two & a half gamers

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...

Luis de la Camara spent 20 years on the client side, six in AAA, then Gameloft, King, Scopely, and five years at Rovio through the Sega exit, and he left a few weeks ago. Felix got him on before the news broke: Luis is the new CMO of Smadex. So this is a conference-bar conversation on tape. The brand question first: even with Angry Birds and Candy Crush, nobody has cracked measuring brand on top o...

Deepstash is “TikTok for smart people”: key ideas from books in bite-size, level-like chapters, now part of a portfolio (Paladin for history, Imperio for business) that founder Vladimir calls Smartheads. We had him on with Jeff Cohen from PvX to unpack how an education app scales like a game. The numbers: more than 50% of paid subscribers now come through web2app after “a billion iterations” that...

Rotate Rings is two weeks old, already at 1M DAU and 500–600K downloads a day. The twist: the core mechanic was a UA creative first. Century Games ran rotating-ring fake gameplay for a year, Tasty Travels used it as a minigame, and now Nebula (Felix's "good authority" says Hungry Studio, the Block Blast team) turned the ad into the game. No timer, no fail state, "another Arrows,...

https://www.segmenta-ai.com/ - Link for signup if you want bid floor help Felix, solo from Istanbul, with the advanced ad monetization episode nobody makes: what to do once your game is earning $1,000 a day in ads. The core idea is that ad revenue stacks on top of itself, so tactics that were a waste of time at $100 a day are suddenly worth real money, and the networks know it better than you do....

Aniimo is the prettiest game we've reviewed this year and Jakub spent a week waiting for it to catch him. It didn't, and the reason is the biggest hole we've ever found in a Chinese launch: there is no gacha. None. Everything you'd expect from a top-tier open-world RPG except the engine that pays for it. You catch your Aniimo in the world, grind the rare ones through long quest cha...

Draft Showdown is a Voodoo-published auto-battler that is, by the admission of the two people on this podcast who actually worked on it, Battle Legion with the friction removed, and that's why it's doing what Battle Legion never could: roughly $120K a day, 45–50% of it from ads, 400K DAU, a $70K IAP spike on the new Draft Pass season, and 1,200 new creatives in the last three days. Felix e...

Mystery Dumpling Unbox ASMR launched in mid-August, spiked to a million downloads a day, is still pulling 300K downloads a day and 1.1M DAU, shows $2 of IAP revenue in the last 30 days. Every one of those 12 million monthly downloads comes from a viral toy trend: RMS "Real Magical Stuff" mystery dumplings, unboxing videos on TikTok and YouTube doing 47M, 70M and 82M views each, and a dev...

Mobidictum Conference in Istanbul, October 7–8: fifth year, 80% of the top Turkish studios in the room, 20 Vietnamese and 30 Chinese companies, 60% international attendance for the first time, and all three of us on stage. Batuhan has free tickets for the 2.5 Gamers audience, so reach out. Turkey went from zero gaming news for five years to producing the most consistent hit-making machine in mobil...

Suck It Up is Tactile Games' new eat-and-grow hole game, and three months after soft launch it's doing ~$30K a day in IAP — about to overtake Lily's Garden as the Danish studio's biggest title (and Lily's Garden made well over half a billion). Matej Lančarič, Jakub Remiar, and Felix Braberg walk the game: a Hole 'Em All-style timed core with the smart differentiators (live...

A general smacks a soldier so hard he turns into a chair — and then into Mel Gibson. That's a real Top Force ad. Century Games isn't testing AI creatives anymore; it's running the whole portfolio on them: Lord Rush pumping out roughly 5,000 ads a month across every era in history (Spartans, pirates, Egyptians with AK-47s), the King Shot slap-skit upgraded so the guy saves a princess fi...

AppLovin's CEO published a blog about "ad quality tools" — and buried in it is the real move: MAX will stop exposing user-level ad data, because competitors have been using the mediated stream (who saw which ad at what price) as training data for their own bidders. Felix Braberg flies solo for the Friday news and reads between the lines: AppLovin's biggest advantage is that every...

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A cat shoots a tree. The tree doesn't fight back. Numbers go up. That's the entire game and it's already past Office Cat's peak, #2 among all idle games on IAP revenue, and doing an estimated $250K a day once you count the ads. Nobody on the crew can explain the trees. Nobody needs to. The lesson: cats always have good CPI, one-stat simplicity keeps it Western-casual, and Treepla k...

Century Games has found a 4X creative direction nobody else is using yet, and the crew is betting the whole category copies it within a month. Matej Lančarič, Jakub Remiar, and Felix Braberg run September's creatives. They retire Golden Goblins from the top slot (with the sharp lesson from Idle Zombie Miner: copy a dying game's creatives and you die with it), pass through the Idle Lumber s...

Zedge removed banners from an app with 721 million installs — half as a joke, to be consistent in a refresh-rate test. Impressions fell 38%. Revenue went up 1%. Their North Star metric rose 1.77%. Then they ran it in reverse to make sure, and got the same result. Banners might genuinely be dead. Felix Braberg goes solo for an ad-monetization interview with Ignas Danielius, Head of Ad Monetization...

A job-search app shipped a Flappy Bird playable that ends with "there's a relevant job for you." Two years ago that would have made zero sense. This month it's the trend: non-gaming apps are flooding the playable space, most of them vibe-coded with AI in an afternoon. Matej Lančarič and Ondrej Mosberger are joined again by Robin Kuyer (Unity PlayWorks) for the "everyone brin...

Game discussed in the video - One Mage Army: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eyaegmoranm.onemagearmy A solo developer messaged Jakub at Gamesforum to say the podcast helped him grow his game from zero to $25K a month, now heading to $50K. This video is for exactly that person: one game, no creative team, no UA department — and a launch that needs to happen anyway. Matej Lančarič...

A hide-and-seek game where you paint yourself to blend into the map, made by two people in two months, just made $60 million. That's the winner of this quarter's Steam Scanner — and it's the one idea on the list mobile genuinely can't clone. The closing caveat matters: it's survivorship bias — 20K+ games hit Steam a year — and Steam's discovery means a Mecha Chameleon never...

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Find the Cat 2 — now in color 02:40 Cat-as-ornament hiding and 70-cat hard levels 04:20 Shorter levels, more interstitials — the pacing change 08:15 The meow is the whole game 13:00 Rewarded ads, 260-second Google formats & the Mintegral fix 18:00 The numbers — 125K downloads/day, 350K DAU, vs Find the Cat 1 24:40 Felix's ad-scaling thresholds and the banner decoy 28:30...

Newzoo says the global games market hits $213.9B in 2026, with mobile the largest platform at $121.1B and — for the first time in a while — the fastest-growing one. And that mobile number is still missing the $10-15B earned off-platform that the trackers can't see. Three stories this Friday, plus the weather. Felix Braberg flies solo for the Friday news. First, Newzoo's 2026 Global Games M...

OOC is marketed as "playable anime." There's almost no anime in it. It's a wall of text — an AI-powered dungeon master running an interactive story you steer with your own prompts. And it's doing an estimated $100K a day, 74% of it from the US, on pure AI-generated text. Welcome to the weirdest, most future-facing app the crew has covered. We break down OOC by New AI Entertai...

Almost every game that tried the Backpack Hero setup on mobile failed. Overgeared Hero didn't — it's the strongest adaptation the crew has seen; it's doing ~$100K a day, and it pulled off the thing most Asian-developed RPGs can't: it cracked the US. We break down Overgeared Hero by Craft (Korea) — a mid-core RPG built on a Hobby/RPG chassis (gacha, energy, idle expedition, gear-mer...

Soft Launch Sonar is where we dig through the millions of games brewing in soft launch to find the patterns before anyone else. This time: Century's not-so-secret second account, Supercent cloning Smash Fest twice in a week, Miniclip taking a swing at Forex, and a Smash Fest clone count that's hit 123 with the honest verdict that almost none of it contains a single new idea. Supercent'...

Most credit cards want the full balance back at the end of the month, at punitive interest, with a fixed limit that has nothing to do with how your campaigns are actually performing. PVX is building the opposite: a UA-financing credit card where your limit resets based on ROAS, so as long as the performance is there, you never have to stop spending. We sit down with Joe Wadakethalakal (CEO and co-...