Two & a Half Gamers
Two & a Half Gamers is a YouTube channel covering the mobile games business. It publishes videos on ad monetization, user acquisition, game launches, studio strategies and industry news.
Documents
🐳🔫 Inside Mech Assemble: AI Memes, Skibidi Toilets & $170K/Day
Mech Assemble: Zombie Swarm has established a significant foothold in the hyper-competitive shoot 'em up market by blending established mechanics from titles like Survivor.io and Bang Bang Survivor with high-quality 3D visuals and a unique mech customization system.
- Mech Assemble: Zombie Swarm generates between $70,000 and $170,000 in daily revenue by blending Survivor.io-style mechanics with 3D visuals and manual weapon customization.
- The game utilizes an aggressive monetization model driven primarily by whale-focused gacha systems and multiple battle passes, with ad revenue contributing only 13% to 15% of total earnings.
- User acquisition in the United States is highly expensive, with customer acquisition costs (CAC) exceeding $30 per user.
🚁 How War Drone 3D Hits $65K/day mainly with Organics, not UA. Warfare drone game from Miniclip!
War Drone 3D has emerged as a significant success within the mobile gaming market, scaling to approximately 500,000 daily active users and generating daily revenues reaching $65,000.
- War Drone 3D generates over $65,000 in daily revenue, driven primarily by heavy rewarded ad monetization and a gacha-based progression system.
- The game achieved peak scaling of over 300,000 installs per day in July 2024, maintaining a strong baseline of 150,000 daily downloads shortly thereafter.
- Over 50% of the game's total downloads are organic, fueled by an immersive 'news media' aesthetic that mimics realistic drone footage.
The Walled Garden Stack: Why no new Mediation platform has Survived Since 2017 by Felix Braberg
The mobile ad monetization landscape in 2025 is defined by a rigid, consolidated mediation market and a strategic shift among top publishers toward in-app purchase (IAP) revenue.
- The mobile mediation market is a closed ecosystem dominated by AppLovin MAX, Unity LevelPlay, and Google AdMob, with no successful new entrants since 2017 due to high barriers to accessing essential bidding demand.
- Top studios like Habby and Rollic are shifting toward IAP-first monetization, with ad revenue now accounting for as little as 11% to 20% of total earnings in recent titles.
- Effective cost-per-mille (eCPM) rates have declined by approximately 20% from pandemic-era peaks due to privacy-related targeting limitations, market corrections, and the transition to automated bidding.
Tiles Survive Breakdown: FunPlus goes full Century Games
FunPlus has initiated a strategic pivot toward a proven, high-efficiency development model, moving away from experimental intellectual property in favor of the simplified, scalable frameworks popularized by Century Games.
- FunPlus's 'Tile Survive' is currently scaling at approximately $50,000 in daily revenue with roughly 60,000 daily downloads since its launch in March.
- The game utilizes a simplified version of the 'Dark War' 4X playbook, focusing on streamlined onboarding, events, and gacha mechanics rather than complex systems.
- Unlike its predecessors, 'Tile Survive' integrates scripted road-collection encounters directly into the core progression, effectively gating player advancement behind specific exploration levels.
Game Analytics 101: Why waiting "One more week" can kill your game!
Retention serves as the foundational metric for growth in the free-to-play mobile gaming sector, as monetization remains impossible without a consistent, active player base.
- Profitability in free-to-play mobile games requires that Lifetime Value (LTV) consistently exceeds the Cost Per Install (CPI), making retention the foundational metric for growth.
- Developers must hit specific Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) targets by Day 7; failing to meet these early benchmarks is a strong indicator that acquisition costs will not be recouped.
- Waiting for ad network performance to improve after missing early benchmarks is a strategic error, as the time required to break even increases exponentially when initial targets are missed.
📊 Chart Compass: State of Mobile Revenue 2025 - What’s Actually Moving the Needle by Jakub Remiar
The mobile gaming industry in 2025 is characterized by a shift toward portfolio-based strategies, where top-tier publishers prioritize scaling multiple high-performing titles simultaneously rather than relying on a single flagship product.
- Publishers are shifting from single-flagship models to portfolio-based strategies, exemplified by Rivergame and Dream Games, to scale multiple high-performing titles simultaneously.
- The industry is increasingly bypassing app store ecosystems through web shops to capture a larger share of revenue and avoid platform fees.
- Market dominance remains split between stable legacy giants like Monopoly Go, Candy Crush, and Roblox, and high-growth emerging categories such as merge games led by Gossip Harbor.
Granny: The untapped goldmine of horror games on mobile! How Granny Broke YouTube & TikTok?
The mobile horror genre, anchored by the runaway success of the Granny franchise, demonstrates that high-fidelity graphics and traditional user acquisition strategies are unnecessary for achieving massive scale.
- The Granny franchise has achieved nearly half a billion total downloads across its titles, with the original game still generating 14 million downloads per month seven years after its release.
- The game sustains a daily ad revenue of approximately $50,000 despite lacking a formal user acquisition (UA) strategy, relying entirely on organic virality from YouTube Let's Plays and TikTok.
- The developer potentially left $50 million in revenue on the table by failing to implement proper ad mediation, relying instead on limited demand sources that significantly underperform compared to optimized setups.
The Real Story Behind Tasty Travels’ Meteoric Rise: Merge, Monetize, Repeat!
The merge game category is currently defined by intense competition and rapid evolution, with established titles like Travel Town and Seaside Escape facing pressure from aggressive newcomers such as Tasty Travels and Merge Cooking.
- Century Games' new title, Tasty Travels, is rapidly scaling toward $200,000 in daily revenue and currently boasts double the ARPDAU of competitor Travel Town.
- The merge game category is experiencing significant growth, with Gossip Harbor generating approximately $1.6 million per day and Travel Town and Seaside Escape each earning roughly $600,000 daily.
- Century Games utilizes an aggressive UA strategy characterized by high-velocity creative iteration, including AI-generated content, fake gameplay hooks, and concepts directly adapted from competitors like Gossip Harbor.
State of the Brutally Honest UA by Matej Lancaric
The 2025 user acquisition landscape is defined by a fundamental shift toward creative-led strategies, where the ability to produce high-volume, iterative content determines market success.
- Creative production is now the primary driver of UA performance, requiring teams to generate at least five new videos per week to combat rapid audience fatigue.
- 68% of industry professionals now utilize AI for tasks including scriptwriting, thumbnail optimization, and the generation of synthetic user-generated content.
- The UA manager role has fundamentally shifted from manual campaign administration to a hybrid function focused on creative prompt engineering and data analysis.
Inside $500M/Year Bending Spoons: TikTok Trends, Viral videos, UA & Paywall Science
Bending Spoons functions as a hybrid between a technology firm and a private equity entity, managing a $2.5 billion portfolio of utility-focused applications including Remini, Splice, Evernote, and WeTransfer.
- Bending Spoons generates $500 million in annual revenue by acquiring apps, optimizing their design and subscription flows, and scaling them through aggressive user acquisition.
- The company’s portfolio includes high-performing apps like Remini, which achieves 300,000 daily installs, and Splice, which generates $120,000 in daily in-app purchase revenue.
- Bending Spoons utilizes 'Superwall-style' paywalls that limit functionality for free users, a strategy that has become a industry-standard template for maximizing conversion rates from install to subscription.
2.5 gamers x Live Game Review - Hole People by Rollic Games
Hole People, published by Rollic Games, exemplifies the current evolution of the hyper-casual market, where deterministic puzzle mechanics are leveraged primarily as vehicles for low-cost user acquisition.
- Rollic Games has shifted its business model from producing many small games to focusing on high-revenue 'hit' titles, with a single successful game like Color Block Jam potentially outperforming the combined revenue of ten smaller projects.
- The game 'Hole People' utilizes a modular development approach where core mechanics—such as the bench system, boosters, and level design—are inserted into established templates, allowing for rapid production with minimal new feature development.
- The 'Hole' theme in 'Hole People' is primarily a strategic choice for User Acquisition (UA) to achieve low CPIs, rather than a core gameplay necessity, as the game mechanics are essentially a variation of existing puzzle-genre templates.
🐎 Uma Musume Pretty Derby: Best Progression System in Mobile & Why should everybody play Umamusume
Uma Musume Pretty Derby represents a significant evolution in mobile game design, successfully transitioning from a niche Japanese title to a global phenomenon with consistent daily engagement.
- Uma Musume Pretty Derby maintains long-term player retention by prioritizing deep, emergent complexity over the industry-standard model of frequent content updates.
- The core progression loop utilizes a roguelite-inspired, multi-generational breeding system where veteran characters pass stats, affinities, and skills to new trainees.
- Character optimization is driven by a three-tiered elemental system covering surface, distance, and running style, which creates a near-infinite array of strategic paths.