Two Gamers again, and this time we review Bulldozer Master from Supercent, the Korean studio behind Pizza Ready. It looks like something vibe-coded over two weekends, and it works anyway. Jakub plays the loop: dig ore blocks, carry them Golden Goblins-style to the refinery, sell, and upgrade move speed, hammers and furnace. Then you rent heavy machinery that runs on fuel (hydraulic breakers, drill crushers, exo-carriers), hire workers who need pizza breaks, and prestige into company upgrades. It’s simple, idle-friendly, and built directly from its own ads.

The creatives are the real story: 2,700 of them, Trackstar-style truck ads, AI videos of drilling gold walls, a Chrome Valley Customs look, a Bumblebee from Wish, and even a Kingshot salad, spread across AppLovin, Mintegral, Unity and Facebook. Matej also shares how Mintegral became one of One Mage Army’s best channels within a week. The formula: take a 4X creative, build the gameplay around it, then scale and profit.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 – 50K DAU in the US

01:12 – Two Gamers: “games don’t need to look good, they need to scale”

02:47 – Core loop: dig, carry, refine, sell (Golden Goblins with a bulldozer)

05:16 – Machinery rental, fuel, workers, pizza breaks and prestige

12:30 – Numbers: 200K/day, 600K DAU, Pizza Ready’s half a billion downloads

17:18 – Felix from Wish: 29 rewarded, 1 interstitial, ~$70K/day

19:27 – Creatives: Trackstar, AI gold drilling, Bumblebee from Wish, 2,700 ads

28:36 – The formula: 4X creative → gameplay → scale, plus a channel mix beyond AppLovin

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

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Today's episode is brought to you by PvX Partners. Developers now have a new way to fund their marketing: PvX Card.

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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.

Our sponsor FastSpring:

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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,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Matej Lancaric⁠

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

Our monthly Playable Trends is back. Matej, Ondrej and Robin each bring three playables that caught their eye and take them apart. Matej opens with Royal Kingdom’s “harder than you think” ball-physics level (save three characters, no snakes for once), a raft-rescue survival playable that turns out to be a 4X game, and Paper.io 2 using a Pocket Champs-style hook without hiding which game it is. Ondrej brings three from Voodoo: a Pixel Flow-style conveyor sort that is honestly harder than you think (he still can’t beat it), a satisfying ball-drop sorter you finish just by tapping, and a room-based platformer that sent us straight back to Dangerous Dave.

Robin shows a sushi reskin of Pixel Flow (Ondrej rebuilt it in Playable Maker), Car Evolve’s slingshot upgrade loop, which ran five minutes before the CTA appeared (Robin fed the source to Claude to start with 5M coins), and Last Asylum running four different mechanics for the same game: Township-style building, Kingshot-style tower defense, roguelike survival and 4X. Last Asylum has gone from a handful of playables to ~1,200 in 30 days, and Kingshot still makes far more money. We close by filtering Sensor Tower to Asia (spoiler: good playables work everywhere, maybe with more family drama and a bit more grind) and looking at seasonal creatives: Golf Clash running Halloween for a year, and a Christmas video still live in July because it was the best performer.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 – Cold open: the playable that never ends

05:23 – Matej: Royal Kingdom’s “harder than you think” physics level

10:26 – The WTF pick: a raft rescue that’s secretly 4X, plus Paper.io 2 with a Pocket Champs hook

17:23 – Ondrej’s Voodoo trio: impossible color sort, ball conveyor, Dangerous Dave vibes

24:25 – Robin: Pixel Flow, but sushi

27:13 – Car Evolve: 5 minutes before the CTA, and we hacked it with Claude

32:25 – Last Asylum: one game, four mechanics, ~1,200 playables in 30 days

40:18 – Asia vs West playables, and do seasonal creatives actually work?

📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS

— Reskin a proven mechanic (Pixel Flow → sushi) and you have a new ad

— One game can be sold through four mechanics; each one attracts a different player

— “Harder than you think” works only if it is actually hard, but finishable

— Mechanics travel across markets; difficulty and grind may need tuning for Asia

🎙️ HOSTS

Matej Lancaric, Ondrej Monsberger, Robin Kuyer

🙏 SPONSORS

Potensus – premium ad network with direct brand deals (Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, Vodafone) and Playable Maker-built formats: https://potensus.com

PVX Partners – fund your UA with PVX Card, credit that grows with your ROAS: https://pvxpartners.com/cards

Kinoa – AI operating system for live ops, segments and game ops: http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100

FastSpring – the no-drama D2C for mobile publishers: https://fastspring.gg

Data courtesy of Sensor Tower

Seen a playable we should cover? Drop it in the comments or the Slack channel.

Subscribe for more playables, creatives and UA: https://www.youtube.com/@twoandahalfgamers

#playableads #playables #mobilegames #creatives #UA #useracquisition #Voodoo #RoyalKingdom #LastAsylum #PixelFlow #PaperIO #PlayableMaker #SensorTower #twoandahalfgamers #Potensus #PVXPartners #Kinoa #FastSpring

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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

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 rare live episode. After almost five years of podcasting, we finally tackled one of the games we had been saving for the right moment: Hill Climb Racing 2 from Fingersoft, part of a franchise with more than 2.5 billion downloads across Fingersoft’s games. Felix and Jakub are joined in person by Oona from Fingersoft (ad monetization manager) and Denise Farley from Google (EMEA monetization) to go through the game design, the ad setup and the UA flywheel behind one of the most downloaded games on the planet.

Jakub starts with the design: physics-based arcade driving, many layers of power progression, car upgrades as a soft-currency sink, and a parts gacha that drives most of the IAP revenue. That puts HCR2 at roughly 70/30 IAP vs ads, while the first game is still almost all ads. Then Una covers the ad monetization: almost 30 rewarded placements, some with no daily cap and no limits for payers (“purchasers buy and then they watch”), an ad progression bundle in the style of Monopoly Go chain offers that lifted day-1 rewarded impressions for new users by more than 10%, interstitials that are delayed after every rewarded view, and tests where delaying or removing interstitials barely changed retention. Denise and Una also explain how Fingersoft dropped geo-based mediation groups for 5 tiers based on impression value, built behavior-based custom CPA events to feed back into UA, and use hybrid mediation and ad preloading in AdMob.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 – Cold open: the ad progression bundle

02:12 – Live from Mount Olympus: meet Una (Fingersoft) and Denise (Google)

03:51 – Game design: physics, progression layers, the parts gacha, 70/30 IAP vs ads

08:55 – Ad progression bundle: +10% day-1 rewarded impressions for new users

09:46 – ~30 rewarded placements, no caps for payers, events like the Halloween pumpkin smash

14:42 – Interstitials vs retention, rewarded cooldowns and the meta rewarded placement

19:48 – Behavior segmentation, custom CPAs and 5 tiers based on impression value instead of geo

23:19 – Hybrid mediation, preloading, and why creatives must match the store page

📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS

— Payers are also heavy rewarded watchers, so don’t hide ads from them

— Delay interstitials after each rewarded view to steer players to the higher-paying format

— Segment by impression value, not geo; some tier-3 users bring tier-1 eCPMs

— Your ads and your store page have to show the same game

🎙️ HOSTS & GUESTS

Felix Braberg, Jakub Remiar

Una – Ad Monetization Manager, Fingersoft

Denise Farley – Monetization, Google (EMEA)

Subscribe for more game deep dives, ad monetization and UA:

https://www.youtube.com/@twoandahalfgamers

#mobilegames #HillClimbRacing2 #Fingersoft #admonetization #AdMob #rewardedvideo #hybridmonetization #useracquisition #gamedesign #mobilegaming #gamedev #SensorTower #twoandahalfgamers