two & a half gamers

Some months the creative trends are wild. This one, Matej says it straight: it's quieter — everyone's copying the same big 4X and Golden Goblins playbook, AI is everywhere, and studios are scaling down for summer. But the detective work underneath is where it gets good, including a live investigation into who actually spends the most on UA and who really leads on revenue once you account for the money Sensor Tower can't see.

We run the month's creatives and end up somewhere more interesting than the creatives themselves. They cover the copy-paste economy (Golden Goblins reskinned with bears and trees as AppQuantum's new Animal Valley; Idle Zombie Miner cloning the original one-to-one), Pantheon's ~9,600 creatives iterating on a single three-year-old winning concept, the "revenue down but DAU up" signal that reveals hidden D2C web-shop money (Raid Rush, Monopoly Go), the sad death of Match Villains (UA turned off, ~30% DAU lost in two months)

The honest through-line: the creatives are converging, so the edge is in the data — reading DAU vs revenue, spotting the D2C dark pools, and knowing who's really winning.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 A quieter month — and why that's still worth watching
02:40 Top creatives by impression share — how to read the tab
05:10 Golden Goblins reskinned — Animal Valley, bears and trees
09:40 Pantheon's 9,600 creatives and the D2C revenue tell
12:30 Match Villains is dead — UA off, 30% DAU gone
16:40 The data detective — who spends the most on UA
24:50 The revenue ranking and the D2C "dark pools"
31:20 Playrix's AI flood and the Simpsons diminishing returns

This episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.
http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100

PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.
Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/
They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.
- Scale fast
- Keep your shares
- Drawdown only as needed
- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you
+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors

For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.
Our sponsor FastSpring:
Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 years
They power top mobile publishers around the world
Launch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.
---------------------------------------
This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let’s not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.
Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠

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

---------------------------------------
Matej Lancaric
User Acquisition & Creatives Consultant
⁠https://lancaric.me
Felix Braberg
Ad monetization consultant
⁠https://www.felixbraberg.com
Jakub Remiar
Game design consultant
⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar
---------------------------------------
Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!
Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!
Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me

GTA 6 pulled an estimated $260M in its first week of pre-orders — and the real story is that its launch has quietly become a proxy for every gaming company's valuation. If it opens well, the industry holds. If it doesn't, the bottom could fall out — and mobile goes with it.

Felix Braberg flies solo for the news segment, with three stories that matter. GTA 6 pre-orders hit roughly $260M globally in the last week of June (Newzoo forecasts $3.3-5.2B by launch week in November, ~51M units), and Felix explains why the whole industry is watching it as a valuation bellwether. Tencent is rumored to be in talks to buy Playtika's Superplay for $1-1.5B — a fascinating story of an earnout gone right for the founders and wrong for the parent: Playtika bought Superplay for $690M in late 2024 with a performance earnout, Superplay is smashing every target (Disney Solitaire alone is ~$5M/week, ~$300M/year), and the ballooning earnout liability (now ~$829M) plus a $2.3B debt wall in 2028-2029 is forcing Playtika to consider selling its crown jewel. And PubMatic signed an OpenWrap deal with Zynga, bringing transparent, fixed-margin ad buying to Zynga's inventory — the same play as Amazon TAM and Bid Machine.

The through-line: the money is moving, and the balance sheets are calling the shots.

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⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 GTA 6 pre-orders hit $260M in week one
02:30 Why GTA 6 is now a proxy for all gaming valuations
04:00 Tencent in talks to buy Superplay for up to $1.5B
06:30 The earnout trap — how Superplay's success became a burden
09:00 Playtika's $2.3B debt wall and the forced-sale logic
10:30 PubMatic x Zynga and the OpenWrap transparency play
12:30 Top charts — Block Out and Meow Doku dominate downloads
---------------------------------------
This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let’s not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.
Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠

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

---------------------------------------
Matej Lancaric
User Acquisition & Creatives Consultant
⁠https://lancaric.me
Felix Braberg
Ad monetization consultant
⁠https://www.felixbraberg.com
Jakub Remiar
Game design consultant
⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar
---------------------------------------
Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!
Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!
Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me
---------------------------------------
If you are interested in getting UA tips every week on Monday, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠lancaric.substack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & sign up for the Brutally Honest newsletter by Matej Lancaric
Do you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Matej AI⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai

Hexa Away did something genuinely clever — it took the arrows/sort mechanic everyone's chasing and rebuilt it on a hexagonal 3D grid, which turns out to be a better fit than flat arrows ever were. Then it scaled hard on AppLovin, hit a wall, and downscaled almost completely. It's a great game and a UA cautionary tale in one.

We break down Hexa Away - a hexagonal-grid sort puzzler from the CyberAgent/GooDroid studio (yes, the Uma Musume people). They cover why the hexagonal grid is a genuinely better canvas for the arrows mechanic (escape routes, tangible blockers, room for more mechanics), the standard-but-solid IAP puzzler feature set, and the numbers that make it significant: it's now the sixth-biggest sort puzzler by revenue (behind Pixel Flow, Magic Sort, Yarn Loop, Marble Sort, and Block Out), doing ~$90K/day IAP plus ~$42K/day in ads at peak, with 500K+ DAU on pristine US-heavy traffic. But the real lesson is the UA story: they went ~90% AppLovin, scaled to 800K DAU in April, then crashed back — because a ~4% day-30 retention simply can't support that level of scale, and once you burn through the AppLovin audience, the ROAS doesn't come back.

The takeaway: a great core and a clever mechanic aren't enough. Concentration risk on one channel plus weak retention is how you overshoot your UA and torch your cash.

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⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Why Hexa Away is significant — the 6th-biggest sort puzzler
03:40 Arrows on a hexagonal grid — "hexagons are the bestagons"
07:40 The blocker framework and monetizing on difficulty
11:20 The numbers — $90K/day, 500K DAU, pristine US traffic
12:20 The ad-revenue breakdown — ~$42K/day, 36% of total
13:30 Four new creatives, ~200 total, and the banner problem
15:00 The AppLovin over-scale — 800K DAU then the crash
18:30 The 4% day-30 retention that explains everything

Potensus is a premium ad network built by people who've actually been on both sides of this industry - game publishers, agencies, and successful exits. They get it.

Here's the thing - Potensus has direct deals with Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, Vodafone. Not programmatic. Direct. Those budgets land in your game at premium CPMs, no middleman tax.

And they handle everything with their in-house team. PLUS they're partnered with PlayableMaker WINK WINK - so they'll take a brand's YouTube video or a static banner and actually turn it into a playable ad or rewarded video. Proper interactive format, built for gaming inventory. Brands getting a gaming-native creative, publishers getting higher CPMs. Everyone wins.

Head to potensus.com to get started or check their creative portfolio here
https://vimeo.com/showcase/12093300?fl=so&fe=fs
---------------------------------------
This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let’s not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.
Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠

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

---------------------------------------
Matej Lancaric
User Acquisition & Creatives Consultant
⁠https://lancaric.me
Felix Braberg
Ad monetization consultant
⁠https://www.felixbraberg.com
Jakub Remiar
Game design consultant
⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar
---------------------------------------
Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!
Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!
Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me

Take Minesweeper. Add Sudoku logic. Put cats on it. Congratulations, you've just made $200,000 a day..

We break down Meow Doku by Oakever, the cat-puzzle that came out of nowhere to shake up a category that hadn't changed in a decade. They walk the game (it's Minesweeper crossed with Sudoku — one cat per color, per row, per column, cats can't touch — simpler than Minesweeper and endlessly satisfying), the pure ad monetization (100% ads, no IAP, ~80%+ from interstitials, a clever cooldown timer that tightens the longer you play), and the numbers (~400K downloads/day, 2M+ DAU with huge US and Japan share, an estimated ~$200K/day and climbing). Then the portfolio: Oakever (real name Learnings / Beijing Lexing) is a fully bootstrapped, Singapore-based Chinese giant with a ~200-300 person R&D team, 70M MAU, a billion cumulative downloads, five straight years of 100%+ revenue growth, and a claim to being the #1 Chinese game company by ad revenue on Meta and Google. And the twist that makes the whole thing a masterclass: MeowDoku isn't original — it's a cats reskin of "Queens Master Sudoku," a game that sat dormant making almost nothing for a year and a half until Oakever found it, added cats, and out-executed everyone on UA. Plus, this game is a LINKEDIN GAME!!

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 The game we've wanted to cover for 3 years
03:30 Minesweeper meets Sudoku — the core rules
06:30 Why it's simpler than Minesweeper (and better)
10:20 100% ads — the cooldown timer trick
14:30 The numbers — 2M DAU, ~$200K/day
22:50 Inside Oakever's monster portfolio
27:30 The bootstrapped Chinese ad-revenue king
36:40 The twist — it's a reskin of Queens Master Sudoku

This episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.
http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100

PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.
Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/
They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.
- Scale fast
- Keep your shares
- Drawdown only as needed
- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you
+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors

For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.
Our sponsor FastSpring:
Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 years
They power top mobile publishers around the world
Launch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.

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

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

---------------------------------------
Matej Lancaric
User Acquisition & Creatives Consultant
⁠https://lancaric.me
Felix Braberg
Ad monetization consultant
⁠https://www.felixbraberg.com
Jakub Remiar
Game design consultant
⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar

Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!
Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!
Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me

Pokémon Go removed the paywall from its biggest event of the year and made more money than any paid version in half a decade. That's the monetization masterclass of the week — and it's just one of five stories that matter.
Matej Lančarič flies solo for the news segment, and it's a heavy week. Pokémon Go hit its 10th anniversary with over $9B in lifetime revenue, then ran GoFest 2026 as its first-ever free, no-ticket event — triggering a $15.1M single day, the game's highest in five years, and a 17-position leap to #2 in monthly revenue. Love and Deepspace is unfolding into the most instructive disaster of the year, with a cancelled love interest, a 230,000-signature petition, funeral flowers and cow dung sent to the studio, and a pulled Bilibili World appearance. Microsoft cut 4,800 jobs with Xbox facing roughly 3,200 over the next year — about 20% of the division — with King in the blast radius and a memo admitting the business "is not healthy" at ~3% margin. AppLovin opened Axon to global self-serve and the stock ripped from the mid-$440s to $564 in two weeks. And Meta shipped Muse image plus new AI-ad labeling that puts a visible tag right next to "Sponsored" if your creative features a photorealistic AI person.
Five stories, one theme: the old assumptions about paywalls, scale, and trust are all breaking at once.
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⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Cold open
00:30 Pokémon Go's free GoFest monetization masterclass
02:30 The Love and Deepspace catastrophe
05:00 Xbox cuts 3,200 — King in the blast radius
07:00 AppLovin opens Axon to self-serve
08:30 Meta's Muse image and the new AI ad labels
10:00 Quick hits — UK job losses, Netmarble takes 40% of WeMade
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS
— Pokémon Go turned its paywall off and made more money. It hit its 10th anniversary on July 6 with over $9B in lifetime revenue per Sensor Tower — the highest-grossing mobile title of the past decade, and that excludes brand partnerships, alternative stores, and their web shop (running on FastSpring). Then GoFest 2026 (July 11-12) ran as the first ever free, no-ticket GoFest.
— The numbers are staggering. Daily spend went from $3.9M on July 5 to $9M on July 6 (a 129% jump), then to $10M on July 10 (another 50% when GoFest opened), peaking at over $15.1M on July 11 — the game's highest daily revenue in half a decade. It leapt 17 positions in the monthly revenue ranking to #2 with $96M in the first two weeks of July, closing on Honor of Kings at $99.2M. Removing the ticket maximized participation, and participation drove IAP.
---------------------------------------
This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let’s not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.
Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠

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

---------------------------------------
Matej Lancaric
User Acquisition & Creatives Consultant
⁠https://lancaric.me
Felix Braberg
Ad monetization consultant
⁠https://www.felixbraberg.com
Jakub Remiar
Game design consultant
⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar
---------------------------------------
Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!
Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!
Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me