🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Record Revenue, Record Layoffs, Why Only 2 Genres Are Actually Winning in 2026

Well, you see all the sophisticated on-boardings, misleading ads, fake ads, whatever, however you want to call it. People have it kind of The U machine behind Last War and Whiteout Survival is [music] what winning operations look like right now. Performance.
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Two and a Half Gamers exclusive. [music]
Breaking news.
Literally [music] breaking.
What's up, everyone? Welcome back to Two and a Half Gamers. My name is Matija Lančarič, and I'm flying solo today again because it's breaking news. And we have proper stuff this week. A massive new gacha just launched and it's everywhere. Yakub is going to be very happy. Felix and me, not that much. These Iron Source Saga finally, and I mean finally, hits its end date. The industry posted record revenue while simultaneously firing tens of thousands

of people. And the genre data behind [music] that tells a very specific story. Adam Froggy went on 20VC podcast and said some genuinely spicy things. You should all listen to this podcast. And Google's [music] ad tech monopoly, well, this case is sitting on a live grenade. Let's talk about that. All right, let's go. So, the NTE biggest mobile launch of the month. Well, let's start with actual news because this is actually a big one. Never NES to Everness, whatever that means and whoever came up with this amazing an amazing name for a game, launched globally on April 29th. PC, Android, iOS, PlayStation 5, Mac, all simultaneously. With full cross-platform version. Developed by Hotta Studio. Same team behind Tower of Fantasy. The pitch is genuinely ambitious. Supernatural urban open-world RPG. Think

GTA meets anime again. Yakub is very happy about this game. It's set in a city called I can't even properly pronounce this name. Where you are actually an anomaly hunter tracking paranormal cases. You can drive Porsches through the city. Persona 5 music collab baked in the the lounge. Cooperative heist mode, ASCII metric horror core mode, lots of other stuff. From UI perspective, this kind of title that's going to spend ton of money. It has IP, production values, cross-platform story to justify massive paid acquisition push. The gacha mechanic is intact. All the characters gacha pull and open-world hook gives them [music] an an enormous and open-world hook gives them an enormous creative surface. What the benchmark? Genshin, Zenless Zone Zero. Can Hotta Studio actually compete at that level after Tower of

Fantasy [music] disappointment? Well, let's see. Apparently, early buzz is strong, but we've seen and been burned before on Chinese open-world gachas. And I'm very sure Yakub's going to at least he's going to talk about this on the podcast. So, we'll be back again with this. Okay. This is the last day of ironSource ad networks. Rest in peace. I want to take a moment with this because it's genuinely the end of an era. Not a good one kind of, but the end wasn't great. The ironSource acquisition was was one of the most controversial deals in mobile gaming history. 4.4 billion dollars. Announced 2022. Shareholders hated it. The The was messy. [music] The timing was terrible, and the combined Unity and ironSource, well, it never became the dominant ad network they promised. And now,

ironSource ad network, [music] well, doesn't exist. The publishing arm, Supersonic, is being sold off as well. Three and a half years later, there's almost nothing left of ironSource inside Unity at all. The silver lining, Unity's actual ad business, the AI-powered platform called Unity I picture, which we already talked about before, grew 80, well, 48% year-over-year, which is not bad. So, let's see. If you're still running ironSource integrations, good luck. Yeah. Well, record profits, record layoffs. And well, who is actually winning? Which is This is the most important structural story in the mobile gaming right now. The numbers this week finally make it very concrete. The global video game industry generated 195.6 billion in revenue in 2025, the highest

annual total on record. At the same time, more than 44,000 development [music] jobs cut since 2022. Another two or three thousand already got in 2026. One in three US developers laid off in the past two years. And 48% of those people are still looking for work. So, how do you have record revenue, record layoffs simultaneously? Well, because the revenue is not being distributed, it's concentrating. And this week, Sensor Tower dropped the State of Gaming 2026 report, and the genre data is very telling. So, 4X strategy is the only genre that's growing in revenue, downloads, and time spent all at once, well, the only one, apparently. Led by Last War War Survival and Whiteout Survival and all, and King Shot and all, pretty much. Two Meanwhile, road books alone accounted for 67% of net market growth last year. Well, what this means in practice is small

number of live service giants are hovering up the entire market growth. Everyone else is competing for the remainder. The studios of winning are mobile native, lean, data driven, AI first,
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in UA and creative. The ones losing are the ones that built for a market that no longer exists. The 4X data is particularly interesting from UA perspective. Well, [music] we talked about it a million times. 4X is one of the categories that are growing. The other one is puzzle or match three. Anyway, 4X. These games run on some of the most aggressive creative testing in mobile. Well, you see all the sophisticated onboardings, misleading ads, fake ads, whatever, however we want to call it. People love it kind of. The UA machine behind last war and whiteout survival is what winning operations look like right now. The performance is undeniable. Okay. Adam Foroughi [music] on 20 VC podcast. This one dropped on April 26th.

And if you haven't listened to it, go listen to it. Adam Foroughi, AppLovin CEO on 20 VC with Harry Stebbings. 81 minutes. Absolutely worth it. I've listened to it I guess five times already and I'm going to listen to it another five times. There's a lot of different stuff. And the 83 million CEO pay day when the stock dropped uh by 92%. AI and layoffs questions pretty much all of interesting things. Is it controversial? Yes. Worth understanding? Also yes, because AppLovin is one of the best performing businesses in all tech right now. [music] The episode is linked in the show notes. Go judge yourself. Google ad tech and rule the ruling that could break everything. Shh. Well, this one matters for everyone that touches programmatic. That's a quick version. There was a in 2025, in April, Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that Google illegally [music] monopolized the publisher ad server and

ad exchange markets. Which is DoubleClick for publishers and AdX. Brinkema set herself a March 31st deadline. That passed. April passed. Still no ruling. Legal analysts say this is normal, but she's been publicly skeptical about forced divestiture. No No identified buyer for AdX. Any Any acquisition by someone else like Microsoft triggers its own antitrust review. The most likely outcome are structural remedies. Why does this matter for mobile, though? Because anything that destabilizes Google ad dominance shifts ad budgets. ESPs reprice. Independent players get room. And if there is even partial structural separation, it would be the biggest forced company breakup since AT&T in 1984. Let's see. Watch this one. Well, right, guys.

That's it. That's your week. NT launched. Iacobucci is thrilled. Let's see in 1 or 2 weeks what what revenue looks like. Iron Source is officially dead. Forex strategy is the only genre, well, besides match three, which is growing, even though there was a slight decline in last month or two. All right. That's it. See you next time. And comment under the video if you need anything. Cheers. Bye-bye.