🎯 Creative Trends April 2026: Volume + 80/20 Creative Strategy FTW!

AppQuantum's Golden Goblins is five years old and still dropping new creatives nobody else is matching. Magic Sword is running 5,000+ new playables per month. Match Villains just flipped the "save the king" formula and is converting harder than ever. And AI creatives are now indistinguishable from human ones in roughly half of the libraries we looked at.Matej Lančarič is joined by Felix Braberg and John Wright (Playable Maker, sitting in for Jakub) to walk through Sensor Tower's April creative trends and figure out what's actually winning right now. The conversation covers the Golden Goblins production machine and why they're still using gates (yes, gates), Match Villains flipping the king-rescue formula into peasant-rescue, the AI invasion of creative libraries, why near-death experience hooks are showing up everywhere, the $40 vs $10 CPI gap between 4X and idle arcade creatives, the brutal volume race (Magic Sword 5K, Royal Match only 300), and the 80/20 iteration rule that separates winners from everyone else.If you ship creatives every week and want to know what's actually working in April 2026, this is the episode.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 Cold open — "what signals do you look for anymore?"02:14 Golden Goblins is still dropping new stuff (and using gates)09:13 The 5,000 creatives per month volume race13:55 The 80/20 rule — iteration beats new concepts21:00 "Save the Peasants" — Match Villains flips the king formula30:40 The Royal Match Apple billion-dollar problem35:30 AI creatives are now 50% of some libraries39:13 The $40 vs $10 CPI gap and the Tasty Travels playbook━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━Get our MERCH NOW: 25gamers.com/shop--------------------------------------PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors---------------------------------------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 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch 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: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠Special guest: John WrightJoin our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA---------------------------------------Matej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://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 - [email protected] 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