two & a half gamers

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 en...

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...

Pokémon Champions launched on mobile doing roughly $300-400K/day. Two days later it was collapsing. It's now around $80K/day and falling — a textbook shark fin from the biggest IP on the planet. We cover the wins on this podcast, but we also cover the failures, and this one is genuinely fascinating. We break down what went wrong with Pokémon Champions. The game is essentially Pokémon Stadium (...

Block Blast got pulled from Google Play, and everyone assumed it was catastrophic. It wasn't — DAU dipped from about 56M to 50M and stabilized. The real story is much more interesting: Block Blast has hit its scale ceiling on the core game, and their answer is to quietly turn the app into a games portal. Jakub Remiar flies solo for a single-game Review Radar update on Block Blast, six months o...

Gossip Harbor is now the fourth-highest-grossing game on the planet — behind only Royal Match, Honor of Kings, and Whiteout Survival. The merge category the crew has been covering for years is bigger and more stable than ever, and Century Games just showed exactly how you stack another winner on top of your portfolio. We break down Hotel Legacy by Century Games (of Tasty Travels fame), using it as...

Voodoo's Path of Kings looks like Skyrim from the surface. It plays more like Tinder. And underneath the swipe mechanic is one of the more clever fusions of gameplay and monetization we've seen — where the gameplay itself is basically the offer pop-up. We break down Path of Kings, the Voodoo mid-core idle RPG they flagged on the Creative Trends episode. They walk it live — the swipe-to-cho...

Offerwall eCPMs in the US can hit $800 to $2,000 for a single completed task — compared to $20-50 for a normal rewarded ad. But most publishers either add one too early, segment it wrong, or let it cannibalize their whales. This is the no-bullshit introduction to doing it right. Felix Braberg flies solo for a 15-minute offerwall masterclass, built from seven years of decks and hands-on experience...

Lilith just did something genuinely new and genuinely reckless. Clash of Critters fuses the coin-looter/social-casino core with a pachinko machine and an idle RPG into one surprisingly clean package, then runs creatives packed with what can only be described as Pokémon from Wish. The crew breaks down whether the boldest iteration in the genre this year will actually fly. We go deep on Clash of Cri...

The roll-up model works beautifully on the way up and gets ugly in a hurry on the way down — and this week Stillfront showed exactly what the down looks like. That's one of four stories worth your attention this week. Felix Braberg flies solo for the Friday news segment. Stillfront CEO Alexis Bonte is stepping down after leading the company's strategic review and restructure — against a ba...

Mobile has a creativity problem — and Steam keeps proving it. In this quarter's Full Steam Ahead, the crew scans the top Q1 Steam releases to find the genre mashups and fresh cores that could translate into mobile's next wave of hits. The throughline: all the creativity got outsourced to Steam. Mobile's job is to figure out how to execute these cores for a wider audience. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━...

What happens when a monetization manager gets to build a game from scratch? You get Tetris Block Party - a hybrid that fuses block-puzzle gameplay, coin-looter meta, and match-3 boosters into a single LiveOps machine where two operators can run almost everything without a dev ticket. Matej Lančarič, Jakub Remiar, and Felix Braberg do a live review with two guests: Erez Yosef, who manages Tetris Bl...

The whole market is chasing the same thing: one magic creative that lowers your CPI. But this month's creative trends show the real story We run through the month's creatives and surface the patterns: AppQuantum/Golden Goblins as the copy-machine the whole market imitates (now with a ~100-person creative team), the onboarding land grab where studios slap My Perfect Hotel, Last Asylum, and...

The World Cup is here, and three football games are quietly printing money — but in completely different ways. eFootball is doing $45M a month after nearly a decade of straight-line growth, and almost nobody in the industry is talking about it. Matej Lančarič, Jakub Remiar, and Felix Braberg break down the three realistic football giants — Dream League Soccer, Konami's eFootball, and EA Sports...

Caught up with Sarah (Google AdMob) and Matt (VP of Revenue at Audiomack) while we were out at MAU Vegas to get the unfiltered truth about Google's new GMA Next-Gen SDK 1.00. Audiomack recently made a massive move by migrating their entire stack over to AdMob. We wanted to see if the reality actually lived up to the hype, or if switching was just a massive headache. Matt dropped the exact metr...

This month's playable trends are the kind you only catch when you're staring at hundreds of creatives in a row: the dress-up "please your boyfriend's mom" hook quietly flooding match-3 UA, and the Playrix templated-playable machine that turns one build into an entire portfolio. Matej Lančarič and Ondrej Mosberger are joined by Robin Kuyer, who leads Unity PlayWorks (formerly...

The old way of buying an MMP took weeks — sales calls, demos, contracts, CSM onboarding, documentation. Airbridge just collapsed that into a couple of hours. Core Plan: https://abr.ge/xqaqqlu Use code Matej26 for bonus attributed installs! Matej Lančarič sits down with Roi Nam, CEO and founder of Airbridge, to unpack Core Plan — a self-serve, pay-as-you-go MMP that comes with 15,000 attributed ins...

Supercell rebooted MoCo, their monster-hunting RPG, with a big relaunch update - new weapons, new abilities, redesigned portals, daily jobs. The hype cycle lit up. And after playing it, the verdict is brutal: it's still dead on arrival. Matej Lančarič, Jakub Remiar, and Felix Braberg dig into the MoCo relaunch and why it doesn't fix the game's core problem. MoCo launched in March 2025...

Direct-to-consumer is finally out of the shadows. Eight public studios just revealed how much revenue they drive through D2C — and the numbers make the case better than any pitch could. But there's a window closing, and the studios moving now are the ones who'll win. We are joined by Chip Thurston (FastSpring) for a D2C deep-dive built around the Pocket Gamer report aggregating publicly di...

It's day two of the World Cup, and the biggest download winner isn't any of the football games anyone predicted — it's a Coca-Cola-sponsored sticker-album app. That's just one of three stories this week that matter for mobile. Felix Braberg flies solo for the Friday news segment. The FIFA Panini Collection is pulling roughly half a million downloads a day across Brazil, Mexico, and...

AI creatives just hit a new level and the most surprising convert is Playrix. After years of holding back, they've gone all-in on AI across Township, Gardenscapes, and Homescapes. Matej, Jakub, Felix (and Freddie the robot) review 100+ AI creatives to figure out what's actually working right now. The episode is a guided tour through the current AI creative landscape: AppQuantum's Golde...

Not all rewarded users are the same — and treating them as one audience is exactly why so many rewarded UA campaigns underperform. Recorded live on Day 2 of MAU Vegas, this conversation breaks down how Tyr Ads segments rewarded traffic into three distinct personas and engineers profitability around the mix. Matej Lančarič sits down with Zino, CEO of Tyr Ads (and the Try Rewards consumer product),...

Block Out by Grand Games is scaling to $300K/day — and it doesn't even have an Android version yet. It's about to become Grand Games' biggest title, overtaking Magic Sword, and the whole thing is a masterclass in perfect execution over original innovation. Matej Lančarič, Jakub Remiar, and Felix Braberg break down Block Out, the deterministic sort puzzler that's quietly become one...

Liftoff finally went public this week — at a valuation that tells you exactly what the public market thinks mobile ad networks are worth. That's just one of four stories this week that genuinely matter if you run UA. Matej Lančarič flies solo for the breaking news segment, ranked from biggest to most practical. Liftoff listed on Nasdaq as LFT after a second attempt, raising $437M at a $3.83B v...

Two rewarded UA platforms just became one — and the integration is already live, not "coming in six months." Recorded live at MAU Vegas, this is the inside story of Mistplay's acquisition of MyChips and the launch of the Mistplay Audience Network. Matej Lančarič sits down with Massimo (founder of MAF / MyChips, now scaling the international business at Mistplay) and Mark Bearman (GM,...

Most teams treat influencer marketing as a series of one-off campaigns. The ones who actually scale treat it as a system — one continuous testing framework that runs from your first nano creator all the way to a Mr. Beast integration. Marion Balinoff returns for episode two of the influencer marketing series, going one level deeper than the foundations. Drawing on 12 years building influencer prog...