two & a half gamers

In this brutally honest episode, the 2.5 Gamers crew and puzzle expert Laura Taranto dive into Century Games’ match-3 ambitions, dissecting new titles like Family Farm Match, Party Match, and Truckstar. Once a 4X and farming powerhouse, Century is now flooding the puzzle genre with games and wild creative tests, but is there any real strategy? We break down:The copy-paste engine and meta behind Pa...

Running UA on AppLovin in 2025? Don’t waste another dollar until you hear this. In this episode, we sit down with Alexis Lejeune (ex-AppLovin, now UA advisor) to dive deep into how AppLovin’s UA stack really works — including how to scale, when to use D28 ROAS, how to test creatives, and how Axon 2 finds your payers before you do. What we cover: Axon 2: How AppLovin’s black box blends mediation +...

In this live-recorded episode from MAU Vegas, Matej sits down with Damon Marshall and Berkley Egenes of Xsolla's mobile leadership team to discuss how the April 30 court ruling opened the floodgates for direct-to-consumer monetization. We unpack: How mobile devs can now promote web shops directly inside iOS apps Why this moment is the “William Wallace freedom moment” for game publishers How Xs...

Today, we take on Lands of Jail, a Chinese-built 4X survival-sim mashup that combines Frozen City onboarding, Whiteout Survival progression, and King Shot-style map layering, all dressed in prison jumpsuits, toy factories, and riot suppression mechanics. Lands of Jail is one of the weirdest, deepest, and most well-executed SLG hybrids we’ve seen in 2025. Built by Chinese studio eWorld, it mixes: F...

We go “Full Steam Ahead” with a special guest, Adam Telfer, unpacking how Steam hits influence mobile game development in 2025: from Dreamdale-ified Palworld clones to digging simulators, idle RPG mashups, and more. The crew explores: Why some Steam-inspired mobile games (like Repo Online) hit 10M+ downloads and $1.3M in ads Why others (like Lilith's Palworld clone) flop despite a powerful IP...

In this solo 2.5 Gamers Monologue, Felix walks you through a full setup and strategy guide for AppLovin MAX mediation, from the basics to advanced performance optimization. Whether you're new to MAX or want to stop leaving revenue on the table, this video covers: How to set up ad units correctly Which networks to start with in 2025 How to manage fill rates, waterfall placements, and API syncin...

How do you build a mobile game that does $168K/day in ad revenue… with no fail states, no IAP pressure, and a monetization wall that doesn’t even kick in until level 24? You study Word Search Explorer, the latest word game from the Lands of Jail studio (PlaySimple/MTG), and a masterclass in calm, deliberate ad monetization. In this episode, we break down the ad placement strategy, retention metric...

🎙️ This might be the most dangerous podcast episode we’ve ever released. An anonymous insider, voice-modulated for protection, joins us to expose the truth about mobile UA, ad network manipulation, and how millions are spent with zero payback logic. With voice modulation in place, our guest “Dr. Doom” reveals what happens behind the dashboards, network sales decks, and investor slides. You’ll hear...

Want real ROAS benchmarks from 300+ games and $200 M+ in spend? This episode of 2.5 Gamers goes deep with ZJ from PVX Partners, who brings an insane dataset from UA financing across puzzle, casual, strategy, and 4X games. We cover what’s really happening in 2025: 📉 Payback windows stretching to 12–24 months 📈 Ad revenue up 15%, but not fast enough to catch CAC inflation 🧠 M1 ROAS is the best ea...

We talk with the Drama Pops team from Codeway — one of Turkey’s top mobile app publishers — about how they scaled a short drama app from scratch into one of the most promising products in the entertainment app space. www.codeway.co https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.deepvision.shortdrama&hl=en 🧠 What You’ll Learn: Why they chose to avoid ad breaks during cliffhangers (and how i...

In this episode, the 2.5 Gamers crew — Matej, Felix, and Jakub — dissect the top mobile ad creative trends spotted across platforms in April 2025. From AI-generated hooks dominating 5-second ad intros, to IP-mirroring creatives, TikTok-style POV playables, and Freezing Families never going away — this is a masterclass in what’s hot (and not) in mobile game UA right now. You’ll see: ⚙️ The rise of...

Ever wonder why some gacha systems print money, while others crash in weeks? In this special solo deep-dive, Jakub from 2.5 Gamers breaks down everything you need to know about gacha system design, from token economies to deck-building, duplicate handling, meta shifts, and the subtle art of collection drivers. If you're building a game with gacha mechanics — or just want to understand why Gens...

MAU Events: May 20, Tuesday Pre-Game 4pm PT https://lu.ma/919nx0pq May 21, Wednesday brunch 11am PT https://lu.ma/krnfc16q May 2,1 Wednesday Gaming Soiree 4pm PT https://lu.ma/il21m7r7 Disney Solitaire is scaling fast. Today, we break down how SuperPlay + Playtika + Disney IP = one of the smartest casual game executions in years. From a familiar Domino Dreams-style template to a scaling UA strateg...

On April 30th, 2025, a U.S. court ruled that Apple’s anti-steering policies are anti-competitive and unenforceable. That single sentence could redefine the mobile app economy. For the first time ever, developers can now directly link to their own web stores from inside their iOS apps, promoting them, pricing them competitively, and funneling players off-platform without fear of being banned. We un...

What if a cozy puzzle game could generate $80K/day — with 89% of that from ads? Dreamy Room is the breakout hit you didn’t see coming. It's not Royal Match. It's not hypercasual. It's deterministic puzzling at its finest — and it's scaling fast. We break down why Dreamy Room is crushing downloads, how its simple-but-hard core loop drives ad revenue at scale, and why it's one of...

Meta just changed the game for ad monetized mobile apps — and if you’re not testing AdROAS campaigns yet, you’re already behind. In this 2.5 Gamers solo deep dive, Matej walks through exactly how to set up Meta’s new AdROAS campaigns, how to unlock the hidden value in your ad impressions, and why this is a must-have in your UA strategy for Android in 2025. 🧠 What You’ll Learn: Step-by-step guide...

$400M/year from all apps? 40M downloads for a 15-minute book summary? In this 2.5 Gamers episode, we explore how Genesis became one of the biggest non-game mobile app publishers in the world, with over $35M/month in revenue, and 400 M+ total downloads. Forget games for a minute. This is the app industry’s secret playbook, and it’s scaling like crazy. 🧠 What’s Inside: How Cleaner Guru hit $4M/mont...

In this episode, we sit down with the team behind Airflux, the AI-powered ad optimizer from Airbridge, and unpack how it’s quietly changing the rules of mobile game monetization.📈 Whether you're optimizing for ad whales, tweaking interstitial frequency, or just tired of playing A/B test roulette, this conversation will change how you think about monetization.🧠 What You’ll Learn:How Airflux d...

In this episode, we dive deep into the wild world of ad monetization trends in mobile gaming for 2025. From Vietnamese studios like ABI Games printing money daily to hypercasual reskins and even mobile rip-offs of popular Steam games, we break it all down. 🎮 Games Discussed: Cooking Dom by ABI Games 🇻🇳 Merge Sticker Playbook by Lion Studios Hamster Escape by Sunday Games REPO Mobile (Steam-inspir...

No UA. No App Store tricks. Chess.com - just 650 remote workers, a Netflix show, a cat bot named Mittens, and a $500M/year business. We dive deep into one of the most fascinating growth stories in mobile: chess.com. From Queen’s Gambit virality to Magnus Carlsen’s meme-worthy genius, we explore how chess.com built a mobile app empire on subscriptions, community, and strategic chaos — all without r...

What do you get when you mash Fallout Shelter, AFK Journey, and Batman?🦇 DC: Dark Legion is FunPlus’ latest 4X-adjacent mobile RPG — but despite the DC IP, flashy UA creatives, and $400K/day revenue spike, it might already be in trouble. Today, we dissect the design, monetization, UA, and feature depth of DC: Dark Legion. Is it a mobile gacha RPG pretending to be 4X? Or is it a 4X that forgot the...

30% of your revenue could be coming from a web shop, and you wouldn’t even see it in your external IAP dashboards. In this exclusive episode of 2.5 Gamers, we sit down with David Stelzer, President of Xsolla (formerly Epic Games, SEGA, CAA), to discuss how top-grossing games are ditching App Store dependency and scaling through direct-to-consumer (D2C) models. This isn’t theoretical. 📈 The top mo...

What if Royal Match and EverMerge had a baby… and it made $250K/day? That’s Matching Story, the surprise hit that blended match-3, merge, and classic narrative-driven creatives into one of the most polished casual games of 2025. Today, we dissect how Matching Story, which soft-launched in 2021, took its time, perfected its systems, and is now out-earning most casual titles on the charts. 🔍 What’s...

What if we told you that the biggest mobile game hits right now are recycling 5-year-old concepts and adding AI? Today, we break down March 2025’s biggest creative trends in mobile gaming — from AI-generated dress-up ads to the rise of near-death experiences in Royal Match clones. You’ll see what’s scaling, who’s winning, and how games pull record revenue by recycling, remixing, and reinvigorating...

Struggling to squeeze more $$$ from your ads? You might be losing thousands just by misusing AdMob. Today, Felix Braberg reveals the exact setup, tips, and optimization tactics he uses to scale ad revenue for games earning $350M+ in lifetime revenue. 👉 Whether you're earning $20/day or $3K/day, this episode is your AdMob playbook. 💡 What you’ll learn: How to properly set up AdMob mediation s...