Jam Bus Sand Fall is Bus Traffic Fever with sand: trucks (Matej says buses) line up at the bottom, colored sand pours in from the top, and you watch. There is no speed-up button, no rewarded “go faster” placement like Colony Flow.
Felix failed the FTUE four times. Jakub calls the category Torture Sort, and the numbers say torture pays: $80K a day in IAP last week heading for $100K, 65K downloads a day, up 1,300% in a month, already #19 in the sort category at roughly $1M a month, with Russia driving downloads and the US driving revenue.
Ad revenue is only ~$7K a day, 12–16% of the total, app-ads.txt hasn’t been touched since January and Unity isn’t even in it.
Whole UA strategy for the category: make images as many people as possible relate to, then solve them. The bigger story is the category: sort is ~$60M a month in IAP, ~$120M with ads, half the size of merge and still growing; Goodroid is at $350K a day and $75M lifetime, Colony Flow at $500K a day, Cube Away at $60K a day out of the gate. Matej tried to build one and hit 20–25% retention: if you don’t have a senior level designer, don’t. Less torture, more fun.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Cold open: a 17-minute level
01:30 – Jam Bus Sand Fall: buses, trucks and sand
04:39 – Torture Sort: no speed-up, fluent fail state, level 30 = level 1
06:40 – Admon: five rewarded placements, $7K/day, no Unity, stale app-ads.txt
11:18 – $80K/day, 65K downloads, +1,300%, Russia vs US
13:05 – The sort category: Goodroid, Colony Flow, $120M a month
20:24 – UA: 600 videos, 5 playables, 95% AppLovin, AI dead eyes
28:40 – Why these games don’t scale and Matej’s failed sort attempt
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
Today's episode is brought to you by PvX Partners. Developers now have a new way to fund their marketing: PvX Card.
If you're scaling your gaming business and need more capital for UA, here's the deal: your credit limit grows with your marketing performance — the higher your ROAS, the more credit you have available. Repayment terms run from 60 to 120 days and scale with your ROAS, so you can match repayments to your game's payback period.
It's dynamic, it's flexible, and it scales as fast as you do.
Check out PvXPartners.com/cards and scale your UA with PvX Card
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
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 - matej@lancaric.me
