From the Editor
What’s up friend?
This week edition is about lot's of things. It’s about 267 games launched in a single quarter and seven survivors. It’s about 79 shooters trying their luck and zero making it past $10M. It’s about a Turkish match-3 game becoming the price-setter for everyone else’s ad inventory while you were busy A/B testing button colors. It’s about AppLovin firing half the company so the survivors can ship 92% of their code with AI.
This issue is about the last lever. The one networks can’t pull for you. It decides which seven games out of 267 actually live.
We’ve got a webinar coming up that I genuinely care about. A new podcast with Shay Yosifon, who scaled Monopoly Go’s UA at Scopely. And six pieces from this week that all point at the same gravity well: creative volume plus system thinking is eating everything else.
Save Your Seat: Game Growth Is Changing. Are You?
May 12, 2026. 4:00 PM CET / 2:00 PM UTC / 7:00 AM PT. Free.
I’m hosting a live webinar with two people I respect. Luis de la Cámara, VP Global Marketing at Rovio. Gil Tov-Ly, CMO at Appcharge. We’re sitting down to talk about the three forces reshaping mobile game growth in 2026.
UA, monetization, and creative share one P&L now. That changes how you staff, measure, and spend.
What we’ll cover:
- The three forces reshaping game growth
- Why web shops are eating the stores
- Creative as a growth system, not a deliverable
- What Rovio, Appcharge, and Sett see coming next
Can’t make it live? Register and we’ll send you the recording.
Sett Featured Content
Unpredictable Hits S2E5: Shay Ze’ev Yosifon, VP of Marketing at Zynga
Shay scaled UA for Monopoly Go at Scopely. Before that he built centralized marketing teams at Playtika and sold ringtones at an ad network earlier in his career. Now he runs marketing for Zynga’s studios including Gram and Socialpoint. He’s seen every version of mobile UA there is.
We sat down for 62 minutes to talk about what UA actually looks like in 2026.
On the last lever: Automation took most of it. Bidding, budget allocation, audience targeting, all algorithm. The thing UA managers still fully control is creative. That’s the lever.
On signal optimization: The new job is feeding the algorithm cleaner signals and capturing value earlier in the funnel.
On China and Turkey: The testing culture coming out of Eastern studios is on a different level. Western studios that don’t match the volume don’t compete. Shay’s read on it: nothing will stop them.
On AI: A force multiplier. Same theme we keep hearing from operators who are actually doing the work.
Industry Buzz
1. The UA System the Platforms Can’t Build for You
Author: Josh Chandley, Deconstructor of Fun
This one is a must-read. Chandley (COO at WildCard) lays out the structural gap that no network can close for you: Unity, AppLovin, Google, Meta optimize on a 7 to 28 day window. Mobile games generate value out to day 720. Two years.
That gap between what the network can see and what your game actually earns is where yield lives. Studios that build internal systems to translate business goals into network-level ROAS targets capture the margin. Studios that don’t, hand it back.
The five properties of a real growth system: signal clarity, latency, gain, receiver capacity, and loop closure. If any of those break, the whole thing leaks money.
The org chart implication: spend levels dictate structure. $500K monthly is when data needs to be its own function. $5-15M is when functions become directorates. $25M+ is when full architecture is non-negotiable.
The conclusion: “Creative production velocity is the final competitive advantage as networks automate baseline creative.” We’ve been saying this for a year.
2. AppLovin Cuts ~50% of Staff. 92% of Their Code Is AI-Generated.
Source: Gamigion
AppLovin laid off close to half its workforce. The reason was speed, not cost.
The numbers are hard to ignore. $160B market cap. $5.48B in revenue. $10M EBITDA per head. 92% of production code generated by AI. This is the most efficient ad-tech operation in the market and they just got leaner.
CEO Adam Foroughi’s framing: “Remove the buffer, and teams have no choice but to automate and move faster.” On role design: “If a role can be automated, it shouldn’t exist.” The takeaway from the operators reading it: AI exposes who’s actually shipping.
The same company crashed 92% in 2022. Now it’s worth $160B. Conviction matters.
The signal for the rest of us: if AppLovin ships 92% of its code with AI, your creative production can’t keep running the old way.
3. Dicero! by Habby: $100K/Day on Day One. 500 to 2,200+ Creatives in Days.
Author: Jakub Remiar
Habby launched Dicero! in mid-April. Doing $100K+ per day from day one.
The game itself is sharp. A dice-poker roguelike, basically Balatro adapted for mobile, with a 1-to-4 merging system, six inventory slots, and rewarded ads completely removed from monetization. Habby’s product team continues to be ridiculous.
The number you should care about is the creative count. 500 ads at launch. 2,200+ within days.
This is what creative velocity at scale actually looks like. Habby floods the funnel and lets the algorithm sort it. Almost nobody else can match that launch curve.
Watching Habby release a game is the closest thing UA has to a leading indicator.
4. 267 Core Games Launched in Q4. Seven Hit. Zero in Action/Shooter.
Author: Matthew Emery, Gamigion
The numbers are brutal. 267 core games shipped in Q4 2025. Seven cleared $10M annual revenue. A 2.6% hit rate.
Look at the breakdown. Every single $10M+ hit was an RPG. Action and Shooter shipped 79 games. Zero hit $10M. Strategy, Simulation, Sports: also zero. RPG-Action specifically had a 37.5% hit rate, three of eight.
Four of the seven hits used known anime IP. All seven came from Korean, Chinese, or Japanese teams. Arknights: Endfield from HyperGryph led the pack at $199M annual.
This is the data behind everything we say about discovery. You can’t predict which seven of 267 will live. You can stack the odds: right genre, right region, right IP, right team. After that, the only thing left is exploration at volume.
97% of ideas fail. Now you have a quarter of evidence.
5. Dream Games Is the Price-Setter. Match-3 Has a Monopolist.
Author: Wayne Bickerton, Gamigion
Royal Match did $1.46 billion in 2024. That’s roughly $500M more than Candy Crush. They’re tracking $100M+ per month at run rate in March 2026. From a Turkish studio that didn’t exist a decade ago.
Bickerton’s frame is sharp: “They are not a participant in mobile advertising. They are a price-setter.” Dream Games buys at a scale that resets CPMs across Apple Search Ads, Meta, and AppLovin for the entire category. Every other match-3 studio is paying Dream Games’ price.
The category consolidated around one winner. Match-3 has a monopolist.
2025 revenue dipped 6%. Strategy titles like Whiteout Survival and Last War: Survival may be pulling premium spenders. Worth watching. The core lesson stands: Dream Games out-bought, out-creatived, and out-executed Candy Crush at scale.
6. Vietnam Hits 4.9B Downloads. #2 Globally.
Source: GameGeek (via Gamigion)
Vietnam isn’t an emerging market anymore.
The numbers: 4.9 billion downloads. #2 globally. 27,388 new games shipped in 2025, up 13% YoY. 210+ active studios. IAP revenue grew 83%.
What changed: 73% of studios are shifting from ad-only to IAP or hybrid monetization. The era of hypercasual spam is over. 78% of users are engaging older titles, which means longer lifecycle products are starting to win. 74% of studios are under 10 years old, so the breakout window is wide open.
The tape: Vietnam is on the same maturation arc Türkiye walked five years ago. NCSoft already moved, paying ~$155M for Lihuhu. Expect more capital and more M&A in the next 12 to 24 months.
If you’re a publisher, get familiar. If you’re a studio, this is your competition.
Wrap Up
The week tells one story.
267 games shipped, 7 lived. Habby went from 500 to 2,200+ creatives in days and pulled $100K/day from launch. Dream Games out-spent everyone in match-3 and now sets the price. AppLovin shipped half the people and 92% of the code is AI. The networks have a 28-day window. Your game has a 720-day life. The gap is yours to close.
Creative volume plus system thinking is the lever. Everyone who’s winning right now is pulling it harder than you are.
Come hang on May 12. We’ll get into it with Luis and Gil.
See you next week.
Yours, Jonathan (Fishi) Fishman
About the Author
Fishi is the Head of Marketing at Sett. His brain is a chaotic jukebox of ideas with more cultural references than any feed can handle. He collects sneakers and plays chess while you’re still counting sheep.
