two & a half gamers

Remember the raft-rescue playable from our last Playable Trends that turned out to be 4X? This is the game: Wild Water World, from the team behind Lands of Jail, and Jakub calls it the biggest 4X innovation since Top Girl. The first days are a minigame simulator: fishing, scavenging plastic while dodging sharks, a Dave the Diver-style dive, all of which you automate within 20 minutes. Then it turns into Township, with resource conversion orders, ship deliveries and auto-production (2 hours free, then rent or buy).

The 4X map only opens at level 16, about 3–4 days in, and it’s stripped down: no player towns, four clans on the whole map, a neutral Pirate Legion, bases you flag instead of farm, and clan leadership that switches automatically every few days by strength (so dead clans don’t stall), probably filled with bots early on. It’s far more approachable than the Kingshot or Last War maps.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: already bigger than Lands of Jail
01:10 – The WTF playable from Playable Trends is back
02:16 – The biggest 4X innovation since Top Girl
03:30 – Minigames first: fishing, ocean scavenging, diving (then automate everything)
07:26 – The Township loop: orders, deliveries, auto-production, and no soldiers
11:37 – The 4X map at level 16: no player towns, 4 clans, Pirate Legion, auto clan leaders
17:23 – Numbers: 500K installs/day, Asia-first, US 1%, the 4X top charts
22:53 – Creatives: 6,000 ads, shelter renovation, and Matej’s own AI versions
This episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.
http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100
--------------------------------------
Today's episode is brought to you by PvX Partners. Developers now have a new way to fund their marketing: PvX Card.
If you're scaling your gaming business and need more capital for UA, here's the deal: your credit limit grows with your marketing performance — the higher your ROAS, the more credit you have available. Repayment terms run from 60 to 120 days and scale with your ROAS, so you can match repayments to your game's payback period.
It's dynamic, it's flexible, and it scales as fast as you do.
Check out PvXPartners.com/cards and scale your UA with PvX Card
---------------------------------------
For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.
Our sponsor FastSpring:
Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 years
They power top mobile publishers around the world
Launch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.
---------------------------------------
This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let’s not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.
Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠
---------------------------------------
Matej Lancaric
User Acquisition & Creatives Consultant
⁠https://lancaric.me
Felix Braberg
Ad monetization consultant
⁠https://www.felixbraberg.com
Jakub Remiar
Game design consultant
⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar
---------------------------------------
Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!
Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!
Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me

All three of us review SchoolCraft Party, a 7-year-old blocky action sandbox that is hitting record numbers. It looks like Minecraft, plays like GTA Vice City from Wish, and every “player” walking around with a country flag and a name is a bot.
The numbers: launched in 2018 (it used to be called Nightclub Craft), with spikes in August 2022 and last Christmas. It is now at a record ~4–4.5M DAU and still ~250K downloads a day, almost all from tier 3–4 markets (Indonesia, India, Brazil, Mexico, Philippines, Russia, Turkey, Vietnam, Pakistan). Felix’s estimate is ~$70–75K/day from ads, from a small Ukrainian team running on AdMob with only Google, Unity and AppLovin in app-ads.txt. His plan: move to MAX, add Pangle, Mintegral, Moloco, InMobi and GAM, and set smarter cooldowns to double ad revenue.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: double the ads, 6x the users
02:19 – Gameplay: Minecraft looks, GTA Vice City loop, watch 10 ads to remove ads
07:45 – Every player is a bot: the offline game pretending to be online
16:24 – ~14 rewarded placements, and Google’s three-ads-in-a-row lock-in
19:02 – Only 3 ad networks in app-ads.txt: Felix’s plan to double ad revenue
22:39 – Numbers: 4.5M DAU, 250K downloads a day, tier 3–4, ~$70–75K/day
24:37 – A 262M-view YouTube short, 5 creatives, and Matej’s 6x UA plan
30:26 – Blocky art = cheapest CPI, the reskin portfolio, Nightclub Craft rebrand

This episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.
http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100
--------------------------------------
Today's episode is brought to you by PvX Partners. Developers now have a new way to fund their marketing: PvX Card.
If you're scaling your gaming business and need more capital for UA, here's the deal: your credit limit grows with your marketing performance — the higher your ROAS, the more credit you have available. Repayment terms run from 60 to 120 days and scale with your ROAS, so you can match repayments to your game's payback period.
It's dynamic, it's flexible, and it scales as fast as you do.
Check out PvXPartners.com/cards and scale your UA with PvX Card
---------------------------------------
For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.
Our sponsor FastSpring:
Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 years
They power top mobile publishers around the world
Launch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.

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

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

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

Felix is back on the Friday news with three stories that matter for mobile gaming. First, AppLovin’s Q3 2026: record revenue of $2.2B (+55% YoY), $1.4B net income (66% margin), $1.8B adjusted EBITDA (84% margin), $5.9B revenue in the first nine months, Q4 guidance of $2.3–2.4B, $1.4B in buybacks this quarter and $3.2B more authorized. The gaming business grew nearly 50% YoY while the new generation of ad models is only partially deployed. With MAX in their pocket, you don’t bet against AppLovin.

Second, Apple passed 1.5B services subscribers but missed on services revenue ($30B vs. the $31B expected), and the stock fell 4% after hours. The CFO blamed a slowdown in mobile gaming and App Store business model changes in certain countries. Felix’s take: gaming isn’t slowing down, it’s moving payments off-platform to avoid the 30%. Third, the UK’s ASA banned ads from King, Scopely, the Dark War Survival publisher and others for misleading gameplay, ads seen back in April. With big studios shipping 12–35K new ads a month that each live a few days, banning specific ads does almost nothing. We close with the weather: Meowdoku tops both US stores, Grand Games holds #2 and #3 on iOS, and Rotate Rings, Block Blast and Royal Smash sit near the top of Google Play.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: Apple’s 1.5B subscribers and the services miss
00:30 – Felix is back: three stories and the weather
01:00 – AppLovin Q3: $2.2B, 66% net margin, 84% EBITDA margin, $3.2B buybacks
03:30 – Apple blames the mobile gaming slowdown, or is it D2C?
05:30 – UK ASA bans King, Scopely and Dark War Survival ads, a drop in the ocean
08:00 – The weather: Meowdoku, Grand Games, Rotate Rings, Royal Smash

📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS
— AppLovin’s gaming business is re-accelerating, and new ad models are only partly rolled out
— Apple’s “gaming slowdown” looks more like revenue moving to web shops and D2C
— Banning individual ads doesn’t touch studios shipping tens of thousands a month
— Puzzle dominates the top charts: Meowdoku and Grand Games lead

🎙️ HOST
Felix Braberg

Subscribe for weekly mobile gaming news, UA and ad monetization: https://www.youtube.com/@twoandahalfgamers

Two Gamers again, and this time we review Bulldozer Master from Supercent, the Korean studio behind Pizza Ready. It looks like something vibe-coded over two weekends, and it works anyway. Jakub plays the loop: dig ore blocks, carry them Golden Goblins-style to the refinery, sell, and upgrade move speed, hammers and furnace. Then you rent heavy machinery that runs on fuel (hydraulic breakers, drill crushers, exo-carriers), hire workers who need pizza breaks, and prestige into company upgrades. It’s simple, idle-friendly, and built directly from its own ads.

The creatives are the real story: 2,700 of them, Trackstar-style truck ads, AI videos of drilling gold walls, a Chrome Valley Customs look, a Bumblebee from Wish, and even a Kingshot salad, spread across AppLovin, Mintegral, Unity and Facebook. Matej also shares how Mintegral became one of One Mage Army’s best channels within a week. The formula: take a 4X creative, build the gameplay around it, then scale and profit.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – 50K DAU in the US
01:12 – Two Gamers: “games don’t need to look good, they need to scale”
02:47 – Core loop: dig, carry, refine, sell (Golden Goblins with a bulldozer)
05:16 – Machinery rental, fuel, workers, pizza breaks and prestige
12:30 – Numbers: 200K/day, 600K DAU, Pizza Ready’s half a billion downloads
17:18 – Felix from Wish: 29 rewarded, 1 interstitial, ~$70K/day
19:27 – Creatives: Trackstar, AI gold drilling, Bumblebee from Wish, 2,700 ads
28:36 – The formula: 4X creative → gameplay → scale, plus a channel mix beyond AppLovin

This episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.
http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100
--------------------------------------
Today's episode is brought to you by PvX Partners. Developers now have a new way to fund their marketing: PvX Card.
If you're scaling your gaming business and need more capital for UA, here's the deal: your credit limit grows with your marketing performance — the higher your ROAS, the more credit you have available. Repayment terms run from 60 to 120 days and scale with your ROAS, so you can match repayments to your game's payback period.
It's dynamic, it's flexible, and it scales as fast as you do.
Check out PvXPartners.com/cards and scale your UA with PvX Card
---------------------------------------
For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.
Our sponsor FastSpring:
Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 years
They power top mobile publishers around the world
Launch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.

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

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

Our monthly Playable Trends is back. Matej, Ondrej and Robin each bring three playables that caught their eye and take them apart. Matej opens with Royal Kingdom’s “harder than you think” ball-physics level (save three characters, no snakes for once), a raft-rescue survival playable that turns out to be a 4X game, and Paper.io 2 using a Pocket Champs-style hook without hiding which game it is. Ondrej brings three from Voodoo: a Pixel Flow-style conveyor sort that is honestly harder than you think (he still can’t beat it), a satisfying ball-drop sorter you finish just by tapping, and a room-based platformer that sent us straight back to Dangerous Dave.

Robin shows a sushi reskin of Pixel Flow (Ondrej rebuilt it in Playable Maker), Car Evolve’s slingshot upgrade loop, which ran five minutes before the CTA appeared (Robin fed the source to Claude to start with 5M coins), and Last Asylum running four different mechanics for the same game: Township-style building, Kingshot-style tower defense, roguelike survival and 4X. Last Asylum has gone from a handful of playables to ~1,200 in 30 days, and Kingshot still makes far more money. We close by filtering Sensor Tower to Asia (spoiler: good playables work everywhere, maybe with more family drama and a bit more grind) and looking at seasonal creatives: Golf Clash running Halloween for a year, and a Christmas video still live in July because it was the best performer.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: the playable that never ends
05:23 – Matej: Royal Kingdom’s “harder than you think” physics level
10:26 – The WTF pick: a raft rescue that’s secretly 4X, plus Paper.io 2 with a Pocket Champs hook
17:23 – Ondrej’s Voodoo trio: impossible color sort, ball conveyor, Dangerous Dave vibes
24:25 – Robin: Pixel Flow, but sushi
27:13 – Car Evolve: 5 minutes before the CTA, and we hacked it with Claude
32:25 – Last Asylum: one game, four mechanics, ~1,200 playables in 30 days
40:18 – Asia vs West playables, and do seasonal creatives actually work?

📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS
— Reskin a proven mechanic (Pixel Flow → sushi) and you have a new ad
— One game can be sold through four mechanics; each one attracts a different player
— “Harder than you think” works only if it is actually hard, but finishable
— Mechanics travel across markets; difficulty and grind may need tuning for Asia

🎙️ HOSTS
Matej Lancaric, Ondrej Monsberger, Robin Kuyer

🙏 SPONSORS
Potensus – premium ad network with direct brand deals (Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, Vodafone) and Playable Maker-built formats: https://potensus.com
PVX Partners – fund your UA with PVX Card, credit that grows with your ROAS: https://pvxpartners.com/cards
Kinoa – AI operating system for live ops, segments and game ops: http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100
FastSpring – the no-drama D2C for mobile publishers: https://fastspring.gg
Data courtesy of Sensor Tower

Seen a playable we should cover? Drop it in the comments or the Slack channel.

Subscribe for more playables, creatives and UA: https://www.youtube.com/@twoandahalfgamers

#playableads #playables #mobilegames #creatives #UA #useracquisition #Voodoo #RoyalKingdom #LastAsylum #PixelFlow #PaperIO #PlayableMaker #SensorTower #twoandahalfgamers #Potensus #PVXPartners #Kinoa #FastSpring

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