two & a half gamers

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 went from zero gaming news for five years to producing the most consistent hit-making machine in mobile, and in this episode we sit down with Batuhan Avucan, founder of Mobidictum, to find out how that actually happened and what's coming next. The short version: investors gave Turkish founders one mandate, puzzle, and Turkish founders executed. The Sort category alone went from basically nothing in 2023 to roughly $80M a month in IAP, and once you add ad revenue on top it's easily $120M a month, spearheaded by Pixel Flow, Magic Sort, Hexa Sort and friends. Block is dominated by Color Block Jam and Block Out from Grand Games, Match Blast and Match Factory are Peak's home turf, and match-3 is still a heavyweight fight between Dream and Playrix. But the interesting part is the machine underneath it: studios that grew up working with publishers like Rollic and Lion, learned the craft, then went solo and shipped Loom and RotateLab-sized results. Batuhan puts it better than we can: "We don't train talent anymore, we train founders."
🙏 THIS EPISODE IS SPONSORED BY POTENSUS
Potensus is a premium ad network built by people who've been on both sides of the industry. Direct deals with Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola and Vodafone, no programmatic, no middleman tags, premium CPMs landing in your game. Plus, with PlayableMaker they turn brand videos and statics into playable ads and rewarded video. Head to potensus.com and check their creative portfolio in the show notes.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: "We make unicorns"
02:26 – Who is Batuhan Avucan and what is Mobidictum
03:45 – Turkey's investment story: from Peak's exit to Series A rounds going underground
08:31 – Jakub's data: Sort at $120M/month, Block, Match-3, Blast and the physics puzzle tip for 2027
12:30 – "We don't train talent, we train founders": the publisher-to-founder pipeline and the puzzle dependency
18:10 – Subsidies, investor mandates and why nobody funds a Turkish RPG
20:27 – China ate every genre except puzzle, so the real threat is Vietnam
24:15 – Mobidictum Conference, Oct 7–8 Istanbul: who's coming and free tickets for our audience
---------------------------------------
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,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Matej Lancaric⁠
Guest: Batuhan Avucan

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

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 the game: a Hole 'Em All-style timed core with the smart differentiators (live animals that jump and hide in levels, a level-based "album" of collectible objectives, and an untimed Zen Garden mode that conveniently makes the "no timer, no stress" creatives true), then the category detective work — the whole thing traces back to Donut County's 2017 Steam trailer, which Voodoo copied into Hole.io (still 300K downloads a day today after a revival), and now Hole 'Em All, Moon Active's Hole Stars, ironSource's Holey 3D, Grand Games' Jelly Hole, and a spiky Hong Kong "Hole Busters" are all fighting for it. Felix's ad-mon read: interstitials only from level 35, rewarded from level 50, eight placements, ad revenue likely under 15% — a deliberate IAP-first, retention-first setup (D1 probably north of 50%, 36 minutes a day).

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Suck It Up — Tactile's new hole game
02:40 The core — timed levels, live animals, and the Zen Garden "no stress" mode
06:40 Album, no-ads pack & the slim feature set
09:20 The numbers — $30K/day, about to pass Lily's Garden
11:00 The category — from Donut County's trailer to Hole.io's 300K/day
14:50 Who's in the hole race — Hole 'Em All, Moon Active, ironSource, Hole Busters
19:40 Ad-mon — interstitials at 35, rewarded at 50, retention play
24:30 The UA — 60 playables, Unity works, and Facebook is gone

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

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, pirates, Egyptians with AK-47s), the King Shot slap-skit upgraded so the guy saves a princess first, fake "watch an ad" callouts on a game with no ads, and the same skit shipped with the actor's nationality swapped per region.

107 AI creatives: Block Blast's genuinely clever "frame anything into a level" trick, Last Asylum's Attack-on-Titan-style spot with no end card (you don't need one — slap a playable after it), a new Lilith 4X scaling from 100K to 200K downloads a day on golden-AK "mushroom budget" ads, Dream Games lifting Travel Town's strawberry micro-drama wholesale, 37 Games' Walking Dead-alike, Top Heroes' Rock-from-Wish mermaid genie, and Supercent's Bulldozer Master doing 200K downloads a day on Truck-Star demolition and the "I own a mine, you can too" meme.

Jakub's closing puzzle: how do King Shot and Lord Rush both scale on identical creatives? Matej's answer: nobody cares. It's mobile.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Everything is AI — and the dying friend
05:10 Block Blast — frame anything into a level
07:25 Century's AI push — King Shot skits, Lord Rush at 5,000/month
15:55 Top Force — Mel Gibson from Wish, toy soldiers, instant localization
18:50 Last Asylum's anime spot — you don't need an end card
20:10 Lilith's new 4X — golden AKs, 200K downloads/day
32:15 Supercent — Pizza Ready, Smashdown tests & Bulldozer Master

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

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 the Friday news and reads between the lines: AppLovin's biggest advantage is that everyone mediates on MAX, and anyone training on that data erodes it — so the vault is closing, and this won't be the last ban.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Friday news — three stories and the weather
00:45 AppLovin's blog: ad quality tools, not data collection
04:20 Reading between the lines — protecting MAX's data moat
05:50 Sega x Netflix: Crazy Taxi, Sonic, Stranger Than Heaven
07:20 Games make movies now — the pipeline flipped
08:00 Oakever sued: lost to Hungry Studio, fighting Avia Games
10:15 The weather — Meow Doku #1 on both stores

📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS

— AppLovin Ad Review will only show aggregated data by network, ad unit, and creative — no more user-level ad journeys.
— Felix's read: it's about stopping rivals from training bidders on MAX's mediated stream. Expect more restrictions.
— Games now spawn movies, not the reverse — Sega x Netflix is the proof.
— Oakever lost to Hungry Studio in April (QBlock vs. Block Blast) and faces an Avia Games case over copied ads.
— Cloning may finally have consequences; these rulings become precedent.
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

❤️