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two & a half gamers

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two & a half gamers
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  • two & a half gamers

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

    25/05/2026 | 44 min
    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.
    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
    00:00 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 race
    13:55 The 80/20 rule — iteration beats new concepts
    21:00 "Save the Peasants" — Match Villains flips the king formula
    30:40 The Royal Match Apple billion-dollar problem
    35:30 AI creatives are now 50% of some libraries
    39:13 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 years
    They power top mobile publishers around the world
    Launch 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 Lancaric⁠
    Special guest: John Wright

    Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA
    ---------------------------------------
    Matej Lancaric
    User Acquisition & Creatives Consultant
    ⁠https://lancaric.me
    Felix Braberg
    Ad monetization consultant
    ⁠https://www.felixbraberg.com
    Jakub Remiar
    Game design consultant
    ⁠https://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]
    ---------------------------------------
    If 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
  • two & a half gamers

    🚨📢BREAKING NEWS: AppLovin Fingerprinting Exposed, Sensor Tower's M&A, Embracer's $192M Write-Down

    24/05/2026 | 9 min
    Has AppLovin been fingerprinting iOS users all along? A white-hat hacker says yes — and they cracked the mediation cipher to prove it.
    Felix Braberg breaks down the three biggest mobile gaming stories from the week ending May 22, 2026. Sensor Tower acquired App Magic to build out their SMB offering and consolidate market intelligence even further. A white-hat hacker published a detailed breakdown of AppLovin's mediation cipher, claiming 50+ device parameters get extracted per ad call across 12+ downstream networks — effectively recreating deterministic IDFA-level tracking even when users deny ATT. And Embracer wrote down their mobile business by $192M after divesting Easybrain to MiniClip for $1.2B last year, with the market now pricing in another major acquisition.
    The cipher story is the spicy one. If confirmed, it explains why iOS performance has been so strong post-ATT — and it sets up a potential antitrust collision course because Apple's own ad business would be exempt from any policing they did against everyone else.
    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
    00:00 Cold open — the cipher and what gets extracted
    00:30 Sensor Tower acquires App Magic for SMB market
    03:00 White hat hacker cracks AppLovin's mediation cipher
    05:30 What 50 device parameters means for ATT
    07:00 The Apple antitrust collision course
    08:00 Embracer writes down mobile arm by $192M
    09:30 Why the market expects another Embracer acquisition
    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS
    — Sensor Tower acquired App Magic, positioning it as their SMB market-intelligence offering. The play is funnel-building — Sensor Tower is expensive at the top end, so App Magic becomes the entry point that captures small studios and indie developers before they grow into enterprise customers.
    — The 50 parameters include OS version, screen size, language, font, volume, mute switch, IDFV, and dozens more — together creating a fingerprint that's effectively as good as an IDFA for tracking purposes.
    — The Apple problem: if Apple polices fingerprinting, it would have to act against every major ad network simultaneously. And Apple Search Ads would be in the crosshairs of any antitrust response, since Apple's own ad business benefits from the same tracking infrastructure. Felix's read: Apple won't act because they'd lose downloads and IAP revenue.
    — Embracer wrote down their mobile business by $192M in their Q1 full-year results, following last year's $1.2B Easybrain sale to MiniClip. Top mobile earners (Crazy Labs, Thinking Ape, Deca, Subway Surfers, Glow, Lamar, Flophouse, Party in My Dorm) generated $72-73M in net sales — down 28% YoY due to the Easybrain divestiture.
    ---------------------------------------
    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: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠

    Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA

    --------------------------------------
    Matej Lancaric
    User Acquisition & Creatives Consultant
    ⁠https://lancaric.me
    Felix Braberg
    Ad monetization consultant
    ⁠https://www.felixbraberg.com
    Jakub Remiar
    Game design consultant
    ⁠https://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]
  • two & a half gamers

    🌸 The Pikmin Bloom Anomaly: How a 5-Year-Old game just hit 5x downloads without UA

    21/05/2026 | 28 min
    A 5-year-old location-based game just 5x'd its downloads. There were no new creatives. No new geos. No marketing push. Just one regional event that changed how the game actually works in Taiwan.

    We break down Pikmin Bloom by Niantic — the quiet survivor of the post-Pokemon-Go location-based wave that everyone forgot about, but which has been quietly making $30-50M/month for years and just spiked dramatically in early 2026. The conversation covers the Pikmin IP history, the game's walking-based resource-conversion mechanics, why 58% of revenue comes from Japan, the brutal scale comparison to Pokemon Go ($85M in 5 years vs $75M in 30 days), and the most interesting product story of the episode: Niantic's regional experiment in Taiwan where they moved mushroom locations weekly from November to February, driving a 5x download spike that's still scaling.
    The takeaway isn't about Pikmin specifically. It's about what product-driven UA looks like when creative-led UA stops moving the needle.
    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
    00:00 Cold open — Pikmin Bloom is scaling, why?
    03:16 Pikmin history lesson — Nintendo IP, RTS origins
    06:16 The actual game: walking, flowers, Pikmin work for you
    13:01 The 5x download spike and Taiwan's surprise dominance
    14:53 The brutal comparison — Pikmin Bloom vs Pokemon Go
    17:01 The Japan IP rule: everything Nintendo touches is sacred
    24:12 The Niantic Taiwan experiment that changed everything
    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS
    — Pikmin Bloom is doing $30-50M/month consistently across five years, with 58% of revenue coming from Japan. The game just 5x'd downloads and crossed into Taiwan as its second-biggest revenue country — and almost none of it is driven by UA.

    — Niantic ran a quiet regional product experiment in Taiwan from November 12 to February 15: mushroom locations changed weekly (normally fixed), which created persistent engagement and surprise discovery. Result: 5x downloads and revenue acceleration that's still running.

    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 years
    They power top mobile publishers around the world
    Launch 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: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠
    Podcast:

    Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA

    ---------------------------------------
    Matej Lancaric
    User Acquisition & Creatives Consultant
    ⁠https://lancaric.me
    Felix Braberg
    Ad monetization consultant
    ⁠https://www.felixbraberg.com
    Jakub Remiar
    Game design consultant
    ⁠https://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]
  • two & a half gamers

    🎮 Playable Trends April 2026: Puzzle Format, Long Sessions, Recognizable Mechanics

    20/05/2026 | 42 min
    Long-form playables aren't just back — they're crushing it. The top playable in April hit 75% impression share. Whiteout Survival is doing it with 3 new playables a month. And the format that's winning everywhere is the one your mum would recognize.

    Matej Lančarič is joined by Ondrej Monsberger and John Wright for another Playable Trends deep-dive. The crew goes through Sensor Tower's top playable creatives for April, focusing exclusively on long-form playables and what's actually driving impression share right now. The conversation covers the production trick of building one playable script and shipping 20 variations, why the "mum test" puzzle format is dominating, the BitLife "find the shoes" frustration mechanic, Royal Match's redirect-then-return experiment, and the awkward truth that Whiteout Survival made only three new playables in April but still has 99% impression share on puzzle creatives.

    If you make playables — or you're trying to understand why CPI keeps climbing despite shipping more creatives — this is the episode to bookmark.

    ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
    00:00 the "mum test" and recognizable formats
    02:24 Welcome — the never-ending playables debate revisited
    06:15 Sensor Tower setup and April's top long-form playables
    09:27 One script, 20 variations — the production playbook
    13:50 The completion-rate vs engagement-clicks tradeoff
    21:00 The 75% impression share playable of April
    25:48 Royal Match's redirect-then-return experiment
    30:05 Whiteout Survival: 99% impression share, 3 new playables
    38:24 Predictions for next month — and the arrows trend
    📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS
    — One playable script can become 20+ variations without rebuilding anything: vary the length, vary the CTA timing, vary the color scheme, vary the redirect point. Stop asking "can I make a new playable" — ask "have I drained the variations from the playable I have."
    — Long-form is not a problem if players are engaged. John spent 9 minutes finishing a Cell Survivor playable. Ondrej spent 5 minutes on Magic Sword. Both downloaded. The frustration isn't the length — it's getting cut off before finishing.

    — Royal Match is experimenting with letting users redirect to the store and then return to finish the playable.

    — Prediction for next month: long-form continues, puzzle format keeps dominating, arrows-themed mini-levels start appearing inside casual game playables (already showing up in Royal Kingdom), and AI playables become indistinguishable from human-made for the simpler concepts.
    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    🎙️ HOSTS
    Matej Lančarič — User Acquisition consultant
    Ondrej Mosbergert — Game Design + UA consultant
    John Wright — Playable Maker
    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    This episode is brought to you by Potensus — the premium ad network with direct deals to Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, and Vodafone (no programmatic middlemen), partnered with Playable Maker for native gaming creative formats. Head to potensus.com to get started.
    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    #mobilegaming #useracquisition #playables #creativestrategy #liveops #f2p
    --------------------------------------
    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 years
    They power top mobile publishers around the world
    Launch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.
    ---------------------------------------
    Matej Lancaric
    User Acquisition & Creatives Consultant
    ⁠https://lancaric.me
  • two & a half gamers

    🧠 CloudX just hit 10-20% Revenue Lifts in 90 Days: The First AI-Native Ad stack for publishers

    18/05/2026 | 35 min
    The first AI-native programmatic stack for mobile publishers is real, and the early numbers are absurd. 10-20% revenue lifts across every publisher they've launched.

    Felix Braberg sits down with Dan Sack — Co-founder of CloudX, formerly MoPub, Twitter, Max, and AppLovin — for round two of their conversation, three months after CloudX went GA in February. The company now works with dozens of publishers, has five bidders fully live, a dozen more integrating, and a 35-person team. The pitch is "monetization as code" — a publisher platform where every setup lives in code and can be operated by humans OR AI agents.

    What's actually working today is the infrastructure
    layer: transparent fees, no competing ad network,
    verified auctions, and integration options that include
    first look, parallel, and standalone. The agentic
    capabilities are coming in Q3 — and that's the part
    that could reshape how publishers operate.

    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

    ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

    00:00 Cold open — dating app publisher up 14% revenue
    01:19 Round two intros + Dan's torn ACL update
    03:30 What CloudX has shipped since February GA
    04:39 Monetization as code: human + AI agent operated
    07:28 Felix's example: "kill DT for IAP whale cohorts"
    08:43 First look vs parallel vs standalone explained
    14:27 The real reason CloudX delivers 10-20% lifts
    24:14 Felix's pickle: 3 weeks of manual tuning, no AI yet
    32:19 The Q3 automation + intelligence layer roadmap

    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

    📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS

    — CloudX is delivering consistent 10-20% revenue lifts
    across every publisher launched, regardless of
    integration type (parallel, first look, banners, full
    screen). Dan admits even he didn't expect lifts of
    this magnitude this quickly.

    — "Monetization as code" means your entire setup lives
    in code and can be operated by humans OR AI agents.
    Think Claude Code or Cowork but for ad operations —
    agents that monitor, recommend, and execute on your
    behalf.

    — Three integration types: first look (CloudX gets the
    call first with a floor, clears or passes), parallel
    (both platforms auction simultaneously in silos,
    winners compared), and standalone (CloudX called only
    for specific apps/inventory). Standalone is launching
    in the next few weeks.

    — Banners are NOT dead. CloudX is seeing real lifts
    there too — partly via dynamic price flooring (which
    many SDK networks underprioritize) and partly by
    bringing massive web/CTV banner demand into in-app
    through partnerships with buyers who historically
    ignored the channel.

    — Demand stack today: Meta, Liftoff fully live. Next
    wave (weeks away): Moloco, Pangle, Digital Turbine,
    MobileFuse, Verve. Big omni-channel buyers set for
    Q3. Twenty-plus bidders integrating.

    — Multi-round auctioning is the killer feature. Bidding
    + dynamic flooring + waterfall optimization in a
    single auction system, no hacks needed. Sophisticated
    publishers have been hacking this for years; CloudX
    productized it.

    — The AI agentic vision: dashboard becomes a Claude-Code-style
    conversation — "what's happening, what should I know,
    what's the recommendation, do it." Automation in Q3,
    intelligence layer following. The platform you log
    into shouldn't be a dashboard you operate, it should
    be an agent you direct.

    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

    🎙️ HOST
    Felix Braberg — Ad Monetization consultant

    🎤 GUEST
    Dan Sack — Co-founder, CloudX (formerly MoPub, Twitter, Max,
    AppLovin)
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/dansack/

    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

    💬 Reach out to Dan: [email protected]
    💬 Comment below: would you try a programmatic stack that runs on AI agents?
    👍 Like the video if you learned something
    🔔 Subscribe for more deep-dive analysis

    #mobilegaming #admonetization #cloudx #mediation
    #programmaticads #aiads #f2p
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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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