Ad Monetization Secrets: Top Mobile Games Printing $$$ in 2025

All right. How much do you think this is generating per day if you look at this active user base in ad revenue? Oh, ad revenue. Uh 70k, 72k a day currently, plus another 6k a day in APS. Not bad. So close to 80k, which is not bad. And they're [ __ ] printing money. Yeah, I mean Vietnam is uh firing in all cylinders. And this is not their like first game we are talking about. Definitely not the last one. I'm pretty sure notice with making those coins rise up worlds chasing the sky. We're the two and a half gamers the midnight crew talking u mate feel bringing the insight we're rocking those vibes till the early day master eyes on the prize tracking data through the cyerspace skies. Felix stacks dollars like a wizard in disguise. Jack crafter realms lift us to

the highest. Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey sick. Got your back. Ads are beautiful. They like the way. Click it fast. Don't delay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Your host. If we can. What? Hello. Hello. Are you here, Mr. Yakob? [ __ ] eggs. Hey, what a whale. Welcome everybody. Wait, did you say X or eggs? Why eggs or eggs? Because it's Easter. Easter is coming. Easter is coming. Oh well, he's going to be live when Easter was already behind us. All right. Anyway, let's start. 3 2 1 go. Hello, [ __ ] X. There you go. All right, let's start again. 3 2 1 go.

Hello. All right, welcome everybody. This is the third time we actually start a podcast. It's fine. Uh, we are talking about admonetization trends. My name is Matthew Lancherich. I'm Felix Prog. And I'm yours. I work maybe. Ah, we can and match is completely right. Today is this magical episode once time a quarter where we actually look at ad monetization trends. We basically pay tribute to the unsung heroes of mobile that don't get enough attention. So we as a two and a half gamers take you where no other podcast goes. So today I have six games that were all most of them were launched in March actually. One was launched in February and one was launched a year ago. But they're in various stages of scaling and I am going to show you all of them. But also it's

do you think you think they you said scaling do you think they have a partner for scaling? Maybe because today's episode is brought to you by PVX partners simplest and most effective great life for marketing. Because if you are scaling your game and need funding, here's the deal. PBX Partners, no equity dilution.com. Don't forget about it. You can repay as you get paid. It's flexible and fast because then you can get funding within 30 days and get a term sheet in just 24 hours. So don't wait. Take control of your UA budget without giving away a piece of your company. pvxpartners.com. Visit the site, tell them two and a half gamers sent you and get the money for scaling your game. Thank you very much PVX partners. Great. Thank you PVX Mate for that helping announcement for helping with scale. Yeah, of course. So, not only am I going to go through six ad monetized games today and show you what's kind of

trending, I'm also going to be doing this while balancing another skill. So, a couple weeks ago, I poured whiskey on my computer cuz, you know, I thought it was fun at the moment, which broke one of my ports. I only have one screen, so I'm I'm looking around on a lot of notes. That's the reason I might be a bit slower. But Jesus Christ, even more slower. God help us. God help us. So, let's start move you guys away. So, Cooking launched by ABI games in March this year. Are you sharing because you are not sharing? I'm sharing. No. Nope. No, you're not. What about this? What about now? Uh, no. No. Still nothing. Why is it not? I have to rejoin. It says what the [ __ ] We can do We can do uh admonetization trends without Felix. So dear listeners, Felix just disappeared, which is fine because, you know, nobody

nobody cares about ads anymore. So this is the theization trends for this quarter. Thank you very much for listening. And we are go we are good to go. Hello. I didn't see you there, Mr. Felix. Where were you? We're talking about sharing. Was a little bit stronger. How the [ __ ] is it this hard to share a goddamn screen? Like seriously, Riverside, you're turning into a garbage. No, it's just I think the problem is on your end, but I'll try to join from the mobile up. No. Why? What? What was what is happening? What just what's happening? This is such a And we are back to this amazing episode. You say okay one more time. I swear to God. [ __ ] yourself. Flying to Lisbon.

We'll fly to Lisbon and we'll grab a nice dinner. But first of first of all, let's start off with the first game on the list which is Cooking by Abi Game Studios, our friends from Vietnam. So, this game was launched in March this year and already has racked up, as you can see here, a quite impressive daily active user. As you can see, it's about 104,000 daily active. And as you can see here, if you look at alltime user base started in March, and as you can see, it's growing. And what's happening here is that essentially Abby Games just like Microphone or River Game, they have started to build a template for the kind of ultra casual admonetized games. And basically what they're doing is they're reskinning status status. And what they're doing old game the old members.

Anyway, let me show you. Uh, the old nemesis indeed. The old nemesis indeed. Okay. So, uhoh. I'm not sure you're going to show copy. I think I saw that. Yeah, the cap I think is kind of an ongoing trend in the one today. But it looks like I don't think you're going to play. I'm not sure. I don't think so either. Anyway, let me find a video. Yeah. Oh, emulate what? Kingdom. So, it's exactly what you think it is. So, it's a bunch of small games that you have to do that all revolve around cooking. And you don't know the levels. They're completely unrelated. So, it's exactly a status. A status. God damn.

Really hard, huh? He's really hard. What you have to do is Yeah, like this one. This is level one. What you have to do is just make a pizza and then you finish it and then you have to cut it with laser precision tools and if you want hints. So these are all timer based. So it's like four and a half or 5 minutes to solve it and then you have to put out the pizza and then you have to make the pizza. So what all these games essentially do is you watch a lot of ads. So, from the get- go, you actually have banner ads. You have interstitial ads between each level, and then you also have rewarded ads that can kind of solve and give you hints. Cuz some of these games, like they're not as straightforward as you think. Like, for example, here on level two, when you have to coers a chicken into giving you the eggs for an omelette, there's kind of no hints on how to do it, right? You can see here is life. Exactly. and then you have to make it. But as you can see, this is exactly the same miniame template as they've used before.

And what they're just doing is taking this like format and then reskinning the games on different things that I'm assuming has low CPI. And we can see here if we look at downloads that just like in the other time, so this game has been downloaded 5.2 2 million times since launching in end of March, which is quite impressive. It's pretty impressive. And right now, it's kind of the developing nations. But as we saw before with these games, right, they start off with this and then they actually expand to tier one geographies as well. We're actually going to cover we're going to cover two ABI games in this one. But do you guys want to take a guess on what the ad revenue currently is in the last 30 days on average? Like 20k. A capy bar cooking game. Capy bar cooking game. Maybe 30k. By the way, this look like Dave the Diver reskin.

No. Yeah. So, yeah. Chopping lettuce. Do you guys want to take a guess? Not more. I That's maybe a little bit more than they they're earning. I'd estimate that this right now is generating anywhere between 43 to 55k a day. No. No way. I mean from Brazil. Seriously? Yeah, dude. There's almost a million users, man. You have active users? 400,000. 900,000. Oh, 900. Okay. Okay. Maybe, maybe there's no US. What? No, no US. UK? No US. So, it's it might not be like like global launched actually. That's what I'm saying. But basically, I'm assuming that basically what ABI games is doing is just sticking to their templates and just getting genre

expertise in kind of the ultra casual level based. I don't think you you use the the word template correctly. No, why not? No, the template is something different. I would say the template would be if they have all the events maybe in the in this case template would be just the admonetization stag and placements at the same in the same places. This is just another game which is admonetized and they're doing it very well. But I don't think this is a template. All right, put a pin in that because we're actually going to do one more ABI games towards the end which is actually only launched in the US where they actually have events where actually they're going after more the AP thing. But keep that in mind when we're going through it a bit later. Okay, but before doing that, I want to talk about Merge Sticker Playbook by Lion Studios. It sounds already pretty good.

So, this game launched, I guess it's been a soft launch, but it actually global launched. Yeah. Around March 20th, and it's already racked up a bunch of about a million downloads. Yeah. About about a million about a million about a million downloads. And as you can see here, Russia, UK, Japan, all these ones. And what it's actually doing as well has very low APS but actually quite interesting gameplay which I want to showcase now if my maybe emulator. There you go. Okay. Alliance Studios. Interesting.

All right. So, the core game play basically is that you have to fill these color coding like color books and you fill them up with stickers by essentially playing the levels. So, this is what you can look at. This is like fruit merge, color book, and triple match 3D kind of combined into one where you match things. And when you match things, you have to match them three times and then you can call for more things and then once you match them. Yeah, that's definitely free merch. Nice. Yeah. So jumping on these trends, right? So it's like you request a bunch of stuff, they comes down colors. Yeah. What happens once you match it into color? So once you match them to color and then one more then basically they go down here and basically you fill up the power and then once you have 23 out of 23 for example that's when uh for example we'll get it

now soon in a flower here and then you match it in and then it goes down here on the greenhouse and once you have all of them that's when the level is complete and essentially then you're taken to a coloring book where you place all these items on one place and you essentially finish up the picture here. There's one I made earlier. Look how beautiful spaces. Interesting core. Interesting. Yeah, it's one of those cores that try to spread you like butter on a two big bread where it just feeds you interstitials and banners in the meantime. Exactly. I hope so. That's exactly what they're trying to do here. but it has a little bit of AP. But I think this is just a bit early stage what's going on. But I think the core gameplay is actually quite interesting right now. It's not making that much money. But it's one of the new launches that actually what not it's not

making that much money that No, no, no. It's basically 6K on on uh on IP revenue a day and another 18 a day in ad revenue because the largest geos like I showed you before, UK, Russia, those type of geos. So, it's not really big in the US uh starting now, but still quite interesting to keep a look on. The next thing I wanted to show is by Monday. So, the hyper casual studio from Monday. Sunday. Sunday. So, Monday. Monday is after Sunday. Jeez, this is always the joke about Sunday, but now it's Monday. Okay. But this is hamster escape by Sunday, not Monday. And Sunday is the hyper casual studio from I think they're in based in Hamburg, but they're definitely German. And what they have launched right now is a game that's a level puzzle game where you are a hero hamster that needs to escape. And it's a bit like Robbery Bob,

a cute version of that. And while you're escaping in the house, you're ascended from various puzzles. You're actually watching a lot of ads as well. Can we see the core also? They have dog escape and cast cat escape as well. Just by the way. And this is hamster escape is a CPI play. I mean the hamster is super cute. I would go with capy bar escape as well and then something else as well because here you go. So this is a game that's kind of difficult to play on the emulator but you'll get the gist of everything is easy on emulator. Not. Some games are not easy. Bind your keyboard or what? No. Ban my keyboard. Why? Of course. No. Yeah, exactly. I mean, let's just leave him alone. He's not having a great time. I can see that. There you go. Yeah. So, this is it. What's the hard part on this on the

emulator? It's not what are we looking at ad? I know it's an ad. Thief escape their own ad. No, it's actually a competing app. Okay. The hamster. It follows you when when you click or Yeah, it's super easy if you're playing it on the phone, I guess, but it's a bit difficult on the emulator. I need to play more games, man. Yeah, exactly. More muscle memory. Do you guys want to open the box and watch a reward ad or do you want to lose it? What's in the box? Lose it. I lose it. What's in the box? I rewarded it. What's in the box? Yeah, there you go. So, dear listeners, we are playing Hamster Escape, the latest of Screw Master. There we go. We're going to talk about this game as

well. Stay tuned. Yeah, that's an ad for our episode. Yeah, exactly. It's an ad for an episode. Thank you very much, Supersonic. H it's going to be live in two months. Anyway, I think this game is currently generating anywhere between 9 to 15K in ad revenue a day, but I thought it was just a cute iteration of their other games that's actually scaling. Now, for the weirdest of all the games, which actually can't play on the emulator, but it's kind of a what can you say? It's a continuation on the trend of porting Steam games and basically putting in a lot of ads on it and it doesn't really work but it's generating a ton of organic downloads. So this is Repo Mobile. So is that it is a let me read here from it because it's a online horror co-op game where you can play up with six players to complete

tasks and basically you work together to do physics based what I know the game the steam you know yeah he just died he just died you you heard that noise what is it you continue I'll I'll let you know in the meantime Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just do the the dedic. So, this game has about, as you can see now, close to a million daily active users and has generated about 4.6 million downloads since it launched in early March. That's actually interesting. But basically, it's I guess I don't know if it's a ripoff or if it's actually the real one. Yeah. Let me show you the game play. Right. So, let me show you here. Right. So, what you're doing is you're going around solving riddles and tasks while you're actually getting scared. So, this is a tutorial. But the interesting thing is, right, it's pretty much all organic downloads. And what they do is that they

show so many interstitials during the game play that they actually rack up almost like 10 interstitial ads I would assume per daily active user which means that sure the ad revenue I estimate only to be about 20 a day but it's all organics so it's most certainly all profit which is super interesting. Do you know something about this game rea? It's Lethal Company is the game. Lethal company. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I I know that. Give me the give me the screen. I'll show you. Mine works. There you go. Uh so there was this game that was all the rave about and my guess is this is just continuation of it which is called Little Company. 23rd of October 2023. It has literally around 400,000 overwhelmingly positive reviews. Nice. 97% and as you can expect

I can't hear anything you can't hear what me or the Yeah now now I can hear but you were mumbling okay so you are part of like insurance company and then you need to go and ensure some catastrophe or whatever something somewhere happened and it's like a horror movie like you see and you go with your friends and it's all dark and there's puzzles to solve and like do stuff yada yada yada yada yada. So you can see pretty much that this is the thing that Felix was showing around. So this is I think this is just a ripoff of that because I don't think this is as good. What? No, of course the mobile version. The one I'm just talking about. The mobile version mobile is a ripoff of this. Yes, that is what I'm saying. No. Yeah. Now, let's see if can share the

screen again. It's going to be a lot of fun. I hear myself. I see myself again. Okay, good. Hello. [ __ ] All right. I don't see myself. Yeah. So, anyway, so it's all organic and I guess this is a ripoff, but I guess if you can generate between 23 to 30K a day from interstitial ads from just organic traffic, it's not a bad thing to do, I guess. No, it's it's one of those things that we still talk about like Steam stuff being ported to mobile pretty easily. Kind of works. Yeah, it kind of works. Kind of proven. Kind of already has audience. Kind of easy money. Yeah. All right. Now, remember what I said about ABI games on the first game when we reviewed it. So, let me show you the premium version of what I was talking about before is Dreamy Rooms by Premium. Why is it premium version? I'll show you. So, this game was launched in early February, and since then, it's generated about 10 million downloads and 100K in IP

revenue. And let me show you here in the last 30 days, users. It's missing the US, that's why. Yeah. So you can see here that 3,000 daily active users in the states and this game is I guess ABI's take on trying to generate AP revenue because what they're doing is they're jumping on the whole decorative trend where taking it to the ultra casual side. So let me show you some gameplay. Hello. Hello. So this is the template one. Yeah, let me show you. So, it's still level based that you do each level, but here what you're doing is you're essentially decorating rooms. And you can see they're quite heavy on the removing ads. But what you have to do is you get given a room and you get given a box. You get given hints just

like in the other ultra casual games that they have. And then you have to place these items to decorate your room. Does it matter? Does it matter how you decorate it? 100%. Yeah. You have to put it in the right place which makes it tricky. Yeah. How do you know if it's the right place? You don't. You just try different things like this. So, this kind of would fit here. You just need to There's no I don't even know what this is, right? Yeah. Here's a toilet. All right. So, we're looking we're kind of trying to find out what's what's this this all about. Yeah. This is it. So, basically what you're doing is Yeah, it's I mean it's not easy. Where do you want to put this? Yeah. Can you rotate these things? No, it's just this way. Like this is the way. Nice. Plant. Where do you want to put

the plant? There. Awesome. Okay. So, I think you can just stop playing this anyway. They go. Okay. To the main menu. So, you have your offers. You have your remove ads. You have your shop where basically you can remove ads. You can buy your VIP dreamer pass. But you can see that basically has a lot more depth than the other ones that they're doing. So they're trying to essentially add an economy on top of everything to generate AP sales. Where's the depth? Yeah. And where's the template? I mean, this is just a UI. So basically, it's like the UI, the level based, and then you're going in here. Please don't don't do it again. Go more games. Please don't do it again. I mean I I'm kind of I see where you are going with this, but they're very far from anything you can call a template in

my opinion. What do you think, Remo? Template should be something that you reuse one to one. Yeah. And I mean several games, not just one. All right. How much do you think this is generating per day if you look at this active user base in ad revenue? Oh, in ad revenue. Uh 150k US. 72k a day currently. Plus another 6k a day in APS. Pretty good. So close to 80k. Yeah. Which is not bad. And they're [ __ ] printing money. A Vietnam is uh firing on all cylinders. And this is not their like first game we are talking about. Definitely not the last one. I'm pretty sure. Sure. Not. Oh yeah. But I did save the best for last because this is actually quite interesting. So I wanted to talk about word search explorer by play simple games that got taken over by MTG. So this was actually launched a year ago uh in I think it was in April last year.

Yeah. But as you can see it started to scale to an absolutely crazy level. So right now the DAU is close to 3 million users. And what this is is a iteration where basically they've taken the game play and the core from wordcapes and basically changed the actual gameplay that you're doing. So instead of solving word puzzles and finding words, you're actually doing a cross word puzzle instead. And by the looks of it, it's super effective whatever they're doing. And let me show you the user base breakdown by countries. So nearly a million users in the US daily active in the last 30 days and it's just in the last month when they've actually hit crazy scale. Let me show you this as well. It's a game. I'll show you afterwards.

App. So it's been downloaded 46 million times since last year, which is quite impressive. Do stack man. So, so I I I see it like in I'm going to show you the gameplay cuz you're going to see exactly what they're doing. Yeah. All right. So, it's exactly like your wordcapes core where you're playing each. I love this prototypey UI menus where it looks like it was done by intern. Yeah, exactly. I mean, what what else do you need? You can remove ads and the game play is you get hints which you have to watch for. I see the curse. I see the curse. They vanish as well. Spear gift. Yeah. Well, it's a level six so it's it's really easy. Where's rabbit? Here we go. Curse is in the prank. Yeah. The bottom. Yes. There you

go. Okay. So, this is it. Thank you very much. Between some levels. Yeah, you're showing interstitials. But essentially the most interesting thing here is right that wordcapes I estimated before the show is generating about 260k a day in revenue and 45k a day in ad revenue. How much do you think this right now is generating? Cuz basically if it stays on this trend you just said it. No no that was wordcapes. This is not working. Needs to be more than 186 because it won't be interesting otherwise. No. So basically this right now generates 160k a day in ad revenue but it's growing and if it keeps growing like this for another month it's going to be lar larger than words which is the largest word find. So and that's all I had for you on this ad monetization episode. It was so much so much fun. all the technical issues. I mean, come

on. Do you need a do you need an like extra person just for all these like screen sharing like a technician or someone? I'm on one screen. I'm on one screen as well. I mean, come on. I have my MacBook. I'm downstairs and that's it. Only thing I have is just, you know, extra stuff. Anyway, so what are the trends? What was the the important what was the important part that we should we should uh take from this episode? This is what's going on. Okay, so the most interesting one is the one that's going to be the most biggest word based ad monetization game. Yeah, that's what I got from from it. And it's by who? What was the play simple games which got bought by Modern Times Group from Stockholm. Yeah. Yeah. So that's interesting, of course, but everything else is also interesting. The Vietnamese studios, especially ABI, we're going to pick up the room

game if it grows. Definitely. For sure. Beats beats like my because I guess I have a little bit higher metrics for scale. Yeah. But still, I wonder how many other Vietnamese games we will cover in the future because I I think it's it's just becoming We might just move we might just move to Vietnam, right? No, it's just we need to have a segment of for forex and then for Vietnam. What's going on in Vietnam? Yeah, what's going on in Vietnam? Like every week there's something new coming and the same thing is Forex. It's insane. I just wait when they start making forex in Vietnam. Well, I don't think that's going to happen though. Quite a far away. They still have to crack the IP riddle, right? Do you remember? Screw the They're going to first fight it out with the Turks, the Vietnam and the Turks. that's going to end up with the hybrid casual stuff. Casual is still going to be Turks, so that that's there. And then we'll see what happens on the forex front because there I think it's more of like consolidation on the Chinese one. Well, you heard that

there's 100 Forex games coming from China. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's going to be more and more. Yeah. Going to be interesting. Okay. So, thank you very much for listening. Please subscribe, join the Slack channel. Also write uh anything on your mind into the comment section because that's what we want to hear from you guys. If you have any other game that we should cover, please let us know. And I think yeah, see you see you next time. Bye. Bye. [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Great. Ah, anyway, I guess this is not

salvageable. [ __ ] I thought Yeah, if only if he he joins and then he can share, then we can we can go. I told him I need if we don't start recording. Oh no. Then I need to go upstairs. Why mobile app? I don't get it. It's okay. I guess this is exactly what adation does to people. Oh my god. Great. Oh, okay. I didn't see it didn't work joining from It didn't work joining from the from the from the desktop. From the desktop. That's what I meant. Why is it not showing the whole screen? I don't know. Just share the screen and click the button. Now, there's an issue. It says on the right side there's an issue. So, we can stop, rejoin, and then do it again. A second to come now. No, no. This is

great because if everything fails, I see myself. Hey, hey, hello. If everything fails, then restart your [ __ ] computer and then it works. Yeah. Thank you very much. Okay.