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two & a half gamers

by Lancaric.me

This is a no BS gaming podcast. We share insights, knowledge and fun gossip relating to the topics of User Acquisition, Game Design and Ad monetisation. You will find here actionable insights in a fun and relaxed atmosphere. A safe space where we mimic the honesty of a 4am conference discussion. Enjoy & let us know your feedback!

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Episodes

  1. ⏳ Torture Sort is REAL: Jam Bus SandFall makes $80K/Day and is slow as hell!

    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...

  2. 🚨📢BREAKING NEWS: New Adnetwork AdSURGE is here, Supercell Kills Squad Busters, Ubisoft Quits Mobile

    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…

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  3. 🎯 20 years' experience: Luis de la Camara on WHY the networks know your users better than YOU!

    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...

  4. 🧠 How Deepstash gets 50% of subscribers from Web2App & 3,000 creatives a month

    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...

  5. 💍 Rotate Rings was a FAKE ad for a YEAR. Now it's a GAME With 1M DAU in 2 Weeks

    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…

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  6. 💰 You Hit $1,000/Day in Ad Revenue. Now Here Are the 5 Tricks Ad Networks hope you NEVER Learn

    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...

  7. 🐿️ FunPlus Made a Genshin-Pokémon-Palworld Game and Forgot the Gacha

    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...

  8. 🐌 Voodoo's mid-core ERA: Draft Showdown is Battle Legion with the friction removed

    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...

  9. 🥟 Mystery Dumpling Unbox ASMR: The Game that isn't a GAME (It's an Ad Simulator)

    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...

  10. Istanbul Is the University of Puzzles: Dream, Grand, Loom & the Founder Factory

    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...

  11. 🕳️ Suck It Up: Tactile's new hole game just ate Lily's Garden

    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...

  12. 🧠 Everything Is AI Now: Mel Gibson From Wish Is Selling You a 4X Game

    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,...

  13. 🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: AppLovin Just Cut Off Everyone's Data: The MeowDoku Studio Got Sued & more

    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…

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  14. 🦉Making $70 Mil. a month ? How Duolingo is plundering all the game mechanics 👀

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  15. 🐱 A Cat Shooting Trees: Idle Cat Gunner & the best creatives of the Year

    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…

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  16. 🧠 New CREATIVE Trend Everybody will COPY in 3..2..1

    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...

  17. 🪦 Are Banners Dead? Zedge Removed Them, Cut 38% of Impressions, and Made MORE Money

    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....

  18. 🎮 Playables Are Now 40-60% of Creative Spend: Here's what's working ńow

    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...

  19. 🧙 Solo Dev Journey #1: How to start with UA? From a store link to a LIVE UA Campaigns

    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…

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  20. 🚂 Full Steam Ahead Q2: 12 Steam Hits & which ones work on Mobile?

    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 —…

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  21. 🐱 Find the Cat 2: The Sequel to a Monster Hit. Built to show MORE Ads

    ⏱️ 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...

  22. 🚨📢BREAKING NEWS: Mobile Gaming Hits $121B + Makers Fund's $250M + AppsFlyer's $400M Loan

    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...

  23. 🗯️ "Playable Anime" With No Anime: How OOC Makes $100K/Day on Pure AI Text

    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,...

  24. 🎒 Overgeared Hero Breakdown: An Asian RPG That Actually Cracked the US market

    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)…

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  25. 📡 Century's Hidden "Innovation" Account & What's Brewing in Soft Launch

    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…

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  26. 💳 A Credit Card that resets your LIMIT when Your ROAS is good: PVX's UA financing card is here!

    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...

  27. ⚔️ 47 Rewarded Ad Placements and a "No Ads" Lie: Inside XP Hero's $400K/Day Idle RPG

    We break down XP Hero by Supercent: an idle RPG built on the same Alien Invasion core as Butcher Hero, but with far better onboarding and vastly more ads. They walk the deep feature set (a growing hero, monetized cargo capacity and return tickets, boss raids that force you to upgrade a whole…

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  28. 💀Review Radar #12: Which games survived & which are actually DEAD (Poke It With a Stick!!)

    Review Radar 12 is where we revisit the games we've covered and find out who lived and who died. This time, the joke's on us: nearly everything came back scaling up. Felix kept reaching for the stick to poke dead games, and Jakub kept insisting they're all still breathing — and mostly, he was...

  29. 🎯 The 2026 D2C Survey: Why 41% of studios still DON'T have a web store (and why they're wrong)

    FastSpring surveyed 110 senior mobile decision-makers — directors, VPs, C-suite — about direct-to-consumer, and the results premiere right here before Gamescom. The headline: 59% now have a web store, but the 41% who don't are held back by three fears that are all out of date. And the #1 reason...

  30. 🚌 Marble Sort Meets Traffic Jam: Bus Traffic Fever Review!

    Bus Traffic Fever fuses two proven puzzlers — Marble Sort and the bus/traffic-jam arrows game — into one brutally slow, weirdly sticky machine. Levels take 30-40 minutes, the frustration is genuinely phone-throwing, and that's exactly why it prints ad revenue. We break down Bus Traffic Fever by...

  31. 🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Rotate Labs Raise + Rival App Store Returns + Gaming Revenue Drops 4.5%?!

    Cube Land's studio just raised a seed round four months after launch, a rival app store returned to Google Play in the US for the first time in over a decade, and Sensor Tower says gaming revenue fell 4.5% in Q2 — except that last number is only half the truth. Three stories, and Turkey keeps...

  32. ⛏️ One Guy, No Ads, No Tutorial, $100K/Day: The Idle Obelisk Miner Story

    Here's a game that breaks every mobile rule and prints money doing it: Idle Obelisk Miner looks like a DOS game from 1995, has no tutorial, no ads, and almost no marketing — and it's doing an estimated $100K a day on just 4-5K downloads. One developer, a fanatical community, and unit economics...

  33. 🎮 9 Playables, 9 Lessons: What's working in playable ads right now

    The most freeing idea in playable ads keeps proving itself: your playable doesn't have to match your actual game. This month a zombie survival game ran a football playable, and an isometric strategy game ran a non-isometric one. The crew breaks down nine playables and the lessons underneath them....

  34. 💣​ How Smash Fest created a NEW Puzzle category overnight

    We are joined by ad monetization guest Katerina to break down Smash Fest and the clone explosion surrounding it. We cover the physics-based cannon core (each ball is a move, run out and buy five more — match-3 logic on a physics engine), the detective work tracing it back to Toon Blast's "Cannon...

  35. 🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Tripledot Buys Supersonic for $40M + EA is Private for $55B + Netflix drama

    This week is one giant lesson in consolidation: everybody's buying everybody, the money is concentrating, the ownership is concentrating, and the people are getting cut. Tripledot bought Supersonic from Unity, Saudi Arabia closed the biggest leveraged buyout in history to take EA private, and...

  36. 🧠 The "Fat Guy Getting Slapped" Concept Took Over: AI Creatives Breakdown

    One concept is eating the entire Forex creative market right now: a "fat guy" gets slapped, abandoned, or humiliated, then rises to power. It was everywhere last month — this month it's on steroids, and every big Forex game has its own version. The crew runs 123 AI creatives in 30 minutes to map...

  37. 🎯 How to Do a UA Review Properly by Matej Lancaric

    "The CPI is going up, so change the creatives" is not a UA review — it's just narrating the dashboard. A real review has next steps, digs under the naming conventions, and usually finds money you're already wasting without spending a cent more. This is how to do one properly. FULL ARTICLE:...

  38. 🐜​ Colony Flow Breakdown: The Ant Puzzler getting sued & already taken DOWN from Android!

    Here's a first: we reviewed the copy, not the original. Colony Flow is an ant-themed "destroy the picture" puzzler that's doing an estimated $150K/day — and it's currently being sued over. The crew digs into the game, the monetization trick underneath it, and what the lawsuit might mean for the...

  39. 🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Google's Antitrust Blow, AppLovin's Hidden Strength & Smash Fest's Copycat Army

    The EU just fined Google €890M for making it hard to steer users to cheaper web stores — another crack in the 30% wall, and genuinely good news for every developer. That's the lead of a quieter, summer-holiday news week, with Felix flying solo while Matej and Jakub are at ChinaJoy. Felix Braberg...

  40. 🧊 Cube Land: How RotateLab went from idea to $300K/Day in Just 6 Months

    A studio in Gaziantep had the idea in November, started building at the end of December, ran a marketability test in January, and by July they're doing an estimated $300K/day. That's the Cube Land story — and we love it! We break down Cube Land Puzzle by RotateLab (Turkey) — a 3D voxel "destroy…

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  41. 🧠 The Creative Trends Nobody Wants to Admit

    Some months the creative trends are wild. This one, Matej says it straight: it's quieter — everyone's copying the same big 4X and Golden Goblins playbook, AI is everywhere, and studios are scaling down for summer. But the detective work underneath is where it gets good, including a live...

  42. 🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: GTA 6 Pre-Orders Hit $260M + Tencent & Superplay for $1.5B + PubMatic-Zynga Deal

    GTA 6 pulled an estimated $260M in its first week of pre-orders — and the real story is that its launch has quietly become a proxy for every gaming company's valuation. If it opens well, the industry holds. If it doesn't, the bottom could fall out — and mobile goes with it. Felix Braberg flies…

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  43. 🎮 Which Playable Performs Best" Why There's No Single Answer (Playable Trends June 2026)

    The single most freeing idea in playable ads: your playable doesn't have to be your actual game. This month's Playable Trends proves it — including a studio running what's essentially a Fishdom ad to drive installs for a completely different fish game. Today is the "everyone brings playables"...

  44. ➡️​HexaAway Breakdown - The 6th-Biggest sort puzzler you've NEVER heard of

    Hexa Away did something genuinely clever — it took the arrows/sort mechanic everyone's chasing and rebuilt it on a hexagonal 3D grid, which turns out to be a better fit than flat arrows ever were. Then it scaled hard on AppLovin, hit a wall, and downscaled almost completely. It's a great game and…

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  45. 🐱 Meowdoku case study: Minesweeper + Cats + Sudoku. Take a 40-Year-Old Game, Add Cats, Make Millions

    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...

  46. 🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Pokémon Go Made MORE Money by Going Free + Xbox Cuts 3,200 + AppLovin Opens Axon

    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....

  47. 💀 Pokémon Champions is already DEAD: here's what went wrong

    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...

  48. 🟥🟩🟨🟦Did Block Blast finally peaked? And why they added 7 more minigames??? 👀

    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...

  49. 🏨 My Perfect Hotel Meets Merge: Decoding Hotel Legacy by Century Games

    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...

  50. 🎮 Path of Kings review: Voodoo's midcore pivot is real

    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...

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ABOUT THIS SHOW

This is a no BS gaming podcast. We share insights, knowledge and fun gossip relating to the topics of User Acquisition, Game Design and Ad monetisation. You will find here actionable insights in a fun and relaxed atmosphere. A safe space where we mimic the honesty of a 4am conference discussion. Enjoy & let us know your feedback!

HOSTED BY

Lancaric.me

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How many episodes does two & a half gamers have?

two & a half gamers currently has 515 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.

What is two & a half gamers about?

This is a no BS gaming podcast. We share insights, knowledge and fun gossip relating to the topics of User Acquisition, Game Design and Ad monetisation. You will find here actionable insights in a fun and relaxed atmosphere. A safe space where we mimic the honesty of a 4am conference discussion....

How often does two & a half gamers release new episodes?

two & a half gamers releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 515 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.

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two & a half gamers is created and hosted by Lancaric.me.
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