🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Royal Kingdom Adds Ads, Playtika Exits Social Casino, Mistplay Buys Mychips

So, I think they're probably [music] earning anywhere between 170 to 190k day right now in ad revenue from their interstitials and rewarded. And you have to assume that this is more likely part of a bigger trend, [music] right? Because if you're managing Toon Blast and you see this, this is the first thing that you're going to basically take a look at [music] and basically try to copy.
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Two and a Half Gamers exclusive.
Breaking news. [music] Literally breaking.
Hello everyone and welcome to another fantastic solo news episode of the Two and a Half Gamers podcast. It's me, Felix. I'm here alone today because Yakub is flying from Vietnam and Mati I think he's flying to America. And then Yakub is also going to join him in America MAU and that means I'm going to do the news alone, which I usually do anyway. So, as if you haven't joined us before, so this is what I think are the

leading three news stories in mobile applications right now. And we start straight away with the first story that I think is the most interesting and it's reported by Neil Long on the 11th of May and it's that Playtika leaves social casino behind to focus on casual hits like Disney Solitaire. So, Playtika has completed its transition into a casual first mobile games publisher and it's effectively leaving social casino behind says CEO Robert Antokol. The comments came in Playtika's Q1 26 financial results, which Antokol claimed casual games were now 76% of the company's business and the transition away from social casino is largely complete. Antokol described Playtika as a casual mobile gaming company with strong social casino business. "We are investing behind We are investing behind our winners and stepping back where the return profile is simply not there, said Anko. The discipline is showing up in the revenue

mix. Each year more of our revenue comes from long life casual games with broader reach. In a prepared remarks he also suggested that legacy titles like Slotomania, Bingo Blitz, World Series of Poker are effectively now in a period of managed decline at Playtika. We are not making a forward promise of continued growth from here, said Anko of Playtika social casino games. Flattening decline and showing early stability is an important milestone and it matters is an important milestone and it matters for the overall durability of the portfolio. So, one of the interesting things is also highlighted in this article as well is besides that Playtika is moving away from its core business is also that they report on D2C revenue. And one of the things that we've actually been doing here at Two and a Half Gamers is we've been kind of using the Playtika uh D2C earnings cuz they're one of the few public companies that actually reports on it in mobile to actually get

a litmus test of what's actually going on. So, if you've not been a avid listener of our podcast, one of the things that we've always been talking about is simply there's a lot of revenue right now in Sensor Tower that we don't know about. There's a big dark pool of IAP revenue, right? And basically there's a lot of companies that are now sending their revenue to partners such as FastSpring or any other like D2C partners and basically not doing their in-app purchases anymore on either Google Play or the App Store. And this is kind of one of the biggest things and no one really knows how much money's actually flowing through this cuz it's through a bunch of companies, right? [music] But the D2C revenue now at Playtika is 62% of their overall revenue on IAPs, right? And that is up from 42% the last time they did one of their quarterly earnings, right? So, they're pushing really hard. What's also interesting to see here is that kind of their old school media legacy titles from social casino, they must be so much competition from super

high CPIs that they're basically just going to focus on something that's easier to scale, which is their casual portfolio. So, very interesting trend coming out of Playtika and uh yeah, very interesting to see. So, moving on to our second story and that is that Misplay has acquired Maths MyChip. MyChips. And that's a if you don't know, that's a rewarded ad platform. So, reading this from PR Newswire, I'm just going to read a couple of paragraphs. So, Misplay, a leading play-and-earn rewards and loyalty platform for mobile games, today has announced the acquisitions of MyChips SRL, a subsidiary of Math, [music] a global rewarded advertising platform. With this acquisition, Misplay accelerates the expansion of its network, strengthening its position as a leader in the rewarded advertising. [music] Rewarded advertising has rapidly become a core channel for mobile user acquisition, delivering high-intent [music] users across the full funnel and

driving measurable gains in retention, engagement, and monetization performance. The addition of MyChips further expands Misplay's loyalty play partner network [music] and unlocking new supply for advertisers. So, not going to finish this story here cuz this is a bunch of quotes, but what essentially has happened this week is that you are witnessing the starting gun on what [music] we think is going to be a red-hot time in the rewarded space, right? So, I don't know if you've read been reading Mati's newsletter, he actually reports on how fragmented the overall rewarded UA spend is right now and there's a lot of reports that a big like fat chunk of mobile spend is now going to rewarded channels and basically it's increasing more and more because basically the conversion rates are super high and it works super well. So, what does this actually mean? This means essentially that there are probably like 14 to 25 players right now that have significant amount of revenue. And this is probably going to be the

first of many acquisitions that we see cuz we have AdJoe, for example. They're making a boatload of money. They might want to make acquisitions. But this is probably where we're going to see the most A in a short amount of time right now to basically dominate this space. Very interesting space to watch and we're going to keep an eye on that. But yeah, super interesting to see. So, for the third and final story before we go and look at the top charts as of today in Sensor Tower, uh what I want to do here is basically also share uh a story that I actually wrote, which I thought was super interesting, right? And that is that Royal Kingdom is scaling with interstitials and [music] rewarded ads. So, I'm going to read a little bit about this and explain it, right? Because it's very interesting because essentially Dream Games is the studio that swore that it and they've been a core pillar of their marketing has forever been that they don't have ads in their games. [music] And it's something that shows up. But essentially, with some snooping,

I was able to deduce that using the Wayback Machine that actually Dream Games added their own app-ads.txt file, which is a file that you need when you start adding in-game ads. And basically, using the Wayback Machine, I can see that this was added in about February and it was really like expanded in a very big way in I guess it was early March, right? And the fascinating thing is that this coincided with first and foremost, a lot of user complaints that complained about ads that you can't skip. But it also meant that Royal Kingdom actually saw the most amount of downloads they ever have in history, right? And they basically are getting about 600,000 downloads per day now. You can see how that changes from the normal [music] trajectory here that used to be anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000, right? And the main driver with why Dream Games added ads into Royal Kingdom is

basically the AppLovin ad a blended a blended ROAS campaigns, right? Where you're targeting users both for IAP purchases and also [music] ad watches, right? So, this is also kind of central to what I've been saying for quite a while, which is not only that ads are beautiful, but basically done in the right way, [music] they can actually increase your IAP revenue. And I think the best overall example of this is Brazil. So, Brazil for Royal Kingdom before it was very small, right? Talking about 25,000 downloads, 12,000 downloads a day, but now you can see that it's over 150,000 downloads a day, right? And what's actually happening on the IAP side is that before inside of Brazil, they used to be making about 12K day. And right now, they're making 17K a day in IAP. So, basically IAP revenue has increased. But then also they're earning a lot of ad revenue on top of that, right? So, basically they're widening the funnel of users that can actually [music] play their game. So, they have a

higher active user base. So, what does this actually mean for Royal Kingdom? It means probably they've added about 20% according to my estimates here in ad revenue. So, I think they're probably earning anywhere between 170 to 190K day right now in ad [music] revenue from their interstitials and rewarded. And you have to assume that this is more likely part of a bigger trend, right? Because if you're managing Toon Blast and you see this, this is the first thing that you're going to basically take a look at and basically try to copy. And one of the things [music] I've been very vocal about is Playrix, right? They have stayed out of ads for so long, but basically when you see numbers like this, I have a feeling that we're going to see a lot more studios that swore off ads that will actually start to use them when they see these Dream Game numbers. So, that was the third and final story. I'm just going to finish here by sharing the top charts in the US as of today, March 2006. So, this is the iOS top chart on free

downloads. You have Magic Sort by Grand Games who just raised a [music] whopping $70 million round. You have Rips by Triumph, that's Triumph Arcade. [music] I guess that's real money, right? Or Skills Game Base Gaming. You have Vita Mayong, Arrows, and Block Blast, and then Block Out by Grand Games. Then on the top grossing, you have Monopoly Go, Classic, Royal Match, Kingdom, Gossip Harbor. Yeah, no real surprises there. [music] Let's take a quick look at Google Play. Free downloads, our friends at Lessmore, and then Arrows Go, the copycat from Okay Games, and then we have Block Blast by Hungry Studio, and Vita Mayong, and Royal Kingdom. I'm wondering what's driving all those downloads. It's probably the interstitial ads, right? Top grossing, Monopoly Go, Royal Match, Candy Crush, Last Day on Earth, and Gossip Harbor. So, no big changes there, but then also Royal Kingdom is really high there, so that's a super interesting. So, I'm going to finish it there cuz I've hit my 10-minute [music] mark, which is our rule for these news segments. This has been another

fantastic news segment where we're discussing the most relevant [music] mobile news in from this past week. I'm Felix. Thank you for stopping by. Bye-bye.