two & a half gamers

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 - matej@lancaric.me

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 - matej@lancaric.me

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 - matej@lancaric.me

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 - 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