two & a half gamers

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 Mosberger are joined again by Robin Kuyer (Unity PlayWorks) for the "everyone brings playables" format — with the bold creative twist of reversing the order.

https://lancaric.substack.com/p/h1-2026-brutally-honest-ua-report?r=7qqaf

Matej's Brutally Honest UA report puts playables at 40-60% of creative spend, up from 30-40% a year ago, as AppLovin, Mintegral, and the SDK networks keep growing. Robin brings the "Frankenstein" playable (Wool Crush: arrows + yarn mechanics + save-the-cat, every popular concept stacked into one ad — plus his spreadsheet method for engineering ideas from what's trending), the non-gaming wave

Ondrej closes with a Fumb Games playable vibe-coded in Playable Maker (30 iterations and the next version does it in three) and a clean memory-game hidden-object playable that respects the player's intelligence.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Playables are 40-60% of creative spend — the Brutally Honest data
06:25 Wool Crush — the Frankenstein playable and the spreadsheet method
11:20 Non-gaming apps take over — Indeed's Flappy Bird, finance, cleaners
19:40 Hero Wars — the open-roam level playable and how to iterate it
25:05 Supercell's playable — lost seven times, should a playable let you lose?
29:40 Sunday City — GTA timing, Grove Street, and the double-hook debate
38:30 Cozy Florist's AI merge & the cats-with-guns wildcard
44:50 Vibe-coded in Playable Maker + the memory-game playable that trusts you

This episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.
http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100

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

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 - matej@lancaric.me

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: one game, no creative team, no UA department — and a launch that needs to happen anyway.

Matej Lančarič goes solo for the first episode of his dev journey, launching his own game, One Mage Army (Android now, iOS in a couple of weeks), in the least ideal conditions: the build was done, Singular and ad monetization were in, but every motion designer and playable person was busy on client work, there was no gameplay footage anywhere online, and all he had was the store page. He walks the whole setup in order: wiring the network connectors (Unity, Google, Mintegral, Meta, Moloco, and more), the Singular events he needed before anything could run (ad impressions, purchases, level victories, hero unlocks — the first-session events), then the creative problem. With nothing to work from, he fed Layer.ai the store link and one brief — 59-second, story-driven, "one mage vs. a horde," keep the store's art style — and had ten AI videos in about 90 minutes, no gameplay at all. They're not perfect, and he says so: any client would reject them. They're also his best performers on Facebook and Apple. Add Playable Maker playables (plus playables built in Layer from the game's own sprites, seven more in the back pocket), and the campaigns: on Facebook, an ad-impression campaign to get any data ($0.18 CPI, ~200 installs), then a level-5 achieve campaign that started producing purchasers on its own (10-13 IPM, ~$0.90 CPI on tier 1, Germany best), then tier-1 purchase campaigns (~€3 CPI, US ~$4.50). On AppLovin, blended-ROAS worldwide (the game is ~40% IAP / 60% ads): a brutal $60 CPI on day one, $30, then $7, now $3.60 and heading toward $2 — and the discipline of not panicking when it's your own money.

The lesson, stated plainly: volume and diversity beat polish. Ten imperfect videos beat one perfect one. Get data in first, ladder the campaigns, iterate the winner. Next up: Firebase, Google Ads, and hybrid ROAS.

---------------------------------------
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 - matej@lancaric.me
---------------------------------------
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
Do you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Matej AI⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai

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 — 20K+ games hit Steam a year — and Steam's discovery means a Mecha Chameleon never gets brute-forced by three Voodoo clones in a month. That's the whole difference between the two platforms.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 The Steam Scanner is back — Q2, smallest to biggest
04:20 Taskbar Hero — an idle RPG in your taskbar (and the widget hint)
08:00 Supermarket Chaos & Oaken Tower — the tidy-up trend and an idle PvP tower
12:00 Idle gacha, Solarpunk & the evolve-into-a-crab roguelite
18:20 Librarian & Rome's Dead — high-budget cleaning and Roman survivor-slop
22:10 Vampire Crawlers, Paralives & the co-op casino-debt game
27:20 The winner — Mecha Chameleon, $60M by two people
35:30 Survivorship bias and why Steam can't be brute-forced

This episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.
http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100
--------------------------------------
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

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 - matej@lancaric.me
---------------------------------------
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
Do you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Matej AI⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai

⏱️ 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 downloads/day, 350K DAU, vs Find the Cat 1
24:40 Felix's ad-scaling thresholds and the banner decoy
28:30 The creatives — AI doctors, 17 playables & find the IP infringement

This episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.
http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100
--------------------------------------
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

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 - matej@lancaric.me
---------------------------------------
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
Do you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Matej AI⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai

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 the weather.

Felix Braberg flies solo for the Friday news. First, Newzoo's 2026 Global Games Market forecast (via Michiel Buijsman, August 25): $213.9B total, up 6.1%, with growth across all platforms and regions; mobile at $121.1B (+6.8%) ahead of console ($46.9B, +5.1%, anchored by GTA 6's November launch) and PC ($45.9B, +5%, moderating after a record 12% in 2025). The mobile growth is coming from deeper spending per player, Chinese publishers gaining share abroad, and expanding D2C — and Felix layers on the off-platform caveat from the recent FastSpring/Chip episode, meaning mobile's true size is meaningfully larger than reported. The player-side forecast is the strategic one: 3.7B players in 2026 (+4.4%) but growth slowing to ~3.2% through 2029 as penetration flattens at ~62% of the online population — so future growth depends on retaining and monetizing existing audiences, not adding new ones. Second, Makers Fund closed its $250M Fund IV (bringing AUM to $1.5B), the San Francisco games-VC behind Dream Games and Voldex — exactly the kind of capital the industry needs flowing to the next generation of studios. Third, AppsFlyer secured a $400M credit line from Bank Leumi on top of a June transaction that valued it at $2.7B (Google, Meta, Unity, and Moloco as minority investors, and liquidity for long-time backers like General Atlantic and Goldman Sachs). Felix's finance read: they bought out investors who wanted out after the IPO failed, came up short on cash, and took on debt to fund growth toward being big enough to go public.

Then the weather: Smash Fest leads US iOS free downloads, Meow Doku is #2 (and #1 on Google Play, beating Roblox), Block Out and Magic Sort (both Grand Games) follow, and Royal Smash vs Smash Fest is now a live fight for the biggest smash game.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Three stories and the weather — Friday news
00:40 Newzoo 2026 — $214B market, mobile $121B and growing fastest
02:30 The off-platform asterisk — mobile's real size
03:30 Player growth is slowing — retention is the new growth
05:10 Makers Fund closes $250M Fund IV
06:20 AppsFlyer's $400M credit line — the post-IPO read
08:00 The weather — Smash Fest, Meow Doku, and the smash-game fight
---------------------------------------
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 - matej@lancaric.me