Brutally Honest #204

Key insights

6 takeaways

01
Spyke Games' title Yarn Flow, launched in December 2025, reached over $100,000 in daily in-app purchase revenue by late February 2026.
02
The $100,000 daily revenue milestone for Yarn Flow was achieved through in-app purchases alone, excluding all ad-based revenue streams.
03
Success in the post-IDFA mobile landscape currently relies on aggressive user acquisition strategies paired with rigorous creative optimization.
04
Effective creative testing requires a structured framework that utilizes clearly defined written hypotheses and comprehensive creative briefs.
05
Rapid iteration based on empirical evidence from creative testing is a primary differentiator between niche mobile products and multi-million dollar hits.
06
The mobile gaming industry is increasingly professionalizing user acquisition knowledge by consolidating performance insights into accessible formats like e-books and case studies.

Summary

Brutally Honest #204 is a March 2026 issue of Matej Lancaric's newsletter on user acquisition in the post-IDFA mobile gaming landscape. Most of the issue sits behind a paywall, so only the introductory material and teasers are visible. The issue promotes the author's shift toward more digestible content, specifically e-books, and announces the release of a new one.

The main substantive item is the return of the author's global launch case studies, with a newly published breakdown of Yarn Flow, a title from Spyke Games. The game launched in December 2025 and, by late February 2026, had passed $100,000 per day in in-app purchase revenue, a figure that excludes advertising income. The case study frames the title as a roughly $4 million hit that has received little industry attention, and it promises the usual deep dive into user acquisition strategy and creative approaches behind the launch.

The weekly tip focuses on a creative testing checklist, emphasizing that test parameters should be defined in writing before running experiments. Visible items include stating a hypothesis that explains what is being tested and why, and preparing creative briefs. The remaining checklist items are not accessible.

Overall, the issue works as a mix of promotion for the author's paid content and a short look at practical UA discipline, with the Yarn Flow revenue milestone as the only hard performance data. Scope is mobile gaming, centered on a late-2025 global launch and early-2026 revenue performance.