Show Notes
A hide-and-seek game where you paint yourself to blend into the map, made by two people in two months, just made $60 million. That's the winner of this quarter's Steam Scanner — and it's the one idea on the list mobile genuinely can't clone.
The closing caveat matters: it's survivorship bias — 20K+ games hit Steam a year — and Steam's discovery means a Mecha Chameleon never gets brute-forced by three Voodoo clones in a month. That's the whole difference between the two platforms.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 The Steam Scanner is back — Q2, smallest to biggest 04:20 Taskbar Hero — an idle RPG in your taskbar (and the widget hint) 08:00 Supermarket Chaos & Oaken Tower — the tidy-up trend and an idle PvP tower 12:00 Idle gacha, Solarpunk & the evolve-into-a-crab roguelite 18:20 Librarian & Rome's Dead — high-budget cleaning and Roman survivor-slop 22:10 Vampire Crawlers, Paralives & the co-op casino-debt game 27:20 The winner — Mecha Chameleon, $60M by two people 35:30 Survivorship bias and why Steam can't be brute-forced
This episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa. http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100 -------------------------------------- PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers. Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/ They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it. - Scale fast - Keep your shares - Drawdown only as needed - Have PvX take downside risk alongside you + Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors --------------------------------------- For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale. Our sponsor FastSpring: Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 years They power top mobile publishers around the world Launch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg. --------------------------------------- This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let’s not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously. Panelists: Jakub Remiar, Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric
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--------------------------------------- Matej Lancaric User Acquisition & Creatives Consultant https://lancaric.me Felix Braberg Ad monetization consultant https://www.felixbraberg.com Jakub Remiar Game design consultant https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar --------------------------------------- Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it! Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple! Please share feedback and comments - [email protected] --------------------------------------- If you are interested in getting UA tips every week on Monday, visit lancaric.substack.com & sign up for the Brutally Honest newsletter by Matej Lancaric Do you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask Matej AI - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai
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Luis de la Camara spent 20 years on the client side, six in AAA, then Gameloft, King, Scopely, and five years at Rovio through the Sega exit, and he left a few weeks ago. Felix got him on before the news broke: Luis is the new CMO of Smadex. So this is a conference-bar conversation on tape. The brand question first: even with Angry Birds and Candy Crush, nobody has cracked measuring brand on top of UA; broad awareness campaigns brought the same quality users at a much higher CPI, so the real power of brand is cheaper performance, and incrementality testing is the only way to know whether App Store search is growth or just defending your own IP.