Session: Winning Portfolio Strategies Of 2026 - Jakub Remiar, two & half gamers.

So, I'd like to welcome straight up to the stage Yacob Raymar from the two and a half gamers who's going to tell us all about winning portfolio strategies. So, that's good.
Yeah. So, let's get to it. Yeah. Hi everyone. Thanks for coming. Today, I want to talk a little bit about

some winning portfolio strategies that we see in the market. Yeah, if I can ask to close the door. Thank you. It'll be better. Yeah. So, my name's Jacob. Usual question, who listens to the podcast if I may ask? If you can raise your hand. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So, a little bit about me. I'm Jacob. I always designer, game designer, always on product. I've been in the industry for more than 10 years now. Work with multiple companies, even a publisher at some point. And yeah, now I'm pretty much consulting companies all around the world and running the two and a half gamers podcast with Felix and Matey where I do the the product part if you want to know more. And again, I'll reference some of our episodes later. Anyway, so what I want to talk about today is some stuff that we see in the market and it's getting extremely extremely obvious, but still I think people are kind of sleeping on it on these strategies that like companies are using these days. But,

uh yeah, let let's try to get through this. Hopefully, you learn also something today because I want this to be extremely practical. So, first thing that I'm going to talk about is template-ization. This is something that uh it's again very obvious. Not everybody is using it. I think it's currently the most uh let's say efficient way to build new games because with this, especially Asian and Chinese companies are working on a premise that each game they fail is actually a plus for them. Because they're working on their template. So, each game that they do and even though they fail, it doesn't matter because they re-salvage and use all that work, all that man-hours that went into it into that template that will power their next game. Which means that this is actually accelerating and the more games they do, the stronger this template is. Therefore, they can go faster. And we've seen that on on the market uh again a lot of times, but not it's not that prevalent. Uh one of the big drawbacks also is that your template will lock your genre. Like don't think about it as some kind

of ultimate solution and like this is best for everything. If you build your template, it's great, but it will lock you in your genre. So, a good example would be something like Habby. We all know Habby, of course. Archero, Kinja Run, Survivor.io. Like who knows for instance even about Kinja Run? Anybody here heard about this game before? And did you heard about uh Survivor.io? This game actually launched during literally during the same month. Because they were again using their template. As you see, it's all based on their template. This is all done again. Habby is a publisher, Gorilla Games is the developer. But, it's all done on their template. You see it how they do it. Like this is their setup. They they're been improving it throughout the years. This is the older ones, of course, but still for instance now that they have Capybara Go and they have the new games, the template improved. You can see their template is basically 2.0 and even went even further because they are making it better as they go. They, for instance, I don't want to say steal, but they integrated a lot of stuff from guys from

Legend of Mushroom. So, each game they make actually is going to be having all these things and what you see here and actually what's the like driving force behind this is that they just changed the course because this is what this is Archero being this kind of a static corridors based RPG shooter, Kinja Run is a runner, Survivor.io is a shoot them up so on so forth, but the meta game is always the same. Now, the newest one is of course Dice Hero, which isn't also doing that well, but at least they try. By the way, for everybody, Habby has a lot of games in soft launch on WeChat mini games. People just don't talk about it at all. They just talk about the ones that they see on the mobile stores, which is like, "Oh, a Habby new game is up." No, Habby has already four other games in soft launch at China. People just don't talk about it. Uh moving forward, this is as I said, not really there like they're not the separate ones doing this. There are multiple other studios. Of course, everybody should know this graph. This is the Gossip Harbor thing, which is now the eighth biggest game on the market.

It's doing something like, yeah, a lot of money, basically 100 mil a month, which is still only the data that we see in Sensor Tower here, but you see this crazy curve what they're doing. And if you look at their portfolio, they're scaling one game after the other. It's not that like Gossip Harbor is this one wonder company. Seaside Escape is doing what, 20 mil a month? Flambé, the like one of their newest game, is already doing uh what was the numbers? Yeah, half a million a day in what, since uh last year's May. So, pretty much in a year they were able to do it. And you see this, it's all basically on a template because it's all pretty much merged too, but again, the kicker is their UA and their live ops, which is unmatched compared to other people on the market. If we move further, we don't really need to go to Asia again. There's this This is for instance Grand Games, Magic Sword. I'll get to that game later down the line as I will go, but again, it's all done on a template. If you look at all their other

games, this is Car Match again from them. This is done on their meta game template because what they do, they do deterministic sort puzzlers, and they do it very very well, and you can see how they're accelerating actually, how another like new games are going into their pipeline and they're again making more and more of them. I actually think he was even lucky enough to kind of predict which game they will do next because it was so obvious. I'll show you later. Uh again, you can see their portfolio, how stuff is pretty much moving around, and it's very very predictable thing. Again, we'll talk about this in detail. Another one would be Yeah, their chart is also quite crazy. Um another one would be also Spy Games. Uh the other big Turkish company, big big by funding, let's say, because they raised so much money, but again, they're using the same exact thing. So, you can see even the evolution of their template when they start with Tile Busters, then they went Blitz Busters, this is Cube Busters, and this is Hexa Out. For instance, this game is completely new. I

think this is like 1 month old. As As it pretty much again goes through their template, even the icons are the same. Like it's one template they they just do and try different cores because it's very very fast. Um don't be um misled by their portfolio account on the App Store because Spy Games, the one with Y, that's their main account, yes, but actually, if you look it up, it's kind of this chart, but what's their actual account now, it's called Combo Games. This is their other testing account, which we kind of doxxed on the podcast. Sorry, Irina. And uh yeah, they're testing a lot of new games here, and you can see for instance Yarn Loop being what? Something like 200k a day already, which is again one of the pretty much parts of their template. Again, I'll I'll have more on that later. Lately and and lastly, I cannot miss Forex here. Forex is the master of all this strategy basically because all

the Forex game that you have on the market are having completely same engine. It's just bread and butter Chinese super efficient Forex, but everybody has a different front end. Like think of it as some kind of a, let's say a car. All the cars look different, but in the end, they are have exactly the same engine. And that's what's happening here. Like these four games have pretty much exactly the same like meta and all these other things, but this is what gates, this is idle, this is isometric RPG, and this is AI generated waifu, whatever, something on it. And they start all completely different, but in the end get to the exact same And then they collectively make something like 5 mil a day only on Western stores again because we don't see the China revenue. Of course, they're making much more money there.
[snorts]
Okay. So, now that we talk about like the first part, which is in order to even talk about these strategies that I'm talking talk now, we need to have

some kind of a template. Otherwise, without the template like it'll be very very slow. Once you have the template, once you have a little bit of more understanding how to kind of make each second game faster than the previous, then we can talk about what's happening and how these companies are using it. So, let's say strategy number one. Domino Dreams. One of my favorite games on the market. It's not that big, but what they did is literally perfect. Like I really had to hand it down to Elad, the CPO of Superplay. They were again acquired by Playtika. Playtika is now by the way a casual company, not a casino company anymore. That's what they said. But what Domino Dreams did was again, he had a very very good talk on this on Rovio Con. So again, I don't know if you can watch it from review, but really worth it. So what's happening here? We have this cute game called Domino Dreams that makes like 300k per day. It's not really the biggest game on the market, but what they did is especially something that you would need to understand to to understand that like

how to use these things. So we have the domino category by absolute revenue. All these games that you have here are mostly some kind of hybrid domino or domino something on domino that, but none of them is actually a puzzler. Because Domino Dreams is a puzzler. And if we go to my favorite time machine and go 4 years back, this is how the category looks before. So you would have all of these domino games having some kind of okay-ish downloads, mostly organic {slash} something. Not really any revenue because you see like this is this is revenue, they don't make revenue, they make money by ads. But again, these games were all domino games, actual domino. If no anybody knows here like how to play domino, domino is kind of quite like intense game of like numbers and you need to put these block around this and so on so forth. That's domino. Uh if you look at Domino Dreams, this is

a puzzle game. This is not a domino game, is a domino themed puzzle game. So what these guys did, they saw that okay, there's this pretty huge amount of traffic of people that are looking for domino that are pretty much still in this category and again doing stuff here, but why don't we turn this around, use that traffic and put it on a much stronger engine, which is the puzzle engine, instead of the usual core game play of domino, which again, you You monetize this as you would do with the puzzle game. So, they did this. And the Yeah, and now this is the downloads category. They're first even there. And when you talk to Domino people, it's like, "Oh, no, but this is not Domino. Our players don't want this." That Nobody cares. I'm sorry. Nobody cares. People will search for Domino. They'll find Domino Dreams. They play Domino Dreams. Your Domino game is dead. That That's how it works, basically. And that's what these guys did, and it's brilliant. Why this game is not bigger enough? Because that's probably the limit of the Domino category. It can

sustain like 300, 400K a day game, but that's it, probably. This won't be Gossip Harbor. But, the strategy was perfect. If we move on, we can continue with Magic Sort. Magic Sort pretty much did the exact same thing. Because what is Magic Sort? Magic Sort basically took water puzzle category. So, again, this is 4 years back, water puzzles. If you look at the traffic, it's crazy high traffic, by the way. This is monthly downloads 4 years ago. So, 6 million sort puzzle water sort puzzle sort water color water blah blah blah. You see these icons also All of these are pretty much ad monetized water puzzles. That's it. No IP revenue. What they did here is they took the water sort puzzle and push it in a much more polished state, but in the end are monetizing it through IAP. Again, same setup. They see this kind of giant amount of traffic that's coming here, that people are searching for, and they, because of their know-how, because of them being Grand Games and having pretty

good puzzle expertise, they turn it into a standard IAP based puzzler. And there we go. And now Magic Sort is what? Even in downloads is the third position. Again, arrows being arrows now. I won't talk about I will talk about this later, but this is kind of skewing the chart a little bit. But, if we would go a few months back, of course, Magic Sort would be first in this category. Because, again, very simple strategy. Take something that works there, push it into IAP. You see that there's the demand, but again, execution was everything here. Strategy number two, we can do it better. So, before strategy number one was pretty much we were catering to the demand and switching it from ad base to IP, this is literally we can do it better strategy, meaning you don't really need to be innovative from the core, you need to be innovative on execution. So, again, let's take something like Block Jam 3D from Voodoo, very good game, it had its run, by the way, they did them like pretty major overhaul visually, but again, if you

look at it, again, it had its pretty good run somewhere 2024, that's it. And now, what we have here, again, car match. Again, Grams games. The game is pretty much the same mechanically. But again, if you look at the revenue, it's 85k a day. I'm not saying this is the super successful game, I think it's the least successful game on their portfolio, but still having a game that makes 90k a day just on IPs is pretty okay. So, again, what's happened here, they took the game and make it better. Because again, they can afford it with their pipeline. Again, it was just another shot. A lot of games that Grams did also will be failed, like that's normal, and you need to do it. So, if we continue this line, let's take Pixel Flow and let's take uh yeah, everybody knows Pixel Flow here. Don't need to talk about it. Let's take Yarn Loop. This is again the game I showed you on Spy Games Combo account portfolio, where Yarn Loop is now doing what? 200k a day. Uh they changed this uh

yarns into nets or whatever, like now it's pretty much unwinding the picture, not shooting the picture. I'm still waiting if this will be enough for Scope Hit on not cease, and this is it, like they did with the Vietnamese clone, which uh I guess everybody knows that Ammo Bears game, which was making 150k like push out of the store. So, So, seems for now it works, but again, it's just a very very aggressive fast follow that seems the iteration still stands and you can do it again because they have the expertise, because they have the pipeline, because they they can do this. Uh if we continue this line, this in my opinion is the best example of we can do it better. Let's take Color Block Jam, like one of the best if not the best games on Rollic portfolio, and uh which is still doing like solid very solid 330k just on IAPs. And let's take Block Out, again by Grand Games, which is by the way currently the biggest Grand Games game there. Again, these two games mechanically are exactly the same, literally like nearly exactly

the same. But if you compare the level design philosophies, they're vastly different. If you really want to know more about this, we have an episode on this uh released last week, but pretty much just like brief like from these two pictures, these guys work on a very very specific principle of zero empty space and they push the levels into these sectors that slowly unlock. You cannot even think forward. If you look at Color Block Jam, what's happening here? Immediately because both like the fail state is time-based. So, when you look at the level, it's time-based fail state. It's not moves. Like you can do how many moves you want, but you have just limited time. But here, if you look at Color Block Jam level, what's happening with the level? You start to think because, you know, I will have 1 minute 40 and I will need to solve this level. How do I do it? So, you start to think a lot. With Block Out, you cannot think forward because you don't see this area. It's not unlock for you. It will unlock after eight whatever eight of these things gets out. So, what

do you need? You need to sort out this, let's say, small area. So, it cuts the level into these snackable pieces, which are much easier to approach. Therefore, you have much more, let's say, tries, attempts, pretty much play-through, rather than Color Block Jam when you need to really They think a lot. And just by this, as I said, this is currently happening with color blockout. It's very, very aggressively scaling up. Again, there's literally zero innovation on the core. There's extreme innovation on the level design because it's the same principle as I said, we can do it better. Like there's so many ideas sitting on the stores that somebody can just take with their execution and make it better. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. Strategy three, yeah, now we reinvent the wheel. This is radical innovation, the I would say most risky, but also the biggest winning strategy of them all.
[snorts]
So, let's take Screw Jam, which Screw Jam basically is this kind of very, very good game by again Rollic. It It had its run somewhere July 2024

where it scale all the way to like nearly 200k day, then it died out. But what happened afterwards, there was this other game called Screw Them, which is by the way the biggest game from Vietnam now by I came. And what Screw Them did here, they added 3D space into it, which fundamentally shifted this whole puzzle because they also now, like this transparency that was here that you can see behind these things, doesn't really help that much as here because now we're literally rotating the picture around that the game design vector got so extended that it pretty much provides completely different gameplay. So, what's happening here is the Screw Them again is consistently doing something like 300k a day now, which is literally like one of the first, let's say, shots from Vietnam that's on IP side that seems very, very stable. And they did that this is their innovation because most of the time they just copy games or fast follow games. This was the first time they really, really did it. But again, to understand this, like how hard it is to go from here to here, that's really what it takes.

Again, a good another example that I like to use will be Pixel Flow. So, if you're familiar with this game called This Is Blast from Voodoo, it was there sitting there, from April 2025. They scaled it all the way to something like 30K day. Now it's kind of dead because again they the did different things with this concept. But there's this other game called Pixel Flow, which everybody knows here in the room, that Kubra took from Voo Games. And it's pretty much taken from this game. Because what she did here, like the idea is very, very similar, but what she did is that she extended the shooting area because it's all about the shooting satisfaction of these blocks from the bottom. So, isn't it it better if we should actually four times more than one times here? Again, being able to add this another layer here, which just gives you so much more design space and design probabilities here. They She literally just took this idea and make it much more better. Anybody could do that for last

what, pretty much a year, but only she was able to do it. So, again, this extreme innovation usually requires extreme genre knowledge. That's the other thing because Kubra was making games for 14 years. She worked at, you know, Creative Games, which was working for Rolex and so on and so forth. So, once you get to this point, again, you have the ability to do these things. And this is what it really takes. Uh, moving on from here. Yeah. So, how do we choose this? Or like how how I actually to apply this? So, I just want to end this with Grand Games portfolio to like tell you like again, Grand is doing extremely efficient and logical moves. Like whatever you're doing, you're doing with puzzlers or casual, follow Grand. What they're doing is like Warren Buffett in my opinion of puzzle games currently. So, Magic Sort, that was strategy number one. We took something from the demand that was there. We're turning it into IP monster. It's ours now. Car Match, strategy number two. We'll do it better. Didn't really work out that

much. It's still better. Block Star. Again, this was the one that I predicted because I said, "Of course they were going to block." Because there's this other game that's sitting on the stores called Block Blast, which has 60 million DAU that everybody wants to turn into IP puzzler. Of course, they do this thing even though it probably will fail. Even though a spy game did the same exact thing. Because it's there. It's extremely obvious that you would need to go for it if you have this puzzle expertise because there is demand. So, doing these things was Again, doing this was extremely obvious. I said that they will do it 2 months before they did it. Because it's just no-brainer to do it. Even though it will fail, doesn't matter. Uh so, again, strategy number two. Then we have strategy number two because why not? If they can do it, why don't they go after this? Of course, they did it. And the last one, arrow gem, that's the one I like the most. Again, it's very obvious because there's this other game doing 20 million downloads a day on ad revenue. So, why wouldn't they do IP-based puzzler out of it? Of course,

they did it. Of course, they did it. So, it's now extremely obvious what they're doing. And again, I'll leave you with this because they don't really take anything like, you know, this hard innovation that I showed you with Pixel Flow or with the the screw them. They just execute extremely extremely efficiently. And they can afford these things because again, I don't know. This will probably fail. This will probably fail or this will probably doesn't matter. One of those will most probably be the winner again at some point. And this is the strategy. Okay. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. Just their execution needs to be much better. That still works and I think it's paramount. Build a system to make games. Keep genre focus. Don't bet any everything on one game. Bet everything on your pipeline that you will be making games as you go. And then, radical innovations are very risky but produce the biggest wins, of course. This is always the thing. Like, there's nothing really to it. Thank you.

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Hey.