------------------------------------
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
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]
🧙 Solo Dev Journey #2: Am I Making ANY Money?
Solo Dev Journey #2 is here because you asked for it. This one is about the single question every developer, my own programmers, and even Andre keep asking: “You spend $4.5K a day and make $4K a day… and you’re …
Notas do episódio
Solo Dev Journey #2 is here because you asked for it. This one is about the single question every developer, my own programmers, and even Andre keep asking: “You spend $4.5K a day and make $4K a day… and you’re happy? That makes no sense.” It makes perfect sense, and I open my Singular account on camera to prove it.
I walk through the CPI vs LTV equation the way a UA person actually uses it: the time element (D7, D30, D90, D365 LTV, never D0), why the payback period is set by where your retention curve dies, and why Robot Breaker sitting at $250K spent and $170K back is not a problem, just a cohort that hasn’t finished paying. Then I switch to One Mage Army, launched September 6–7 on Android only, and show the real numbers: 60–80% day-1 ROAS, 120–200% ROAS days, 103% ROAS for the whole month on $40K, and scaling from $200 to $1K/day in a week to $2.5K/day now. The game is maybe 30% feature-ready. Mark my words.
Plus: the channel mix (AppLovin started terribly and is now one of the best; Unity Ads surprisingly good; Google and Mintegral added), how organics move with paid spend, the cheaters sideloading APKs and faking IAPs from Germany and Vietnam, the license-key fix in Singular, and the dashboard I built with Singular’s MCP and a “UA senior Matej” skill so I can make daily decisions without spending eternity in spreadsheets.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: $200 to $1K/day in a week, 103% for the month
01:15 – Sponsor: Potensus
02:24 – Why Solo Dev Journey #2 exists
03:45 – “You spend $4.5K and make $4K?” – the CPI vs LTV equation explained
05:20 – Robot Breaker: $250K spent, $170K back, 30-day payback and why that’s fine
06:45 – One Mage Army month 1: 60–80% D1 ROAS, 103% on $40K, scaling 5x
08:30 – Channel mix: AppLovin, Facebook, Unity, Google, Mintegral and organics
10:15 – Cheaters, fake IAPs from Germany/Vietnam, license key + the Singular MCP dashboard
12:00 – The playbook: CPI, channel, LTV curve, geo, creative – what to track and when to scale
📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS
— LTV has a time element; your payback window is where your retention curve flattens
— Spending more than you make today can still be profitable; cohorts pay back over 30+ days
— Every channel, geo and creative has its own LTV curve; tailor UA to each
— Verify purchases in the store console; cheaters will fake IAPs once you get popular
🎙️ HOST
Matej Lancaric – UA consultant, co-founder of Playable Maker,
🙏 SPONSOR
Potensus – premium ad network with direct brand deals (Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, Vodafone) and Playable Maker-built interactive formats: https://potensus.com
Got questions about scaling your game? Drop them in the comments – they become Solo Dev Journey #3.
Subscribe for more UA, creatives and mobile game growth: https://www.youtube.com/@twoandahalfgamers
#mobilegames #useracquisition #solodev #gamedev #UA #LTV #CPI #ROAS #indiegame #OneMageArmy #RobotBreaker #Singular #AppLovin #twoandahalfgamers #Potensus #PlayableMaker
⏳ Torture Sort is REAL: Jam Bus SandFall makes $80K/Day and is slow as hell!
Jam Bus Sand Fall is Bus Traffic Fever with sand: trucks (Matej says buses) line up at the bottom, colored sand pours in from the top, and you watch. There is no speed-up button, no rewarded “go faster” …
Notas do episódio
Jam Bus Sand Fall is Bus Traffic Fever with sand: trucks (Matej says buses) line up at the bottom, colored sand pours in from the top, and you watch. There is no speed-up button, no rewarded “go faster” placement like Colony Flow.
Felix failed the FTUE four times. Jakub calls the category Torture Sort, and the numbers say torture pays: $80K a day in IAP last week heading for $100K, 65K downloads a day, up 1,300% in a month, already #19 in the sort category at roughly $1M a month, with Russia driving downloads and the US driving revenue.
Ad revenue is only ~$7K a day, 12–16% of the total, app-ads.txt hasn’t been touched since January and Unity isn’t even in it.
Whole UA strategy for the category: make images as many people as possible relate to, then solve them. The bigger story is the category: sort is ~$60M a month in IAP, ~$120M with ads, half the size of merge and still growing; Goodroid is at $350K a day and $75M lifetime, Colony Flow at $500K a day, Cube Away at $60K a day out of the gate. Matej tried to build one and hit 20–25% retention: if you don’t have a senior level designer, don’t. Less torture, more fun.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: a 17-minute level
01:30 – Jam Bus Sand Fall: buses, trucks and sand
04:39 – Torture Sort: no speed-up, fluent fail state, level 30 = level 1
06:40 – Admon: five rewarded placements, $7K/day, no Unity, stale app-ads.txt
11:18 – $80K/day, 65K downloads, +1,300%, Russia vs US
13:05 – The sort category: Goodroid, Colony Flow, $120M a month
20:24 – UA: 600 videos, 5 playables, 95% AppLovin, AI dead eyes
28:40 – Why these games don’t scale and Matej’s failed sort attempt
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
Today's episode is brought to you by PvX Partners. Developers now have a new way to fund their marketing: PvX Card.
If you're scaling your gaming business and need more capital for UA, here's the deal: your credit limit grows with your marketing performance — the higher your ROAS, the more credit you have available. Repayment terms run from 60 to 120 days and scale with your ROAS, so you can match repayments to your game's payback period.
It's dynamic, it's flexible, and it scales as fast as you do.
Check out PvXPartners.com/cards and scale your UA with PvX Card
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
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]
🚨📢BREAKING NEWS: New Adnetwork AdSURGE is here, Supercell Kills Squad Busters, Ubisoft Quits Mobile
Solo news week, and the action is all on the platform and ad-tech layer. Miniclip launched AdSurge, a new ad network built with Tencent and Easybrain: Miniclip’s casual portfolio and addressable pool …
Notas do episódio
Solo news week, and the action is all on the platform and ad-tech layer. Miniclip launched AdSurge, a new ad network built with Tencent and Easybrain: Miniclip’s casual portfolio and addressable pool, Easybrain’s Sudoku-grade monetization data, Tencent’s scale behind it, landing exactly as AppLovin sits in legal trouble and Unity bets everything on Vector. It won’t dethrone anyone overnight, but a well-funded entrant with real first-party data means more auctions and pricing pressure, and that’s leverage for all of us. Matej is testing it the day he gets access and says you should too. Then the shutdown wave. Supercell is killing Squad Busters: pulled from stores December 1, servers off December 14, barely two years after a global launch Supercell almost never grants and almost never reverses. If the best hit-rate instincts in the industry can push a game to global and lose it this fast, the bar for worldwide launch is very high. Ubisoft is worse: Rainbow Six Mobile shuts in January, Helsinki studio RedLynx is poised to close with 52 jobs at risk, and the number that explains it all is $5.3M lifetime IAP from 13M downloads. Installs are a vanity metric; monetization is the business. Also: we broke it first, Luis de la Camara (ex-Rovio, King, Gameloft) is the new CMO of Smadex, go watch Felix’s episode with him. And the 30% fight boils over: Google defending Play Store commissions in a £1bn UK class action while the CEOs of Rovio and Sega say Apple and Google aren’t earning their cut. No shit.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: the shutdown wave
00:25 – AdSurge: Miniclip, Tencent and Easybrain’s new ad network
02:05 – Luis de la Camara joins Smadex as CMO
02:20 – Supercell kills Squad Busters
03:05 – Ubisoft: Rainbow Six Mobile, RedLynx and $5.3M from 13M installs
04:00 – Apple and Google’s 30%: UK class action, Rovio and Sega speak up
🎙️ HOST
Matej Lancaric – UA & Creatives
👉 Got AdSurge access? Tell us in the comments
👉 Felix + Jakub back next episode
👉 Join the 2.5 Gamers Slack
#MobileGaming #AdSurge #Miniclip #Supercell #SquadBusters #Ubisoft #AdTech #UserAcquisition #TwoAndAHalfGamers
---------------------------------------
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]
---------------------------------------
If you are interested in getting UA tips every week on Monday, visit lancaric.substack.com & sign up for the Brutally Honest newsletter by Matej Lancaric
Do you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask Matej AI - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai
🎯 20 years' experience: Luis de la Camara on WHY the networks know your users better than YOU!
Luis de la Camara spent 20 years on the client side, six in AAA, then Gameloft, King, Scopely, and five years at Rovio through the Sega exit, and he left a few weeks ago. Felix got him on before the news broke …
Notas do episódio
Luis de la Camara spent 20 years on the client side, six in AAA, then Gameloft, King, Scopely, and five years at Rovio through the Sega exit, and he left a few weeks ago. Felix got him on before the news broke: Luis is the new CMO of Smadex. So this is a conference-bar conversation on tape.
The brand question first: even with Angry Birds and Candy Crush, nobody has cracked measuring brand on top of UA; broad awareness campaigns brought the same quality users at a much higher CPI, so the real power of brand is cheaper performance, and incrementality testing is the only way to know whether App Store search is growth or just defending your own IP.
Felix’s thesis: the networks know your users better than you ever will, so stop fighting it and segment on their output. His hack: track eCPM decay per user; shallow curve means IAP-optimized traffic, steep drop means ad-ROAS traffic, and you can tell who will ever pay.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: incentives that make rewarded cohorts perform
01:17 – Who is Luis: AAA, Gameloft, King, Scopely, Rovio
03:36 – Brand vs performance: the battle Rovio never fully won
05:25 – “The networks know your users better than you”
09:11 – Felix’s eCPM decay hack for spotting payers
10:24 – UA Society takeaways: segmentation, rewarded users, Papaya
14:29 – Retargeting, CTV and incrementality done simply
21:30 – DSPs are winning: Moloco, Liftoff and how to work with them
25:47 – The BREAKING news: Luis joins Smadex as CMO
🎙️ HOST & GUEST
Felix Braberg – Ad Monetization
Luis de la Camara – CMO, Smadex (ex-Rovio, Scopely, King)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/luiscamaraking/
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
--------------------------------------
Today's episode is brought to you by PvX Partners. Developers now have a new way to fund their marketing: PvX Card.
If you're scaling your gaming business and need more capital for UA, here's the deal: your credit limit grows with your marketing performance — the higher your ROAS, the more credit you have available. Repayment terms run from 60 to 120 days and scale with your ROAS, so you can match repayments to your game's payback period.
It's dynamic, it's flexible, and it scales as fast as you do.
Check out PvXPartners.com/cards and scale your UA with PvX Card
---------------------------------------
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.
Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA
---------------------------------------
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]
🧠 How Deepstash gets 50% of subscribers from Web2App & 3,000 creatives a month
Deepstash is “TikTok for smart people”: key ideas from books in bite-size, level-like chapters, now part of a portfolio (Paladin for history, Imperio for business) that founder Vladimir calls Smartheads. We had …
Notas do episódio
Deepstash is “TikTok for smart people”: key ideas from books in bite-size, level-like chapters, now part of a portfolio (Paladin for history, Imperio for business) that founder Vladimir calls Smartheads. We had him on with Jeff Cohen from PvX to unpack how an education app scales like a game. The numbers: more than 50% of paid subscribers now come through web2app after “a billion iterations” that Vlad himself thought would never work, 3,000 creatives in the last 30 days from a 30-person UA and creative team, niche organic pages that surface what goes viral before it becomes an ad, and contextual cross-promo (read the Iliad in Deepstash, get Achilles in Paladin) converting 10x better than generic ads. Felix’s homework for Vlad: you’re on AdMob only, add two or three networks and watch ad revenue double or triple, then go the Duolingo route and show ads to the users you know won’t subscribe. Jeff explains why web2app fits subscriptions better than games (one purchase decision, then opt-out), why consumer apps are now half of PvX’s ~$40M/month in funded UA, and why he keeps telling Vlad to spend more. Plus GTA, Halloween and Dracula as cultural-moment content, tiered AI models for creative production, and the one gap Matej couldn’t let go: no AppLovin, no playables, yet.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: web2app
01:17 – Meet Vlad (Deepstash) and Jeff (PvX)
05:05 – The product: ideas as levels, Paladin, Imperio
12:34 – Cross-promo that works: context = 10x
15:15 – Felix: one network is “ripping your eyes out”
18:58 – Web2app: 50%+ of subscribers, why games struggle
30:00 – Seasonality, Q5 and where PvX came in
41:35 – 3,000 creatives, 30 people, organic pages, AI tiers
51:00 – No AppLovin, no playables. Yet.
🎙️ HOSTS & GUESTS
Matej Lancaric – UA & Creatives
Felix Braberg – Ad Monetization
Jakub Remiar – Game Design
Vladimir Oane – Founder, Deepstash / Smartheads
Jeff Cohen – Origination Lead, PvX Partners
#Deepstash #Web2App #UserAcquisition #PvX #SubscriptionApps #MobileMarketing #TwoAndAHalfGamers
--------------------------------------
Today's episode is brought to you by PvX Partners. Developers now have a new way to fund their marketing: PvX Card.
If you're scaling your gaming business and need more capital for UA, here's the deal: your credit limit grows with your marketing performance — the higher your ROAS, the more credit you have available. Repayment terms run from 60 to 120 days and scale with your ROAS, so you can match repayments to your game's payback period.
It's dynamic, it's flexible, and it scales as fast as you do.
Check out PvXPartners.com/cards and scale your UA with PvX Card
---------------------------------------
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]
💍 Rotate Rings was a FAKE ad for a YEAR. Now it's a GAME With 1M DAU in 2 Weeks
Rotate Rings is two weeks old, already at 1M DAU and 500–600K downloads a day. The twist: the core mechanic was a UA creative first. Century Games ran rotating-ring fake gameplay for a year, Tasty Travels used …
Notas do episódio
Rotate Rings is two weeks old, already at 1M DAU and 500–600K downloads a day. The twist: the core mechanic was a UA creative first. Century Games ran rotating-ring fake gameplay for a year, Tasty Travels used it as a minigame, and now Nebula (Felix's "good authority" says Hungry Studio, the Block Blast team) turned the ad into the game. No timer, no fail state, "another Arrows," and still only $45–50K/day in ads because interstitials are delayed Block Blast-style: Jakub hit level 34 without one. 3,000 creatives in three weeks, AI IQ-test guys, Einstein, sunglasses to hide the AI eyes. UA is 70% of the success, and the clones are coming.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Why the traffic isn't pristine
01:37 – A UA creative became a game
03:08 – Gameplay: rotate, disconnect, shatter
08:20 – 1M DAU in two weeks
11:04 – Hungry Studio's delayed-interstitial playbook
14:32 – Creatives: AI hooks, 3,000 ads, 90 playables
23:12 – $50K/day verdict and clone prediction
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
--------------------------------------
Today's episode is brought to you by PvX Partners. Developers now have a new way to fund their marketing: PvX Card.
If you're scaling your gaming business and need more capital for UA, here's the deal: your credit limit grows with your marketing performance — the higher your ROAS, the more credit you have available. Repayment terms run from 60 to 120 days and scale with your ROAS, so you can match repayments to your game's payback period.
It's dynamic, it's flexible, and it scales as fast as you do.
Check out PvXPartners.com/cards and scale your UA with PvX Card
---------------------------------------
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]
---------------------------------------
If you are interested in getting UA tips every week on Monday, visit lancaric.substack.com & sign up for the Brutally Honest newsletter by Matej Lancaric
Do you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask Matej AI - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai
💰 You Hit $1,000/Day in Ad Revenue. Now Here Are the 5 Tricks Ad Networks hope you NEVER Learn
https://www.segmenta-ai.com/ - Link for signup if you want bid floor helpFelix, solo from Istanbul, with the advanced ad monetization episode nobody makes: what to do once your game is earning $1,000 a day in …
Notas do episódio
https://www.segmenta-ai.com/ - Link for signup if you want bid floor help
Felix, solo from Istanbul, with the advanced ad monetization episode nobody makes: what to do once your game is earning $1,000 a day in ads. The core idea is that ad revenue stacks on top of itself, so tactics that were a waste of time at $100 a day are suddenly worth real money, and the networks know it better than you do. First, network coverage: at $1,000 a day you should be live on at least six or seven of the ten big networks (AppLovin, Meta, Google, Unity, Mintegral, InMobi, Digital Turbine, Pangle, Moloco, Liftoff, BidMachine on iOS), and at $3,000 a day on all of them, because each good network adds roughly 5–10% to revenue.
And finally, bid floors: since the industry went bidding-only two years ago, every network runs a bandit model that keeps testing lower bids until one converts, dragging your average down, turning you from price setter to price taker. Bid floors, set at the right levels and updated at the right cadence, claw back 5–20%, and Felix's new SDK-less bid-floor service plugging into MAX showed one client earning nearly 30% more during the test window. Eleven games live, looking for the twelfth. Next milestone to plan for: $25–30K a day, where everything changes again.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: when spacing ads out is actually worth it
02:32 – Why ad monetization stacks: what changes at $1,000/day
03:30 – Which networks to run: 7 of 10 at $1K/day, all of them at $3K/day
05:00 – app-ads.txt and reseller demand: why it's not a beer tap
07:00 – The recency model: impressions lose 39–52% of value by the 12th
09:30 – Policing ad length: timestamp every impression and confront the network
11:30 – The pro move: load an interstitial in the rewarded slot
13:00 – Bid floors vs the bandit model: from price taker back to price setter
---------------------------------------
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]
---------------------------------------
If you are interested in getting UA tips every week on Monday, visit lancaric.substack.com & sign up for the Brutally Honest newsletter by Matej Lancaric
Do you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask Matej AI - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai
🐿️ FunPlus Made a Genshin-Pokémon-Palworld Game and Forgot the Gacha
Aniimo is the prettiest game we've reviewed this year and Jakub spent a week waiting for it to catch him. It didn't, and the reason is the biggest hole we've ever found in a Chinese launch: there is no gacha …
Notas do episódio
Aniimo is the prettiest game we've reviewed this year and Jakub spent a week waiting for it to catch him. It didn't, and the reason is the biggest hole we've ever found in a Chinese launch: there is no gacha. None. Everything you'd expect from a top-tier open-world RPG except the engine that pays for it. You catch your Aniimo in the world, grind the rare ones through long quest chains, and that's it. Jakub's verdict: "you build a beautiful car and you forgot to put in the engine."
Mobile revenue is around $200K a day, the cross-platform in-game spend chart suggests maybe $600K combined, and the audience is exactly who you'd want: Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Thailand with the US at just 16%. The people who, in Jakub's words, live and die by the gacha, handed a game with none.
Kudos to FunPlus for diversifying away from 4X. Now add the gacha.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: Honkai did $12M a day at launch, Aniimo doesn't have the engine for it
02:32 – Who made it: Paw Print Studio, FunPlus and why the 4X OGs need a way out
06:00 – The game: Genshin world, Pokémon catching, twining into your Aniimo, boss fights and rarities
15:00 – Energy, live ops and cosmetics: the only monetization that exists
18:24 – The elephant in the room: there is no gacha
23:30 – The numbers: 40M pre-regs, ~1M DAU, $200K/day mobile, Japan and Korea leading
34:11 – UA and creatives: 1,300 in-game cinematics, no AI, no playables, Kakao and Path of Exile YouTubers
43:23 – Category check: Genshin $30M, WuWa $10M, NTE $5M a month and the prediction
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
Today's episode is brought to you by PvX Partners. Developers now have a new way to fund their marketing: PvX Card.
If you're scaling your gaming business and need more capital for UA, here's the deal: your credit limit grows with your marketing performance — the higher your ROAS, the more credit you have available. Repayment terms run from 60 to 120 days and scale with your ROAS, so you can match repayments to your game's payback period.
It's dynamic, it's flexible, and it scales as fast as you do.
Check out PvXPartners.com/cards and scale your UA with PvX Card
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]
🐌 Voodoo's mid-core ERA: Draft Showdown is Battle Legion with the friction removed
Draft Showdown is a Voodoo-published auto-battler that is, by the admission of the two people on this podcast who actually worked on it, Battle Legion with the friction removed, and that's why it's doing what …
Notas do episódio
Draft Showdown is a Voodoo-published auto-battler that is, by the admission of the two people on this podcast who actually worked on it, Battle Legion with the friction removed, and that's why it's doing what Battle Legion never could: roughly $120K a day, 45–50% of it from ads, 400K DAU, a $70K IAP spike on the new Draft Pass season, and 1,200 new creatives in the last three days.
Felix estimates $38–43K a day in ads alone, and he's already messaged Voodoo begging to know how they did it.
On the UA side Matej is surprised to see Facebook still the biggest channel over AppLovin, Unity and Mintegral, then explains why: the creatives are fake-as-hell mass battles, 4X hooks, Mob Control tubes, Plants vs Zombies clones, Hero Wars, Rush Royale, a dinosaur you never get to pick, all 59 seconds, no AI, "as soon as you see these type of ads, you know it's expensive."
Plus Teut Weidemann's new book "I Told You So: Why Fairness Wins in Free-to-Play"
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: $38–43K a day in ads
01:20 – Battle Legion trauma: Matej did the UA, Jakub did the design, Voodoo did the iteration
05:54 – The core loop: roguelite draft, live counters, four-card deck and no placement
11:35 – Legendaries behind the Draft Pass, shard gacha and the two-plus-one ad shop
19:26 – Felix's admon breakdown: seven rewarded placements and the double-interstitial trick
23:44 – Numbers: $120K/day, 400K DAU, $70K season spike, Voodoo portfolio and the $200–300K prediction
30:25 – UA and creatives: Facebook still number one, 1,200 creatives in 3 days, all fake, no AI
40:06 – Rigged matchmaking: why 70% win rate feels fair and games push it to 95%
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]
🥟 Mystery Dumpling Unbox ASMR: The Game that isn't a GAME (It's an Ad Simulator)
Mystery Dumpling Unbox ASMR launched in mid-August, spiked to a million downloads a day, is still pulling 300K downloads a day and 1.1M DAU, shows $2 of IAP revenue in the last 30 days.Every one of those 12 …
Notas do episódio
Mystery Dumpling Unbox ASMR launched in mid-August, spiked to a million downloads a day, is still pulling 300K downloads a day and 1.1M DAU, shows $2 of IAP revenue in the last 30 days.
Every one of those 12 million monthly downloads comes from a viral toy trend: RMS "Real Magical Stuff" mystery dumplings, unboxing videos on TikTok and YouTube doing 47M, 70M and 82M views each, and a developer that named the app so precisely ("mystery dumpling" + "unbox") that it sits as the first Google result when a kid searches for the toy. The monetization is textbook ultra-casual pumping: interstitials triggered by action count starting at 15 and dropping to two or three, a permanent MREC on a 10-second refresh sitting on top of the "claim free legendary pack"
Felix runs the math: mostly Indonesia and Tier 2/3 traffic, only 33K DAU in the US, so somewhere between $18K and $29K a day in ad revenue, call it $1M a month and roughly $900K banked since launch.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: 70 million views on a dumpling unboxing video
01:32 – What Mystery Dumpling Unbox ASMR is and why $2 of IAP is the wrong way to look at it
02:29 – Gameplay walkthrough: interstitials on action count, a permanent MREC, Google billboards and four ads per screen
11:07 – The toy behind it: RMS mystery dumplings, Amazon, €50 diamond editions and a safety recall
12:50 – The numbers: 1M downloads/day spike, 300K/day now, 1.1M DAU, 12M downloads a month, all Tier 2/3
15:23 – Felix's Panini FIFA theory and the $18–29K/day ad revenue estimate
20:32 – Zero paid UA: TikTok, YouTube, Google search #1 and how ASO did all the work
29:07 – Fake 4.7-star reviews, the ultra-casual category and the Miniclip clone
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
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]
Istanbul Is the University of Puzzles: Dream, Grand, Loom & the Founder Factory
Mobidictum Conference in Istanbul, October 7–8: fifth year, 80% of the top Turkish studios in the room, 20 Vietnamese and 30 Chinese companies, 60% international attendance for the first time, and all three of …
Notas do episódio
Mobidictum Conference in Istanbul, October 7–8: fifth year, 80% of the top Turkish studios in the room, 20 Vietnamese and 30 Chinese companies, 60% international attendance for the first time, and all three of us on stage. Batuhan has free tickets for the 2.5 Gamers audience, so reach out.Turkey went from zero gaming news for five years to producing the most consistent hit-making machine in mobile, and in this episode we sit down with Batuhan Avucan, founder of Mobidictum, to find out how that actually happened and what's coming next. The short version: investors gave Turkish founders one mandate, puzzle, and Turkish founders executed. The Sort category alone went from basically nothing in 2023 to roughly $80M a month in IAP, and once you add ad revenue on top it's easily $120M a month, spearheaded by Pixel Flow, Magic Sort, Hexa Sort and friends. Block is dominated by Color Block Jam and Block Out from Grand Games, Match Blast and Match Factory are Peak's home turf, and match-3 is still a heavyweight fight between Dream and Playrix. But the interesting part is the machine underneath it: studios that grew up working with publishers like Rollic and Lion, learned the craft, then went solo and shipped Loom and RotateLab-sized results. Batuhan puts it better than we can: "We don't train talent anymore, we train founders."
🙏 THIS EPISODE IS SPONSORED BY POTENSUS
Potensus is a premium ad network built by people who've been on both sides of the industry. Direct deals with Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola and Vodafone, no programmatic, no middleman tags, premium CPMs landing in your game. Plus, with PlayableMaker they turn brand videos and statics into playable ads and rewarded video. Head to potensus.com and check their creative portfolio in the show notes.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: "We make unicorns"
02:26 – Who is Batuhan Avucan and what is Mobidictum
03:45 – Turkey's investment story: from Peak's exit to Series A rounds going underground
08:31 – Jakub's data: Sort at $120M/month, Block, Match-3, Blast and the physics puzzle tip for 2027
12:30 – "We don't train talent, we train founders": the publisher-to-founder pipeline and the puzzle dependency
18:10 – Subsidies, investor mandates and why nobody funds a Turkish RPG
20:27 – China ate every genre except puzzle, so the real threat is Vietnam
24:15 – Mobidictum Conference, Oct 7–8 Istanbul: who's coming and free tickets for our audience
---------------------------------------
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, Matej Lancaric
Guest: Batuhan Avucan
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]
🕳️ Suck It Up: Tactile's new hole game just ate Lily's Garden
Suck It Up is Tactile Games' new eat-and-grow hole game, and three months after soft launch it's doing ~$30K a day in IAP — about to overtake Lily's Garden as the Danish studio's biggest title (and Lily's …
Notas do episódio
Suck It Up is Tactile Games' new eat-and-grow hole game, and three months after soft launch it's doing ~$30K a day in IAP — about to overtake Lily's Garden as the Danish studio's biggest title (and Lily's Garden made well over half a billion). Matej Lančarič, Jakub Remiar, and Felix Braberg walk the game: a Hole 'Em All-style timed core with the smart differentiators (live animals that jump and hide in levels, a level-based "album" of collectible objectives, and an untimed Zen Garden mode that conveniently makes the "no timer, no stress" creatives true), then the category detective work — the whole thing traces back to Donut County's 2017 Steam trailer, which Voodoo copied into Hole.io (still 300K downloads a day today after a revival), and now Hole 'Em All, Moon Active's Hole Stars, ironSource's Holey 3D, Grand Games' Jelly Hole, and a spiky Hong Kong "Hole Busters" are all fighting for it. Felix's ad-mon read: interstitials only from level 35, rewarded from level 50, eight placements, ad revenue likely under 15% — a deliberate IAP-first, retention-first setup (D1 probably north of 50%, 36 minutes a day).
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Suck It Up — Tactile's new hole game
02:40 The core — timed levels, live animals, and the Zen Garden "no stress" mode
06:40 Album, no-ads pack & the slim feature set
09:20 The numbers — $30K/day, about to pass Lily's Garden
11:00 The category — from Donut County's trailer to Hole.io's 300K/day
14:50 Who's in the hole race — Hole 'Em All, Moon Active, ironSource, Hole Busters
19:40 Ad-mon — interstitials at 35, rewarded at 50, retention play
24:30 The UA — 60 playables, Unity works, and Facebook is gone
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]
🧠 Everything Is AI Now: Mel Gibson From Wish Is Selling You a 4X Game
A general smacks a soldier so hard he turns into a chair — and then into Mel Gibson. That's a real Top Force ad. Century Games isn't testing AI creatives anymore; it's running the whole portfolio on them: Lord …
Notas do episódio
A general smacks a soldier so hard he turns into a chair — and then into Mel Gibson. That's a real Top Force ad. Century Games isn't testing AI creatives anymore; it's running the whole portfolio on them: Lord Rush pumping out roughly 5,000 ads a month across every era in history (Spartans, pirates, Egyptians with AK-47s), the King Shot slap-skit upgraded so the guy saves a princess first, fake "watch an ad" callouts on a game with no ads, and the same skit shipped with the actor's nationality swapped per region.
107 AI creatives: Block Blast's genuinely clever "frame anything into a level" trick, Last Asylum's Attack-on-Titan-style spot with no end card (you don't need one — slap a playable after it), a new Lilith 4X scaling from 100K to 200K downloads a day on golden-AK "mushroom budget" ads, Dream Games lifting Travel Town's strawberry micro-drama wholesale, 37 Games' Walking Dead-alike, Top Heroes' Rock-from-Wish mermaid genie, and Supercent's Bulldozer Master doing 200K downloads a day on Truck-Star demolition and the "I own a mine, you can too" meme.
Jakub's closing puzzle: how do King Shot and Lord Rush both scale on identical creatives? Matej's answer: nobody cares. It's mobile.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Everything is AI — and the dying friend
05:10 Block Blast — frame anything into a level
07:25 Century's AI push — King Shot skits, Lord Rush at 5,000/month
15:55 Top Force — Mel Gibson from Wish, toy soldiers, instant localization
18:50 Last Asylum's anime spot — you don't need an end card
20:10 Lilith's new 4X — golden AKs, 200K downloads/day
32:15 Supercent — Pizza Ready, Smashdown tests & Bulldozer Master
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]
🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: AppLovin Just Cut Off Everyone's Data: The MeowDoku Studio Got Sued & more
AppLovin's CEO published a blog about "ad quality tools" — and buried in it is the real move: MAX will stop exposing user-level ad data, because competitors have been using the mediated stream (who saw which ad …
Notas do episódio
AppLovin's CEO published a blog about "ad quality tools" — and buried in it is the real move: MAX will stop exposing user-level ad data, because competitors have been using the mediated stream (who saw which ad at what price) as training data for their own bidders. Felix Braberg flies solo for the Friday news and reads between the lines: AppLovin's biggest advantage is that everyone mediates on MAX, and anyone training on that data erodes it — so the vault is closing, and this won't be the last ban.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Friday news — three stories and the weather
00:45 AppLovin's blog: ad quality tools, not data collection
04:20 Reading between the lines — protecting MAX's data moat
05:50 Sega x Netflix: Crazy Taxi, Sonic, Stranger Than Heaven
07:20 Games make movies now — the pipeline flipped
08:00 Oakever sued: lost to Hungry Studio, fighting Avia Games
10:15 The weather — Meow Doku #1 on both stores
📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS
— AppLovin Ad Review will only show aggregated data by network, ad unit, and creative — no more user-level ad journeys.
— Felix's read: it's about stopping rivals from training bidders on MAX's mediated stream. Expect more restrictions.
— Games now spawn movies, not the reverse — Sega x Netflix is the proof.
— Oakever lost to Hungry Studio in April (QBlock vs. Block Blast) and faces an Avia Games case over copied ads.
— Cloning may finally have consequences; these rulings become precedent.
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]
🐱 A Cat Shooting Trees: Idle Cat Gunner & the best creatives of the Year
A cat shoots a tree. The tree doesn't fight back. Numbers go up. That's the entire game and it's already past Office Cat's peak, #2 among all idle games on IAP revenue, and doing an estimated $250K a day once …
Notas do episódio
A cat shoots a tree. The tree doesn't fight back. Numbers go up. That's the entire game and it's already past Office Cat's peak, #2 among all idle games on IAP revenue, and doing an estimated $250K a day once you count the ads. Nobody on the crew can explain the trees. Nobody needs to.
The lesson: cats always have good CPI, one-stat simplicity keeps it Western-casual, and Treepla knows how to monetize a cat idler better than anyone. Just add LiveOps before it runs into the ground.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Idle Cat Gunner — why are the cats shooting trees?
04:05 The core — one stat, no enemies, a time-gated DPS check
06:35 Gacha always rolls D, skins, fish tank, pets & the modes
10:15 Rebirth, 5-minute ad boosts & the buff package
13:20 Step-up offers, auto-upgrade and the $50K spend depth
19:45 The numbers — past Office Cat's peak, ~$250K/day adjusted
28:45 The creatives — trees bully cats, cats get machine guns
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]
---------------------------------------
If you are interested in getting UA tips every week on Monday, visit lancaric.substack.com & sign up for the Brutally Honest newsletter by Matej Lancaric
Do you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask Matej AI - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai
🧠 New CREATIVE Trend Everybody will COPY in 3..2..1
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 …
Notas do episódio
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]
🪦 Are Banners Dead? Zedge Removed Them, Cut 38% of Impressions, and Made MORE Money
Zedge removed banners from an app with 721 million installs — half as a joke, to be consistent in a refresh-rate test. Impressions fell 38%. Revenue went up 1%. Their North Star metric rose 1.77%. Then they ran …
Notas do episódio
Zedge removed banners from an app with 721 million installs — half as a joke, to be consistent in a refresh-rate test. Impressions fell 38%. Revenue went up 1%. Their North Star metric rose 1.77%. Then they ran it in reverse to make sure, and got the same result. Banners might genuinely be dead.
Felix Braberg goes solo for an ad-monetization interview with Ignas Danielius, Head of Ad Monetization at Zedge (the personalization company behind the 721M-install, 4.7-rated wallpaper and ringtone app, plus Emojipedia, GuruShots, and the new Dataseats AI-training-data business).
They cover how ad-mon has evolved (from painful waterfalls to bidding and, ironically, back to user-value-segmented waterfalls), why banners went from Zedge's main revenue driver to a stale unit (the format is functionally unchanged since the late '90s while interstitials and rewarded have been through a conversion arms race; 5-second refresh rates kill advertiser value; misclicks and unfixable redirects), and the experiment itself: a refresh-rate test (15/20/30 seconds) with a "for a laugh" variant that removed banners entirely — run from December 8 through January, spanning the best and worst ad-ops months, with the no-banner group outperforming control for the entire duration. Ignas explains the mechanism (advertisers bid on the user, and a fast-refreshing banner is the cheapest impression to "buy" them on — remove it and later-session interstitials, numbers four through six, see fill rates explode), why the first interstitial didn't change, why Google likely drove the biggest effect, the conditions under which other publishers can reproduce it (top networks, up to 15 bidders on interstitials, low latency, a full format mix — and frequency of use matters)
The takeaway: "the banner always contributes" was a status quo nobody tested. Zedge tested it. It didn't hold.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Meet Ignas — ad monetization at Zedge
05:15 How ad-mon evolved — and why waterfalls are back
06:05 The banner's slow decline: a unit that never innovated
09:55 5-second refreshes, misclicks & redirects — how banners kill themselves
11:40 The experiment — refresh rates, and "for a laugh, remove it"
14:50 The result — 38% fewer impressions, +1% revenue, +1.77% North Star
17:10 Why it works — advertisers buy your user cheap on the banner
21:40 Should you turn off banners? The checklist
---------------------------------------
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.
Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA
🎙️ HOST
Felix Braberg — Ad Monetization consultant
🎤 GUEST
Ignas Danielius — Head of Ad Monetization, Zedge (full study and contact in the show notes)
This episode is brought to you by Potensus — a premium ad network built by people who've been on both sides of the industry, with direct (non-programmatic) deals with Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, and Vodafone landing in your game at premium CPMs, plus a PlayableMaker partnership that turns brand videos and statics into native gaming playables and rewarded formats. Head to potensus.com to get started.
---------------------------------------
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]
---------------------------------------
If you are interested in getting UA tips every week on Monday, visit lancaric.substack.com & sign up for the Brutally Honest newsletter by Matej Lancaric
🎮 Playables Are Now 40-60% of Creative Spend: Here's what's working ńow
A job-search app shipped a Flappy Bird playable that ends with "there's a relevant job for you." Two years ago that would have made zero sense. This month it's the trend: non-gaming apps are flooding the …
Notas do episódio
A job-search app shipped a Flappy Bird playable that ends with "there's a relevant job for you." Two years ago that would have made zero sense. This month it's the trend: non-gaming apps are flooding the playable space, most of them vibe-coded with AI in an afternoon.
Matej Lančarič and Ondrej Mosberger are joined again by Robin Kuyer (Unity PlayWorks) for the "everyone brings playables" format — with the bold creative twist of reversing the order.
https://lancaric.substack.com/p/h1-2026-brutally-honest-ua-report?r=7qqaf
Matej's Brutally Honest UA report puts playables at 40-60% of creative spend, up from 30-40% a year ago, as AppLovin, Mintegral, and the SDK networks keep growing. Robin brings the "Frankenstein" playable (Wool Crush: arrows + yarn mechanics + save-the-cat, every popular concept stacked into one ad — plus his spreadsheet method for engineering ideas from what's trending), the non-gaming wave
Ondrej closes with a Fumb Games playable vibe-coded in Playable Maker (30 iterations and the next version does it in three) and a clean memory-game hidden-object playable that respects the player's intelligence.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Playables are 40-60% of creative spend — the Brutally Honest data
06:25 Wool Crush — the Frankenstein playable and the spreadsheet method
11:20 Non-gaming apps take over — Indeed's Flappy Bird, finance, cleaners
19:40 Hero Wars — the open-roam level playable and how to iterate it
25:05 Supercell's playable — lost seven times, should a playable let you lose?
29:40 Sunday City — GTA timing, Grove Street, and the double-hook debate
38:30 Cozy Florist's AI merge & the cats-with-guns wildcard
44:50 Vibe-coded in Playable Maker + the memory-game playable that trusts you
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]
🧙 Solo Dev Journey #1: How to start with UA? From a store link to a LIVE UA Campaigns
Game discussed in the video - One Mage Army: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eyaegmoranm.onemagearmy A solo developer messaged Jakub at Gamesforum to say the podcast helped him grow his game …
Notas do episódio
Game discussed in the video - One Mage Army: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eyaegmoranm.onemagearmy
A solo developer messaged Jakub at Gamesforum to say the podcast helped him grow his game from zero to $25K a month, now heading to $50K. This video is for exactly that person: one game, no creative team, no UA department — and a launch that needs to happen anyway.
Matej Lančarič goes solo for the first episode of his dev journey, launching his own game, One Mage Army (Android now, iOS in a couple of weeks), in the least ideal conditions: the build was done, Singular and ad monetization were in, but every motion designer and playable person was busy on client work, there was no gameplay footage anywhere online, and all he had was the store page. He walks the whole setup in order: wiring the network connectors (Unity, Google, Mintegral, Meta, Moloco, and more), the Singular events he needed before anything could run (ad impressions, purchases, level victories, hero unlocks — the first-session events), then the creative problem. With nothing to work from, he fed Layer.ai the store link and one brief — 59-second, story-driven, "one mage vs. a horde," keep the store's art style — and had ten AI videos in about 90 minutes, no gameplay at all. They're not perfect, and he says so: any client would reject them. They're also his best performers on Facebook and Apple. Add Playable Maker playables (plus playables built in Layer from the game's own sprites, seven more in the back pocket), and the campaigns: on Facebook, an ad-impression campaign to get any data ($0.18 CPI, ~200 installs), then a level-5 achieve campaign that started producing purchasers on its own (10-13 IPM, ~$0.90 CPI on tier 1, Germany best), then tier-1 purchase campaigns (~€3 CPI, US ~$4.50). On AppLovin, blended-ROAS worldwide (the game is ~40% IAP / 60% ads): a brutal $60 CPI on day one, $30, then $7, now $3.60 and heading toward $2 — and the discipline of not panicking when it's your own money.
The lesson, stated plainly: volume and diversity beat polish. Ten imperfect videos beat one perfect one. Get data in first, ladder the campaigns, iterate the winner. Next up: Firebase, Google Ads, and hybrid ROAS.
---------------------------------------
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]
---------------------------------------
If you are interested in getting UA tips every week on Monday, visit lancaric.substack.com & sign up for the Brutally Honest newsletter by Matej Lancaric
Do you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask Matej AI - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai
Aqui estão os 40 episódios mais recentes de 527. Os mais antigos estão no feed do podcast.
Podcasts parecidos
Mais podcasts de Lazer
Este podcast é seu?
Confirme com uma entrada no seu feed: você recebe um código aqui, adiciona como podcast:txt no canal do seu feed e nós verificamos. Depois disso, seu podcast aparece como “verificado” no SoundNode.