Advertise on podcast: two & a half gamers

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

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]

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 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

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]

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

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]

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 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

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

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]

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 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]

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 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]