two & a half gamers

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 The headline: 59% now have a web store, but the 41% who don't are held back by three fears that are all out of date.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The takeaway: the fears are outdated, the data problem means the industry's "decline" is partly an illusion, and D2C is now about owning the player relationship — not just dodging the 30%.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 - [email protected]

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 - [email protected]

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 - [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

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 - [email protected]

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 - [email protected]

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 - [email protected]

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.

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⏱️ 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 - [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

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.

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⏱️ 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 - [email protected]

"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.

Here's a first: we reviewed the copy, not the original. Colony Flow is an ant-themed "destroy the picture" puzzler that's doing an estimated $150K/day — and it's currently being sued over. The crew digs into the game, the monetization trick underneath it, and what the lawsuit might mean for the entire copycat economy.

We break down Colony Flow (by OneSoft/ABI Games) — a sort puzzler in the "destroy the picture" genre where a colony of ants slowly carries colored cubes off a picture into your bench. The standout is the monetization: the ants are deliberately slow, which creates constant friction that the game resolves with a rewarded-video (or premium-currency) speed-up. We cover the standard sort-puzzler feature set , the numbers (~100K downloads/day rising to ~200K in July, ~$150K/day IAP with likely 40-50%+ on top from ads), and the UA (~600 creatives, ~90% AppLovin and Mintegral, zero Facebook — because blended campaigns just don't work there).

The through-line: the copy is outscaling debate, the friction mechanic is genuinely smart, and this lawsuit could set a precedent for the whole clone economy.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 We're reviewing the copy — the lawsuit setup

02:40 The game — ants destroying the picture

04:00 Why the ant pathfinding points to Pixel Flow

06:10 Slow on purpose — the friction-into-rewarded-ad mechanic

09:00 Blockers, fake "daily rewards," and the feature set

13:00 The numbers — $150K/day and the Famfinity lawsuit

20:00 The creatives — 600 ads, AppLovin & Mintegral, no Facebook

29:30 What the lawsuit means for the copycat economy

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]