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two & a half gamers

Lancaric.me

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!

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Yesterday · 52 min
🎮 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 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 - matej@lancaric.me
Thursday · 21 min
🧙 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 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 - matej@lancaric.me --------------------------------------- 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
Wednesday · 37 min
🚂 Full Steam Ahead Q2: 12 Steam Hits & which ones work on Mobile?
A hide-and-seek game where you paint yourself to blend into the map, made by two people in two months, just made $60 million. That's the winner of this quarter's Steam Scanner — and it's the one idea on the list mobile genuinely can't clone. The closing caveat matters: it's survivorship bias — 20K+ games hit Steam a year — and Steam's discovery means a Mecha Chameleon never gets brute-forced by three Voodoo clones in a month. That's the whole difference between the two platforms. ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 The Steam Scanner is back — Q2, smallest to biggest 04:20 Taskbar Hero — an idle RPG in your taskbar (and the widget hint) 08:00 Supermarket Chaos & Oaken Tower — the tidy-up trend and an idle PvP tower 12:00 Idle gacha, Solarpunk & the evolve-into-a-crab roguelite 18:20 Librarian & Rome's Dead — high-budget cleaning and Roman survivor-slop 22:10 Vampire Crawlers, Paralives & the co-op casino-debt game 27:20 The winner — Mecha Chameleon, $60M by two people 35:30 Survivorship bias and why Steam can't be brute-forced 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 - matej@lancaric.me --------------------------------------- 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
September 7 · 40 min
🐱 Find the Cat 2: The Sequel to a Monster Hit. Built to show MORE Ads
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Find the Cat 2 — now in color 02:40 Cat-as-ornament hiding and 70-cat hard levels 04:20 Shorter levels, more interstitials — the pacing change 08:15 The meow is the whole game 13:00 Rewarded ads, 260-second Google formats & the Mintegral fix 18:00 The numbers — 125K downloads/day, 350K DAU, vs Find the Cat 1 24:40 Felix's ad-scaling thresholds and the banner decoy 28:30 The creatives — AI doctors, 17 playables & find the IP infringement 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 - matej@lancaric.me --------------------------------------- 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
September 4 · 10 min
🚨📢BREAKING NEWS: Mobile Gaming Hits $121B + Makers Fund's $250M + AppsFlyer's $400M Loan
Newzoo says the global games market hits $213.9B in 2026, with mobile the largest platform at $121.1B and — for the first time in a while — the fastest-growing one. And that mobile number is still missing the $10-15B earned off-platform that the trackers can't see. Three stories this Friday, plus the weather. Felix Braberg flies solo for the Friday news. First, Newzoo's 2026 Global Games Market forecast (via Michiel Buijsman, August 25): $213.9B total, up 6.1%, with growth across all platforms and regions; mobile at $121.1B (+6.8%) ahead of console ($46.9B, +5.1%, anchored by GTA 6's November launch) and PC ($45.9B, +5%, moderating after a record 12% in 2025). The mobile growth is coming from deeper spending per player, Chinese publishers gaining share abroad, and expanding D2C — and Felix layers on the off-platform caveat from the recent FastSpring/Chip episode, meaning mobile's true size is meaningfully larger than reported. The player-side forecast is the strategic one: 3.7B players in 2026 (+4.4%) but growth slowing to ~3.2% through 2029 as penetration flattens at ~62% of the online population — so future growth depends on retaining and monetizing existing audiences, not adding new ones. Second, Makers Fund closed its $250M Fund IV (bringing AUM to $1.5B), the San Francisco games-VC behind Dream Games and Voldex — exactly the kind of capital the industry needs flowing to the next generation of studios. Third, AppsFlyer secured a $400M credit line from Bank Leumi on top of a June transaction that valued it at $2.7B (Google, Meta, Unity, and Moloco as minority investors, and liquidity for long-time backers like General Atlantic and Goldman Sachs). Felix's finance read: they bought out investors who wanted out after the IPO failed, came up short on cash, and took on debt to fund growth toward being big enough to go public. Then the weather: Smash Fest leads US iOS free downloads, Meow Doku is #2 (and #1 on Google Play, beating Roblox), Block Out and Magic Sort (both Grand Games) follow, and Royal Smash vs Smash Fest is now a live fight for the biggest smash game. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Three stories and the weather — Friday news 00:40 Newzoo 2026 — $214B market, mobile $121B and growing fastest 02:30 The off-platform asterisk — mobile's real size 03:30 Player growth is slowing — retention is the new growth 05:10 Makers Fund closes $250M Fund IV 06:20 AppsFlyer's $400M credit line — the post-IPO read 08:00 The weather — Smash Fest, Meow Doku, and the smash-game fight --------------------------------------- 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 - matej@lancaric.me
September 3 · 38 min
🗯️ "Playable Anime" With No Anime: How OOC Makes $100K/Day on Pure AI Text
OOC is marketed as "playable anime." There's almost no anime in it. It's a wall of text — an AI-powered dungeon master running an interactive story you steer with your own prompts. And it's doing an estimated $100K a day, 74% of it from the US, on pure AI-generated text. Welcome to the weirdest, most future-facing app the crew has covered.We break down OOC by New AI Entertainment (a subsidiary of Korean AI company VRTN) — and use it as a window into the fast-scaling "AI companion" / LLM-driven-content category. We walk the actual experience (a micro-drama-style menu of isekai and anime scenarios, but instead of scripted choices you type free-text prompts, and the LLM improvises the world like a Dungeons & Dragons game master — Jakub compares it directly to 1970s multi-user dungeons, the text-only RPGs that existed before graphics), why the generative freedom is both the magic and the flaw (you can break the story like the genie-with-infinite-wishes paradox, and the AI has to scramble to hold it together), and the token economy (you burn ~90 tokens per response on the good model, run dry in a handful of replies, and get pushed to refill — with 30% off on web). Then the numbers and the category: OOC at ~$100K/day since a June launch with sky-high US IAP conversion, sitting alongside PolyBuzz, Tipsy / Live Your Story (~$500K/day), Status, and others - all LLM-driven content apps that barely existed two years ago. ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 "Playable anime" — and why there's no anime03:20 How it actually plays — you write the prompts08:00 It's a 1970s text MUD with an AI dungeon master12:00 The genie problem — breaking the story13:40 The token economy — pay for the good model20:40 The numbers — $100K/day, 74% US, and the category35:00 Why it's not on AppLovin (and the missed playable play)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 investorsFor 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 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch 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 Lancaric⁠Matej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiarPlease 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 - matej@lancaric.me
September 1 · 39 min
🎒 Overgeared Hero Breakdown: An Asian RPG That Actually Cracked the US market
Almost every game that tried the Backpack Hero setup on mobile failed. Overgeared Hero didn't — it's the strongest adaptation the crew has seen; it's doing ~$100K a day, and it pulled off the thing most Asian-developed RPGs can't: it cracked the US. We break down Overgeared Hero by Craft (Korea) — a mid-core RPG built on a Hobby/RPG chassis (gacha, energy, idle expedition, gear-merge, endless tower, pet dungeons) but with a genuinely novel core: inventory-Tetris roguelite runs where you arrange, merge, and position gear in a backpack, and adjacency bonuses (place items near the right weapon or armor) turn it into more than just Tetris. The standout mechanic Jakub unpacks: your upgradeable starting gear sits outside the recipe book, so meta-progression makes you stronger at the start of each run — a roguelite spend-depth lever that lets them keep raising enemy stats and keep you spending. They cover the numbers (~$100K/day since a June launch, ~20K downloads/day, and crucially 24% of revenue from the US, then Japan at 23% and Korea at 13% — rare US strength for an Asian mid-core), the deliberately simple ad setup (12 rewarded placements, all unlocked at once after floor-one round-six, ~15% ad revenue / ~$19K/day, with LINE in the stack for Japan), and why this audience (hardcore PC-pixel, Castlevania/Shovel Knight/Balatro-adjacent, the players who check a tier list before they play) doesn't want aggressive interstitials and can't be scaled on cheap high-volume traffic. Then the UA: ~2,700 creatives, heavy AI, Hobby-style explanatory/altered-gameplay hooks, a channel mix that finally diversified from Facebook/Unity/AdMob into 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 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 - matej@lancaric.me
August 27 · 35 min
📡 Century's Hidden "Innovation" Account & What's Brewing in Soft Launch
Soft Launch Sonar is where we dig through the millions of games brewing in soft launch to find the patterns before anyone else. This time: Century's not-so-secret second account, Supercent cloning Smash Fest twice in a week, Miniclip taking a swing at Forex, and a Smash Fest clone count that's hit 123 with the honest verdict that almost none of it contains a single new idea. Supercent's two near-identical Smash Fest clones (Wackstack and Smashdown) shipped in one week, part of a clone wave Felix now counts at 123 — the Pixel-Flow-sold-for-a-billion gold rush in full swing, with everyone piling in despite zero genre expertise. Combo Games brings a puzzle spread (a promising arrows-with-holes ball game, a bubble-associations game, and the obligatory Cube Land clone "Cube Smash"), Miniclip surfaces a mysterious Forex entry (a Chinese-owned British studio going the other way), Match Villains' UA chart is flatlined (pivoting to LiveOps and profitability), and the crew heaps genuine praise on Total Battle for a slow-and-steady hockey stick that's now doing record revenue by owning its "gate" niche. Plus InnoGames, Say Games, and Gamespark — rumored to be RiverGames trying to wrestle back 4X share with a one-to-one Last War template in King Shot visuals. ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Soft Launch Sonar returns — millions of games, one crew 02:20 Century's secret "Innovation" account — merge + Forex only 06:40 Top Force Commander — Century's King Shot clone 13:00 Supercent's two Smash Fest clones and the 123-clone wave 18:20 Combo Games' puzzle spread and the Cube Land clone 24:00 Miniclip does Forex + Total Battle's slow-and-steady miracle 31:40 Gamespark — the rumored RiverGames comeback play 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 - matej@lancaric.me
August 26 · 32 min
💳 A Credit Card that resets your LIMIT when Your ROAS is good: PVX's UA financing card is here!
Most credit cards want the full balance back at the end of the month, at punitive interest, with a fixed limit that has nothing to do with how your campaigns are actually performing. PVX is building the opposite: a UA-financing credit card where your limit resets based on ROAS, so as long as the performance is there, you never have to stop spending. We sit down with Joe Wadakethalakal (CEO and co-founder of PVX Partners) to break down the credit card PVX is launching in Q4. The core idea: bring PVX's ROAS-based underwriting — the same approach behind their UA financing — into a credit card with dynamic, performance-based limits. https://pvxpartners.com/cards Joe walks how it works (spend $100K, and if the curves look good you can spend $200K next month while only paying back the first month's ROAS, ~30-40%, because PVX resets the limit rather than demanding the full balance), the crucial distinction between the card and traditional UA financing (the card is still a loan you repay; UA financing means PVX takes the cohort risk), per-channel cards with ROAS-based limits (a Meta card, a TikTok card, each capped by that channel's performance), the underwriting mechanism (MMP data via a fast agent-based installer, ~90% confidence on monthly performance within 15 days of signal), the Amex-points debate (are you optimizing for points or for cheaper, resettable capital?), and the launch plan (UK and 4-6 EU countries first in October-November, then ramp globally). The takeaway: for early-stage studios and solopreneurs, the real bottleneck usually isn't the cost of capital — it's the credit limit and the ability to keep rolling it. That's what PVX is trying to unlock. ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Meet Joe from PVX Partners — the credit card idea 03:00 Why UA financing through a credit card 04:15 ROAS-based dynamic limits and per-channel cards 06:00 How PVX underwrites — MMP data and fast integration 10:40 What happens when the golden cohorts fade 12:30 Card vs UA financing — who takes the cohort risk 15:00 The Amex-points debate — points vs cheaper capital 17:25 UK/EU launch, the ideal customer, and Q4 timing 📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS — The real unlock isn't the interest rate — it's the reset. Spend $100K, and if the curves look good, you can spend $200K next month while only repaying the first month's ROAS (~30-40%), because PVX resets your limit rather than demanding the full balance back. For early, fast-growing companies, the bottleneck is rarely the cost of capital; it's getting the credit limit and being able to keep rolling it without interruption. — You can run per-channel cards with ROAS-based limits. A Meta card, a TikTok card, a Google card — each with limits set by that channel's ROAS rather than a flat dollar amount. It's up to the borrower how granular they want to go, and it turns spend management into performance management. The card is the on-ramp; once you're consistently spending ~$10K/day with stable performance, PVX can transition you to true UA financing (spend still runs on the card, but the cohort liability moves to PVX's balance sheet after month one). https://pvxpartners.com/cards 🎙️ HOSTS Matej Lančarič — User Acquisition consultant Jakub Remiar — Game Design consultant Felix Braberg — Ad Monetization consultant 🎤 GUEST Joe Wadakethalakal — CEO & Co-founder, PVX Partners This episode features PVX Partners: the UA financing provider helping consumer app and game studios scale marketing spend without giving away equity. Learn more and get on the list for the upcoming credit card at pvxpartners.com https://pvxpartners.com/cards 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 - matej@lancaric.me
August 24 · 43 min
⚔️ 47 Rewarded Ad Placements and a "No Ads" Lie: Inside XP Hero's $400K/Day Idle RPG
We break down XP Hero by Supercent: an idle RPG built on the same Alien Invasion core as Butcher Hero, but with far better onboarding and vastly more ads. They walk the deep feature set (a growing hero, monetized cargo capacity and return tickets, boss raids that force you to upgrade a whole team, Legend of Slime-style blessings, gacha chests from the Habby template, a PvP intrusion system, an endless tower, and map-spawning chests), the ad monetization (Felix's counted 47 rewarded placements, an interstitial on a 60-90 second cooldown tied to rewarded views, 53% ad revenue versus Butcher Hero's 32%, landing ~$85K/day in ads on possibly-undercounted DAU — so plausibly $200K and maybe $400K/day total), Then the UA masterclass: Supercent runs a fake-out "no ads / idle lumber / tower-defense" playable that has nothing to do with the game, This is genius, not lazy, because 4X originally stole those concepts from idle RPGs - so Supercent, having finally built the actual idle RPG everyone's been imitating, is just stealing it back. ~1,300 creatives in three days (700 new), heavy AI, AppLovin + Mintegral led, all channels running. ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 XP Hero — Butcher Hero with better onboarding (and way more ads) 04:00 The monetized-cargo mechanic and forced backtracking 06:00 The interstitial-every-60-seconds cooldown trick 08:10 The deep feature set — boss raids, blessings, gacha, tower 14:00 47 rewarded placements — Felix reads the whole list 18:45 The numbers — 53% ad revenue, ~$200-400K/day 22:45 The "no ads" lie and the fake-out playable 27:00 Stealing 4X creatives back — the UA masterclass 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 - matej@lancaric.me
August 20 · 31 min
💀Review Radar #12: Which games survived & which are actually DEAD (Poke It With a Stick!!)
Review Radar 12 is where we revisit the games we've covered and find out who lived and who died. This time, the joke's on us: nearly everything came back scaling up. Felix kept reaching for the stick to poke dead games, and Jakub kept insisting they're all still breathing — and mostly, he was right. The lesson that keeps repeating: hard work pays off, revenue and DAU often tell opposite stories once D2C is involved, and "dead" is a lot rarer than a declining revenue chart makes it look. ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Review Radar #12 — the time-machine begins 02:00 Arrows & Forge Master — Lesmore is on a heater 06:45 Pixel Flow stabilizes — the "this won't hold" call 08:15 Cozy games, Sand Loop & the Voodoo learnings 11:35 Finch — the D2C monster hiding in a wellness app 16:55 Gacha RPGs, Angry Birds Rush & the death pile 22:45 Yarn Loop vs Jelly Buster — the sort race heats up 24:55 Castle Clashers plateaus & ButcherHero's winning 2.0 -------------------------------------- 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 Playable Maker partnership that turns brand videos and statics into native gaming playables and rewarded formats. Head to potensus.com to get started. https://potensus.com/ 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 - matej@lancaric.me
August 19 · 45 min
🎯 The 2026 D2C Survey: Why 41% of studios still DON'T have a web store (and why they're wrong)
FastSpring surveyed 110 senior mobile decision-makers — directors, VPs, C-suite — about direct-to-consumer, and the results premiere right here before Gamescom. The headline: 59% now have a web store, but the 41% who don't are held back by three fears that are all out of date. And the #1 reason studios adopt D2C isn't profit anymore. Matej Lančarič, Jakub Remiar, and Felix Braberg welcome back Chip Thurston (FastSpring) for the sixth D2C episode — a full breakdown of FastSpring's 2026 D2C survey (Q2 2026, 110 respondents, all senior manager or above, 92% from 100+ person studios, 91% doing over $10M/year, split across US/Europe and casual/core). They unpack why web-store adoption barely moved year-over-year (57%→59%) despite 60% planning it — game dev is hard and roadmaps slip — and the three "reasons not to adopt," which Chip reframes as misconceptions: technical complexity (rooted in confusing a merchant of record like FastSpring with a payment service provider like Stripe — the MoR handles all the tax, compliance, and audit exposure for you), damaging Apple/Google relationships (a fear anchored in 2023, when there were real repercussions; in 2026 both platforms have defined, approved D2C compliance paths), and legal uncertainty (the terms are actually solidifying — Epic/Google settling, Apple's Japan/Brazil compliance as the bellwether). The most surprising finding: profit margins ranked only #4 among reasons to adopt — behind brand visibility & loyalty (#1), customer data & insights (#2), and pricing/promotion control (#3). The takeaway: the fears are outdated, the data problem means the industry's "decline" is partly an illusion, and D2C is now about owning the player relationship — not just dodging the 30%. ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 The 2026 D2C survey — who FastSpring actually asked 05:30 Adoption barely moved (57%→59%) — why plans slip 07:30 Reason #1 not to adopt: "too technically complex" 09:30 Merchant of record vs payment service provider, explained 16:30 Reason #2 & #3: Apple/Google fear and legal uncertainty 25:45 The ping-pong-ball estimate — how much D2C is hidden? 32:30 The big surprise: profit is only the #4 reason to adopt 39:00 The new terms — Google's 20% fee and Apple's window --------------------------------------- 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, Chip Thurston 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 🎤 GUEST Chip Thurston — 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 - matej@lancaric.me
August 17 · 30 min
🚌 Marble Sort Meets Traffic Jam: Bus Traffic Fever Review!
Bus Traffic Fever fuses two proven puzzlers — Marble Sort and the bus/traffic-jam arrows game — into one brutally slow, weirdly sticky machine. Levels take 30-40 minutes, the frustration is genuinely phone-throwing, and that's exactly why it prints ad revenue. We break down Bus Traffic Fever by GooDroid (a CyberAgent subsidiary in Tokyo) — and the twist is that it's the second time they've covered this studio in a single month, because these are the same people who made Hexa Away. The numbers (soft-launched in March, ~$70K/day IAP, ~400K downloads/day, ~2M+ DAU, US leading IAP with tier-3/tier-4 traffic behind), and Felix's ad-mon breakdown (revive-after-fail driving ~60-70% of ad revenue, an estimated ~$131K/day in ads — ~75% of total — putting the game plausibly at $200K and maybe $400-500K/day once you correct for Sensor Tower's DAU under-counting). Then the part that matters: the UA is making the exact same mistake as Hexa Away — ~20 new creatives, ~85% AppLovin ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Marble Sort + Bus Jam — two games in one 02:15 Why it's brutally hard (and an hour per early level) 05:30 The bench "mosh pit" and the slow-on-purpose pacing 09:00 Fail-state mechanic, boosters and the shallow feature set 12:00 The numbers — $70K/day IAP, 2M+ DAU 14:10 The ad-mon breakdown — ~$131K/day, sunk-cost monetization 19:30 Same studio as Hexa Away — the UA mistake repeats 26:20 The 30-day window and how it should've been done 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 - matej@lancaric.me
August 14 · 10 min
🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Rotate Labs Raise + Rival App Store Returns + Gaming Revenue Drops 4.5%?!
Cube Land's studio just raised a seed round four months after launch, a rival app store returned to Google Play in the US for the first time in over a decade, and Sensor Tower says gaming revenue fell 4.5% in Q2 — except that last number is only half the truth. Three stories, and Turkey keeps winning. Felix Braberg flies solo for the Friday news. First, RotateLab — the Turkish studio behind Cube Land (a recent friends-of-the-pod deep-dive on the show) — raised a seed round co-led by Leighton Ventures and Arcadia Gaming Partners, with Cube Land past 2M downloads and into the US top-50 free games and top-80 grossing just four months post-launch. It underlines a bigger trend: right now Turkey and Vietnam are where gaming funding and talent are concentrating, with VCs literally opening Turkish offices. Second, Aptoide became the first rival app store to return to Google Play in the US (after the loosening of restrictions long criticized as anti-competitive) — a Portugal-based store with ~40,000 apps and ~25M users that previously had to be sideloaded. It's a genuine milestone for app-market competition, and the draw is the same one powering the whole D2C wave: dodging the 30% Google fee. Third, a Sensor Tower Q2 report shows non-gaming revenue up 14.6% (led by AI apps) while gaming revenue fell 4.5% year-over-year — but Felix flags the missing piece: on the upcoming FastSpring episode, Chip estimates $9-12B of D2C gaming revenue sits on top of last year's $52B iOS figure (15-20% earned outside the stores), which Sensor Tower can't yet see. So the "decline" is only half the picture. Plus the US charts, where Turkish games (Block Out, Smash Fest, Bus Traffic Fever, Magic Sword) plus Meow Doku are dominating. The through-line: the money and talent are flowing to Turkey, the app stores are cracking open, and gaming's "decline" mostly disappears once you count the D2C revenue nobody can see yet. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Three stories that matter this week 00:40 RotateLab (Cube Land) raises a seed round 03:00 Why Turkey and Vietnam are getting the funding 04:30 Aptoide returns to Google Play — the first rival store 07:00 Why it matters: dodging the 30% fee 09:00 Gaming revenue down 4.5% — but it's half the truth 11:00 The charts — Turkish games and Meow Doku dominate --------------------------------------- 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 - matej@lancaric.me --------------------------------------- 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
August 13 · 35 min
⛏️ One Guy, No Ads, No Tutorial, $100K/Day: The Idle Obelisk Miner Story
Here's a game that breaks every mobile rule and prints money doing it: Idle Obelisk Miner looks like a DOS game from 1995, has no tutorial, no ads, and almost no marketing — and it's doing an estimated $100K a day on just 4-5K downloads. One developer, a fanatical community, and unit economics nobody else can touch. We break down Idle Obelisk Miner (by Checkbox Entertainment) — a one-man-hit-wonder in the same family as The Tower and Level Devil. They cover the deliberately old-school design (mono Sound Blaster music, pure text, "here's the game, figure it out, we don't care if you don't"), the deep idle systems (mining, crafting with crit chances, drones, prestige, the obelisk DPS-gate, event automation), why it plays like an "unfolding game" that keeps moving your engagement to new mechanics, and the extraordinary numbers: ~$100K/day IAP on ~4-5K downloads/day, pristine tier-one traffic, ~$13 revenue-per-download (versus ~$3 for Golden Goblins), and an ARPDAU multiples above The Tower — all built on a spend-depth the crew estimates at ~$40-50K. The story behind it: solo developer Alex William Olds in Northern Ireland, an "anti-mobile-game" philosophy (no ads, no pop-ups, purchases quarantined in a dedicated store), a 57K-member Discord and a 14K/40K-weekly Reddit, three years of flatlining before the feature set finally hit and retention went positive, and a steady migration of hardcore players from The Tower. ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 A one-man-hit-wonder like The Tower — Idle Obelisk Miner 02:30 "Here's the game, figure it out" — the no-tutorial design 06:15 Mining, crafting, drones & the obelisk DPS gate 14:30 The unfolding-game design and why prestige works here 16:55 Why an idle game with no ads is the right call 17:40 The numbers — $100K/day on 5K downloads 24:00 Build it for yourself — the one-man-wonder thesis 27:30 The community engine — 57K Discord, stealing Tower players 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 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 - matej@lancaric.me
August 12 · 45 min
🎮 9 Playables, 9 Lessons: What's working in playable ads right now
The most freeing idea in playable ads keeps proving itself: your playable doesn't have to match your actual game. This month a zombie survival game ran a football playable, and an isometric strategy game ran a non-isometric one. The crew breaks down nine playables and the lessons underneath them. Matej Lančarič and Ondrej Mosberger are joined again by Robin Kuyer for the "everyone brings playables" format. They cover ZomLine Survival's World-Cup-timed football playable (a themed playable bolted onto a 4X game — nothing to do with the core, and that's the point), the perennial themed-playable truth (it either performs brilliantly or does nothing, with slot/casino games running Christmas playables all year), the frustration-as-motivator debate (Ondrej's 3D-Tetris-on-a-Clash-of-Clans-lookalike playable that's built to make you fail), the mini-game-per-mechanic strategy (Happy Nation/Miniclip's nonogram — if your app has many mini-games, build a playable for each and measure which end-screen choice players tap), visual rewards vs literal rewards (Epic Stickman's one-click combat that pays off with a cutscene, not a chest), the textbook hand-holding playable (Estoti's Frostworld), and Matej's picks — Smash Fest (which he crowns the trend everyone should follow), Rogue Legends (a smooth tower-defense playable with no logo or download button at all, for a game that looks nothing like it), and a wild Bart-Simpson-plus-undressing screw-puzzle hook fronting a Forex game (IP infringement and all). Plus a genuinely useful tangent from Robin on how network preview templates clash with playable UI, and how Unity tracks users bouncing between CTA and end-card. The through-line: run different playables to capture different users, don't fear a mismatch between ad and game, and let the physics (or the frustration, or the reward) do the work. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 The format — everyone brings playables (and a heatwave) 04:20 ZomLine's football playable & the themed-playable truth 09:40 3D Tetris on a Clash lookalike — the frustration debate 16:30 Happy Nation's nonogram — a playable per mini-game 20:00 Epic Stickman — the visual reward, not the chest 23:50 Cooking Go & Frostworld — visually appealing, textbook onboarding 32:50 Matej's picks — Smash Fest & the no-logo Rogue Legends playable 39:50 The Bart Simpson undressing hook & Smash Fest as the trend 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 Playable Maker partnership that turns brand videos and statics into native gaming playables and rewarded formats. Head to potensus.com to get started. --------------------------------------- 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 - matej@lancaric.me
August 10 · 42 min
💣 How Smash Fest created a NEW Puzzle category overnight
We are joined by ad monetization guest Katerina to break down Smash Fest and the clone explosion surrounding it. We cover the physics-based cannon core (each ball is a move, run out and buy five more — match-3 logic on a physics engine), the detective work tracing it back to Toon Blast's "Cannon Fest" event (spotted by Game Refinery back in November 2024, and run by Peak as both playables and creatives — someone put two and two together and realized it worked), why Smash Fest was abruptly pulled from Google Play right as it scaled to ~300K downloads/day, and the seven-studio clone wave (Royal Smash by Cypher Games, Carnival Knockdown, Knockout, Knock Fever, Stack Smash by Tripledot, Carnival Blast, and more). Katerina digs into the monetization — Smash Fest's fairly basic setup (one rewarded placement, interstitial every fourth attempt) versus Royal Smash's smarter double-your-coins rewarded flow — with estimates landing around ~$130K/day in ads for Smash Fest, and the crew guessing the true total (IAP plus ads) could push toward ~$1M/day given a reported ~1M DAU. Then the UA reality: Smash Fest scaled ~300K downloads/day on ~50 creatives and essentially one great playable, ~90% AppLovin — while Royal Smash is catching up fast with 10x the creative volume, more channels, better LiveOps, and a monetization edge. ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 A new physics-puzzle category — and the controversy 03:00 The core loop — cannon physics, each ball a move 07:00 The detective story — it's Toon Blast's Cannon Fest event 10:30 Seven studios clone it in one month 12:30 Why Smash Fest got taken down as it scaled 16:30 The monetization breakdown — ~$130K/day in ads 23:00 A new category: physics puzzlers take over from Angry Birds 28:00 The UA reality — 50 creatives vs Royal Smash's 500 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,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Katerina Maliaran, Matej Lancaric⁠ 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 - matej@lancaric.me
August 7 · 11 min
🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Tripledot Buys Supersonic for $40M + EA is Private for $55B + Netflix drama
This week is one giant lesson in consolidation: everybody's buying everybody, the money is concentrating, the ownership is concentrating, and the people are getting cut. Tripledot bought Supersonic from Unity, Saudi Arabia closed the biggest leveraged buyout in history to take EA private, and Netflix gutted a studio seven weeks after praising its game on an earnings call. Matej Lančarič flies solo for the weekly news. Tripledot acquired Supersonic from Unity for $40M cash — a striking number given Supersonic likely did ~$40-45M in revenue over the last 12 months (per Sensor Tower plus ad revenue), and given ironSource paid $150M for it 11 years ago and Unity got it inside the $4.4B ironSource merger in 2022. It's the final piece of ironSource leaving the building — and the second time Tripledot has done this, after buying AppLovin's entire games business for $800M a year ago. The pattern is now complete: both AppLovin and Unity have exited game publishing to become pure ad-tech companies (ad networks make ads, publishers make games). That sale landed alongside Unity's best quarter ever (revenue $546M, up 24%, Grow segment up 35% to $389M on Vector AI, approaching GAAP profitability). Saudi Arabia's PIF closed its $55B take-private of EA (now delisted, ~93% PIF-owned with Silver Lake and Affinity Partners) — the largest LBO in history, with ~$20B in debt that will push EA hard toward recurring mobile and live-service revenue, plus a Vision 2030 soft-power dimension via EA Sports FC. Netflix's FIFA World Cup studio Refactor laid off 85% of staff seven weeks after Netflix named the game one of its most successful cloud debuts — the same praise-then-kill pattern as Squid Game Unleashed. And AppLovin posted a "miss that isn't a miss" (revenue up 53% to ~$1.92B, just under consensus). The through-line: the ad networks make ads now, the publishers make games, and the ownership of the whole industry is concentrating like never before. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 A week of pure consolidation — everybody's buying everybody 01:40 Tripledot buys Supersonic for $40M — the ironSource endgame 05:30 The pattern: ad networks exit publishing 06:40 Unity's best quarter ever — the Vector AI turnaround 09:30 Saudi Arabia takes EA private for $55B 13:00 The Netflix FIFA disaster — praised, then gutted 17:30 AppLovin's Q2 — the miss that isn't a miss --------------------------------------- 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 - matej@lancaric.me --------------------------------------- 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
August 6 · 32 min
🧠 The "Fat Guy Getting Slapped" Concept Took Over: AI Creatives Breakdown
One concept is eating the entire Forex creative market right now: a "fat guy" gets slapped, abandoned, or humiliated, then rises to power. It was everywhere last month — this month it's on steroids, and every big Forex game has its own version. The crew runs 123 AI creatives in 30 minutes to map where AI creative is actually heading. Matej Lančarič, Jakub Remiar, and Felix Braberg speed through the month's AI creatives and surface the patterns. Golden Goblins still wins with clever non-AI hooks (power progressions, the tag meme) rather than full AI. King Shot's "no ads" theme has spread through Forex, puzzle, and everywhere else — often paired with the now-ubiquitous slapped-guy power fantasy (complete with a one-to-one "Henry Cavill from Wish" character). Playrix's Township and Gardenscapes are flooding feeds with flower-team and egg-overload AI creatives, one-to-one across the portfolio. The through-line: the concept is an old mafia-boss power fantasy reborn through AI — and it's everywhere because, chaos and all, it seems to be working. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 123 creatives in 30 minutes — buckle up 01:55 Golden Goblins — winning with clever non-AI hooks 03:00 King Shot and the "no ads" theme everywhere 04:10 The "fat guy getting slapped" power fantasy — on steroids 07:55 Playrix — Township & Gardenscapes' AI flood 14:45 Top Heroes' chaos — poop filters and cratering revenue 27:00 Pixel Flow & Meow Doku — AI creatives done right 29:50 123 creatives in, Mr. Fat Guy leads the pack 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 - matej@lancaric.me
August 5 · 16 min
🎯 How to Do a UA Review Properly by Matej Lancaric
"The CPI is going up, so change the creatives" is not a UA review — it's just narrating the dashboard. A real review has next steps, digs under the naming conventions, and usually finds money you're already wasting without spending a cent more. This is how to do one properly. FULL ARTICLE: https://lancaric.substack.com/p/ua-review-bible-how-to-do-it-properly?r=7qqaf Matej Lančarič goes solo for a UA-audit masterclass, built from his popular Substack piece and 12+ years of spending on and reviewing user acquisition. He walks the five layers he audits every time — the strategy behind the spend, the campaigns, the creatives, the MMP/dashboards, and the people making the decisions — and the order that matters (data and raw conclusions first, context and conversations second, so nobody colors your read before you've formed it). Along the way: why you must strip out fraud before you trust anything (one game looked like five healthy channels until fraud removal revealed one channel eating 70% of spend), why you should never trust a campaign's naming convention (build the spend-by-campaign-by-geo pivot and look underneath), how splitting a "worldwide" campaign by geo and OS surfaces small high-ROAS pockets (his own US spend was dragging the whole campaign down until he split it four ways), most reviews don't call for more budget — just reallocation — and you should run one every month. ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 There's a review, and there's a review 02:14 Why UA audits matter — and what a bad one looks like 04:00 The five layers: strategy, campaigns, creatives, MMP, people 06:00 Data first, people second — protecting your raw read 07:30 Strip out the fraud before you trust anything 10:00 Never trust the campaign name — pivot by geo 12:30 Splitting by geo and OS — finding the hidden pockets 15:30 Cohorts, blended-number traps & the LTV questions 📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS — There's a review, and there's a review. Pulling 90 days of data, glancing at the MMP, and saying "CPI is up, you've got creative fatigue, change the creatives" isn't a review — it's narrating the dashboard. A real review produces next steps and digs several layers under the surface. — Audit five layers, in order: the strategy behind the spend, the campaigns, the creatives, the MMP/dashboards, and the people making the decisions. Knowing who owns UA and who makes which calls is as important as the data. — Look at the data before you talk to people — deliberately. If you gather context first, people's framing colors your read. Matej wants raw data and raw conclusions first, then asks for context to catch anything he overlooked. Order protects objectivity. — Never trust the campaign naming convention. Teams silently add geos into campaigns without updating the name. Build a spend-by-campaign-by-geo pivot table and look at what's actually inside each campaign, not what it's called. Go one layer deeper, always. — Splitting "worldwide" by geo and OS surfaces hidden pockets. On his own game, the US was dragging the whole campaign down — so he split it into four campaigns. "Best practice" says run one worldwide campaign, but best practice has exceptions. Bucket by geo using your own LTVs (not someone else's), and remember geo performance on iOS doesn't predict Android — audit by OS too. Tier one isn't only UK/Canada/Germany/Australia; small high-ROAS pockets (Norway, etc.) hide in the data. 🎙️ HOST Matej Lančarič — User Acquisition consultant (12+ years, UA reviews & audits) 🙏 SPONSOR 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 Playable Maker partnership that turns brand videos and statics into native gaming playables and rewarded formats. Head to potensus.com to get started.

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two &amp; a half gamers

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two & a half gamers