two & a half gamers

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 portal.
Jakub Remiar flies solo for a single-game Review Radar update on Block Blast, six months on from the original deep-dive. He covers the takedown's actual impact (minimal, and DAU had already peaked in March), the massive UA downscale (from ~30,000 creatives and 1.5M downloads/day in December to ~5,000 creatives and ~600K/day now — a downscale, not a decline), the arrival of Block Blast's first real competitor (Color Block Combo Blast from Chinese studio Flyers Technology, growing fast but on tier-2/tier-3 traffic with almost no US DAU), and the pivot that matters most: "More Games" has moved from a hidden settings menu into a full main-menu button, now housing eight fully-fledged games (Fruit Merge, Mahjong, Sudoku, and more) — the same playbook as the no-wifi offline-games portals. Plus Sensor Tower's ad-revenue estimate (~$22M/month, ahead of Vita Mahjong) and the standing Jakub-vs-Felix bet on whether Block Blast ever passes Garena Free Fire.The read: don't sleep on this game. The core has peaked, but the winter blitz is probably coming — and the portal play is the real evolution.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 Revisiting Block Blast — six months on
01:30 The takedown — how much damage did it actually do?
03:00 The first real competitor arrives
05:30 Why the competitor isn't a real threat (yet)
07:00 The massive UA downscale — 30K creatives to 5K
10:09 The pivot — "More Games" hits the main menu
14:00 $22M/month in ads and the Garena Free Fire bet
17:00 Has Block Blast peaked, or is the winter blitz coming?

Potensus is a premium ad network built by people who've actually been on both sides of this industry - game publishers, agencies, and successful exits. They get it.

Here's the thing - Potensus has direct deals with Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, Vodafone. Not programmatic. Direct. Those budgets land in your game at premium CPMs, no middleman tax.

And they handle everything with their in-house team. PLUS they're partnered with PlayableMaker WINK WINK - so they'll take a brand's YouTube video or a static banner and actually turn it into a playable ad or rewarded video. Proper interactive format, built for gaming inventory. Brands getting a gaming-native creative, publishers getting higher CPMs. Everyone wins.

Head to potensus.com to get started or check their creative portfolio here
https://vimeo.com/showcase/12093300?fl=so&fe=fs
---------------------------------------
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

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 top of your portfolio.
We break down Hotel Legacy by Century Games (of Tasty Travels fame), using it as a lens on the whole merge category. They recap the state of merge (Gossip Harbor at ~$95M/month and still climbing, Tasty Travels, Travel Town, Flambe, Seaside Escape), walk Hotel Legacy's board and its standard-but-polished feature set (three LiveOps systems, bubble offers, generators, the min-max storing loop), and dig into the genuinely puzzling part: the winning My Perfect Hotel / Last Asylum creative concept that's driving installs isn't actually in the game yet.

The lesson: you stack merge games by shipping essentially the same game with a new theme, then testing creatives at scale until you find what to build next.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 The state of merge — Gossip Harbor is #4 globally
05:00 The revenue picture — $95M/month and climbing
06:46 Hotel Legacy enters at #15 — 50K/day, all tier-one
09:00 The "six merge games" player behavior theory
10:06 Walking the board — LiveOps, bubble offers, min-maxing
17:00 The mystery — the winning creative isn't in the game
17:42 The creatives — My Perfect Hotel, Last Asylum, 500 in 30 days
27:16 How to stack a merge game on your portfolio

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

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 mid-core idle RPG they flagged on the Creative Trends episode. They walk it live — the swipe-to-choose mechanic (swipe right and you go straight into a purchase, swipe left and you skip), the Legend-of-Mushroom-style idle core streamlined for a Western fantasy audience, the ads-as-biggest-upgrade loop, the prestige treadmill that resets the map when content runs out, and a genuinely useful tangent on how to actually price a "remove the interstitials" offer (Felix does the ad-monetization math live).

Then the numbers and the bigger picture: Path of Kings is doing ~$30K/day and sits right at the make-or-break threshold early Voodoo games have to clear, while Voodoo overall is doing ~$25M/month in IP revenue off Marble Sort and Castle Clashers/Busters — a real mid-core pivot that has everyone talking IPO. Plus the creatives: ~1,384 in 30 days, 100% AI, and gloriously broken (floating horses, dragons you don't sit on, four art styles per video).

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

Offerwall eCPMs in the US can hit $800 to $2,000 for a single completed task — compared to $20-50 for a normal rewarded ad. But most publishers either add one too early, segment it wrong, or let it cannibalize their whales. This is the no-bullshit introduction to doing it right.Felix Braberg flies solo for a 15-minute offerwall masterclass, built from seven years of decks and hands-on experience across titles like the Ludia Trailer Park Boys games. He covers what an offerwall actually is (paying your time-rich, cash-poor users to complete tasks in exchange for in-game currency), the one rule that determines whether it'll work at all (you need at least 20% of revenue from non-ad sources — and "remove ads" as your top IAP disqualifies you), the metrics that define success (DoDAU, with ~10% as the benchmark), the segmentation and hand-holding that separates a sub-10% opt-in from a real revenue stream, how to think about exchange rates and avoid IAP cannibalization, why you start on API and graduate to SDK, and how sales and holiday boosts (yes, even Arbor Day) spike offerwall revenue. Done right, an offerwall can add 8-12% to total app revenue.The core lesson: offerwalls reward deep economies and clever segmentation — not a plug-and-play install.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 What an offerwall actually is and how it works
02:15 Who should use one — the 20% non-ad revenue rule
04:30 The players it monetizes: time-rich, cash-poor
05:30 DoDAU and the ~10% benchmark
07:00 Segmentation and hand-holding — the real unlock
11:00 Exchange rates, cannibalization, and fraud
13:00 API first, SDK later — the rollout strategy
16:00 Sales and holiday boosts (even Arbor Day)
Potensus is a premium ad network built by people who've actually been on both sides of this industry - game publishers, agencies, and successful exits. They get it.

Here's the thing - Potensus has direct deals with Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, Vodafone. Not programmatic. Direct. Those budgets land in your game at premium CPMs, no middleman tax.

And they handle everything with their in-house team. PLUS they're partnered with PlayableMaker WINK WINK - so they'll take a brand's YouTube video or a static banner and actually turn it into a playable ad or rewarded video. Proper interactive format, built for gaming inventory. Brands getting a gaming-native creative, publishers getting higher CPMs. Everyone wins.

Head to potensus.com to get started or check their creative portfolio here
https://vimeo.com/showcase/12093300?fl=so&fe=fs
---------------------------------------
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

Lilith just did something genuinely new and genuinely reckless. Clash of Critters fuses the coin-looter/social-casino core with a pachinko machine and an idle RPG into one surprisingly clean package, then runs creatives packed with what can only be described as Pokémon from Wish. The crew breaks down whether the boldest iteration in the genre this year will actually fly.

We go deep on Clash of Critters by Lilith (the AFK Arena / Rise of Kingdoms studio). They walk the game live — the pachinko coin-looter core that funnels directly into your XP, the auto-leveling idle RPG creatures, the raid/revenge social-casino mechanic lifted one-to-one from Coin Master and Monopoly Go, the card-album and gacha meta — and assess the iteration itself: a male-skewed, Asian-flavored coin looter built on a mechanic that's never dominated the very Asian markets it's aimed at. Then the creatives: ~4,000 in 30 days, heavy AI, Forex concepts, and a batch of blatantly Pokémon-styled ads that ran in Japan and then quietly went dark right before global launch. The recurring "see you in Tokyo" joke writes itself.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 What is Clash of Critters — Lilith's coin looter RPG
02:57 The pachinko machine core and the XP connector
05:27 The "Pokémon from Wish" creatures and auto-leveling
09:33 The raid mechanic and the coin-looter formula
19:43 The verdict — a clean iteration missing a front end
22:00 The numbers — $200K/day and the Chinese soft launch
29:22 The creatives — 4,000 in 30 days, heavy AI, Forex
36:47 The Pokémon problem — "see you in Tokyo"

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