The old way of buying an MMP took weeks — sales calls, demos, contracts, CSM onboarding, documentation. Airbridge just collapsed that into a couple of hours.

Core Plan: https://abr.ge/xqaqqlu

Use code Matej26 for bonus attributed installs!

Matej Lančarič sits down with Roi Nam, CEO and founder of Airbridge, to unpack Core Plan — a self-serve, pay-as-you-go MMP that comes with 15,000 attributed installs free for a year. They get into why now (AI has driven a ~60% year-over-year jump in app releases, and those founders need measurement fast), who it's for (founders under $10M ARR, teams of 1-20, mostly consumer and subscription apps), how the AI-native onboarding works (MCP and an AI pilot that installs the SDK and builds reports for you), what got stripped out to keep it "core," and the roadmap — instant pre-SDK analysis from your ad accounts, easier web-to-app, and built-in signal engineering. On that last point: Roi shares how one sleep-tracking app cut CPA 27% with the simplest signal-engineering tactic — delaying the cancellation signal to Meta.

The throughline: measurement should be as fast as the AI tools founders already use.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Meet Roi and Airbridge

00:45 What Core Plan actually is — 15K free installs

02:31 Why now — AI and the 60% jump in app releases

05:04 How Core Plan differs from the enterprise plans

07:15 The AI pilot and MCP — SDK install in 2 hours

12:05 The roadmap — pre-SDK analysis and web-to-app

14:18 Signal engineering and the 27% CPA win

19:08 Who's signing up — the thick-tail app market

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📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS

— Airbridge launched Core Plan, its first-ever product-led-growth motion in 10 years as an MMP. It's self-serve and pay-as-you-go, with 15,000 attributed installs free for one year, then 5 cents per attributed install (installs, not conversions) after that. Founders can sign up on the dashboard and be running in 2-3 hours.

— The "why now" is AI. App releases are up roughly 60% year-over-year (per a16z) as founders use AI to research, pick a segment, and ship apps in days. But while AI tools deliver value in minutes, MMPs historically took weeks to two months to onboard — sales calls, contracts, CSM, documentation. Core Plan closes that speed gap.

— The target is small-to-mid-market founders under $10M ARR, teams of 1-20, who grow primarily through UA. Currently ~85% apps (vs games), ~60% subscription apps, with more than half of users from the US, UK, and Europe but sign-ups genuinely global.

— Core Plan is ~65% of the enterprise feature set. It keeps the essentials — cohort analysis, raw data export, deep linking, up to two integrations (RevenueCat, Adapty, AdMob, Amplitude, Mixpanel, Braze) — and strips advanced reporting, multi-touch attribution, incrementality, and agency/security management. The 15K free installs are calibrated to get an early app to ~$3-5K MRR and prove product-market fit.

— The AI-native onboarding is the core differentiator. An MCP integration (drop it into Claude Code or Codex) plus an embedded AI pilot lets founders install the SDK, set up taxonomy, place tracking codes, and generate reports by asking — instead of reading documentation for hours. Tech-savvy founders are getting the SDK live in 2-3 hours vs the 2-month enterprise timeline.

— Signal engineering is the sleeper topic. Everyone talks about it; almost nobody implements it. The idea: ~20% of trial subscribers cancel within 20-30 minutes, and sending that signal to Meta/Google can mislead the algorithm about your real audience. The fix can be as simple as delaying the cancellation signal by ~2 hours. One sleep-tracking app (a category leader in Japan) cut CPA by 27% with that single tactic. Airbridge wants to make this a toggle on the dashboard rather than a custom engineering project.

🎙️ HOST

Matej Lančarič — User Acquisition consultant

🎤 GUEST

Roi Nam — CEO & Founder, Airbridge

Supercell rebooted MoCo, their monster-hunting RPG, with a big relaunch update - new weapons, new abilities, redesigned portals, daily jobs. The hype cycle lit up. And after playing it, the verdict is brutal: it's still dead on arrival.

Matej Lančarič, Jakub Remiar, and Felix Braberg dig into the MoCo relaunch and why it doesn't fix the game's core problem. MoCo launched in March 2025 with a download spike, hit a hard shark fin, and the relaunch pumped it back up to roughly 230K DAU — but only around $14K/day in revenue and ~$5M lifetime (about one peak day of Brawl Stars). Jakub's diagnosis as a hardcore RPG player: the game has no depth, no chase items, no endgame, just farming stat-cores and a cosmetics shop. The relaunch added "depth-ish" — a little bit of depth sprinkled into the depth — but lightweight RPGs don't exist, and Supercell's broad-and-accessible business model is fundamentally incompatible with what makes RPGs work.

The conclusion the hosts land on is uncomfortable: in its current state, MoCo is essentially unsalvageable as an RPG. Either pivot it into a MOBA, or kill it and go back to strategy games — the thing Supercell is genuinely great at.

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⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Cold open — what does this mean for Supercell?

02:19 The relaunch and the search for one positive sign

03:30 The numbers — shark fin, 230K DAU, $14K/day

07:40 The core problem — no depth, no chase items

12:50 "Gen Z slop": why the RPG genre rejects this

16:00 The endgame problem — stat-cores and cosmetics

26:00 MoCo vs Diablo Immortal vs Path of Exile

30:45 The verdict — kill it or pivot to MOBA

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

Direct-to-consumer is finally out of the shadows. Eight public studios just revealed how much revenue they drive through D2C — and the numbers make the case better than any pitch could. But there's a window closing, and the studios moving now are the ones who'll win.

We are joined by Chip Thurston (FastSpring) for a D2C deep-dive built around the Pocket Gamer report aggregating publicly disclosed D2C revenue. They break down the three cohorts (social casino, mid-core, casual) and what each tells us, the standout data points (Playtika at 39% of revenue, Fishing Clash at 33%, Double Down at 44%), the difference between direct-checkout links and web stores and why you need both, Google's new External Content Links policy, the still-unapproved Epic v. Google settlement and its 20% linked-payment fee, where Apple's appeals stand after the Supreme Court declined to hear them, and the single most actionable takeaway: maximize US D2C traffic today, while you can still steer without fees.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Cold open — maximize US D2C traffic today

01:35 The Pocket Gamer D2C report and why it matters

05:35 The three cohorts — social casino, mid-core, casual

11:50 Direct checkout vs web store — the frictionless path

16:00 Google's External Content Links policy explained

21:20 The Epic v. Google settlement and the 20% fee

30:10 Where Apple stands after the Supreme Court

36:20 Casual works too — Playtika and the playbook

📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS

— D2C is out of the shadows. A Pocket Gamer report (by Craig Chappell) aggregates publicly disclosed D2C revenue from eight studios — Playtika, MTG, Stillfront, SciPlay, PlayStudios, Tensquare, Huuuge, G5, Take-Two. For the first time, studios are openly reporting D2C as a positive earnings story rather than treating it as a cloak-and-dagger tactic.

— Three cohorts, all winning. Social casino (SciPlay, PlayStudios, Huuuge, Double Down at 44%) leads because revenue is VIP-concentrated — shift a few whales and you shift a big share of revenue. Mid-core (MTG, Stillfront, Tensquare) ranges up to 44%.

— Direct checkout vs web store is the key strategic choice. Direct-checkout links (skip the store, go straight to a hosted checkout page, bounce back to the game) are the most frictionless path available today and can push you over 50% D2C. But every direct-checkout link is a "linked payment" that would incur the 20% fee under the coming settlement — so the durable play is habituating players to your web store as a destination they'll return to regardless.

— Google's External Content Links policy is the first salvo. In effect since January 28, 2026 (US only for now), it requires enrolling via an API to link to external content — or your app updates get disapproved. No fees yet (they legally can't), but it lays the groundwork for the 20% linked-payment fee with a 24-hour attribution window once the settlement is approved.

— The Epic v. Google settlement is still unapproved and the dates are slipping. Google intended its new fee structure to take effect June 30, 2026 (US and Europe), but the court is skeptical and hasn't approved it. The structure decouples the old 30% into a 5% Google Play billing fee plus a 20-25% platform fee (varying by install date), with carve-outs for first $1M (10%) and subscriptions (10% + 5%). The cosmetic-vs-power-item distinction was dropped entirely.

— The actionable playbook: maximize US D2C today with a mix of direct-checkout and web-store links (to habituate players for the fee future). Learn from the disclosed studios (Raid Shadow Legends' web-store points flywheel is a great model). And treat Japan — which already allows steering with fees under its Mobile Software Competition Act — as a soft launch for the fee-based future of D2C.

🎙️ HOSTS

Matej Lančarič — User Acquisition consultant

Jakub Remiar — Game Design consultant

Felix Braberg — Ad Monetization consultant

🎤 GUEST

Chip Thurston — FastSpring