This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
I asked Claude to study 2.5 Gamers, the podcast by Jakob and Matej that dissects a mobile game every week. Here’s the prompt I used:
I want you to browse the most-viewed videos from the past five years, pull the transcripts, and go through the content carefully, word by word. Then write me a breakdown of mobile F2P trends over recent years, with a particular focus on games coming from lesser-known developers.
What makes this podcast compelling is that the main characters are often two-, seven-, twenty-person teams — frequently based in Turkey, Vietnam, China, or some small town in Northern Ireland — pulling in numbers that turn heads.
A note on figures: almost all the revenue numbers I mention are estimates made by Jakob and Matej using market intelligence tools. Treat them as ballpark figures.
2023: the rise of hybrid games
After Apple’s privacy changes, user acquisition costs climbed to the point where the hyper-casual model — masses of downloads at a few cents each, monetised purely through ads — stopped making sense. In early 2024, a Voodoo executive said it plainly: hyper-casual is dead as a business, and their entire prototype pipeline is now aimed at hybrid casual.
Hybrid casual means starting with an ultra-simple hyper-casual core and layering a meta on top of it: currencies, progression, events, battle passes, some in-app purchases.
- SayGames set the template with My Perfect Hotel: over a year in soft launch, then 13 million installs in the first month.
- Habby did the same with their action RPGs, building a template they reuse from one game to the next.
User acquisition has increasingly spilled over into design, to the point of actually driving it. Whiteout Survival by Century Games, for the first thirty minutes, is indistinguishable from an idle game. Then a “World” button appears and you realise you’ve been playing a 4X all along. They grafted a low-CPI idle game onto a deep strategy title, because idle sells cheaply in ads while the 4X monetises for years. You’re essentially building two games in one.
2024: core mechanics start to matter again
2024 is the year small studios prove that a fresh mechanic is worth more than any amount of market research.
- Lessmore is a remote team of 17 people. The prototype for We Are Warriors was built by two people in two weeks, with zero market research: they believed in a moment-to-moment gameplay loop that nobody had done yet. Estimated result: around $200k a day from ads alone, with rewarded ads capped at two per day to stop ads from becoming the main strategy.
- Quokka Games, based in Turkey, has about ten people. Screw Jam is a mash-up of three existing games: the nuts and bolts from Nuts & Bolts, the exit limit from Bus Jam, and the bench mechanic from tile-match games. Within four months it goes from zero to roughly $130k a day in in-app purchases.
- Hexa Sort, published by Lion Studios, invents a new puzzle mechanic and builds the whole thing around advertising: ten-minute levels, rewarded ads that appear directly on the board when you need space, and an interstitial when you reopen the app.
- Offline Games — a collection of solitaire, chess, minesweeper, and clones of well-known games, apparently made by a single person. Zero progression, zero currencies, virtually no ads. By July 2024 it’s hitting one and a half million downloads a day. No paid acquisition campaigns found anywhere: just solid ASO, a YouTube channel with trailers racking up tens of millions of views, and cross-promotion across its own apps. One line from the episode stuck with me: “maybe the answer to monetisation is not having one.”
- The WeChat mini-game market has around 400,000 developers, 70% of teams have between 5 and 30 people, and a game takes two or three months to make. China is running one to two years ahead of the West.
2025: execution and speed
By 2025 the mood shifts. The ideas are out there, but the trend is to copy them fast — and in mobile, it looks like the winners are whoever executes that best.
- Rollic becomes the master of “deterministic puzzlers” — levels that play out identically every time — and bets on many games doing one or two million a month rather than chasing a single Royal Match.
- Block Blast by Hungry Studio, a small Chinese team obsessed with A/B testing, takes Tetris, strips out the time pressure, and turns it into a three-piece puzzle with dynamic difficulty tuned to each player. It becomes the second most downloaded game in the world.
- Grand Games, a Turkish studio, takes water sort — a genre packed with low-effort games coasting on ads — and applies the same level of polish as Royal Match: effects, animations, the game immediately telling you when you’re stuck and offering you an extra bottle.
- Falcon Games, in Vietnam, copies Royal Match’s events system wholesale and drops it onto a puzzle about sorting objects onto shelves, overtaking the games that had invented the genre.
To me, this is a clear sign of dwindling originality and creative ambition. The sector is increasingly being taken over by a pure-greed mindset.
2026: the sort genre and the 30-day window
By 2026, execution is optimised even further — the winning teams are the ones who move fastest.
- Pixel Flow comes out of Loom, a Turkish team of 7–8 people who left Rollic. No investor wanted to back them — according to Akin Babayigit, because they hadn’t come from Peak, the “right” studio. They put in all their own money, ran UA themselves, and went from zero to over a million dollars a day in ninety days. Then Scopely acquired them. A one-to-one Vietnamese clone reached $140k a day within two months, before being pulled from the stores.
- Cube Land by RotateLab, a remote Turkish team, arrives after about twenty released games with nothing to show for it. Idea in November, retention test in March, $300k a day six months later. They call it “volume of shots”: keep taking them.
- Smash Fest takes its core from a mini-game inside a Toon Blast live event — a cannon shooting balls at physical structures — and turns it into a full game. It scales to 300k downloads a day. Within a month, seven clones drop from established studios. Pixel Flow had three months before being copied; Smash Fest had one. The advice they keep repeating is blunt: you’ve got 30 days to scale.
The creative arms race
If there’s one thread running through all four years, it’s the weight of ad creatives. Since 2023, the volume of videos a game needs to produce has kept growing. Vita Mahjong, a simplified mahjong game aimed at older players, produced 23,000 creatives in a single month. One example cited: 1,800 creatives tested to find one capable of sustaining a million in spend. The takeaway is “whoever executes at volume wins.”
AI has accelerated everything. Some Chinese studios claim to produce 70% of their videos with AI. But the same technology has reached smaller players too: Matej, who’s developing his own game solo, generated ten videos starting from nothing but the store link, in an hour and a half. His conclusion is that ten imperfect videos beat one perfect one.
And there’s a darker side to this, which needs saying. Ads featuring fake neurologists, falsified gameplay, Marvel and Nintendo characters used without permission, families freezing to death to sell a gardening game. The platforms do very little about it. It’s one of the reasons I look at this market with a mixture of admiration and unease.
What I take away from all this
Laid out in order, these three years tell me a few things I want to keep in mind.
The barriers to entry are low; the barriers to excellence are sky-high. Akin says it, and the facts back him up. Anyone can clone Pixel Flow in two weeks. Meowdoku copied an almost note-for-note sudoku that had been sitting on the market for eighteen months going nowhere, and made it explode. Block Out took the same mechanics as Color Block Jam with a completely opposite level design philosophy and surpassed the original. The idea gets you through the door; execution decides who stays.
Specialisation pays off. Loom came from years of deterministic puzzles. Malpa Games spent ten years sharpening their production on word games and sudoku before hunting for new ideas, because “ideas get copied immediately if you’re not precise and fast.” People who know a genre inside out spot where it can be pushed before anyone else does.
Fresh ideas come from outside the genre. A mini-game from a live ops event becomes a full game. A game for older players becomes a monetisation model. Township, after seventeen years, is a match-3 with a tycoon layer in front of it that exists purely to lower the cost of acquisition. “People don’t look outside their own genre,” they say in the Township episode. Those who do find room to move.
Organic reach still exists, but it’s the exception. For most small studios, distribution remains the core problem — and with AI bringing production costs down, it’s only going to become more so.
What reassures me, in all of this, is that the game still matters. Akin says the industry has swung too far towards data, and that today the ad networks’ algorithms raise the quality bar at launch: you can’t ship a half-finished game and test your way to success anymore. You need instinct. You need someone who knows what to keep and what to cut.
And for anyone working in design, that’s good news.
