two & a half gamers -💣​ How Smash Fest created a NEW Puzzle category overnight

Summary

Here’s one of the wildest copycat stories in mobile: a LiveOps event minigame buried inside Toon Blast got extracted, turned into a standalone game called Smash Fest, and within a single month seven prominent studios shipped their own versions. A whole new physics-puzzle category, born from an event nobody was supposed to notice.

Matej Lančarič and Jakub Remiar are joined by ad-monetization guest Katerina to break down Smash Fest and the clone explosion around it. They cover the physics-based cannon core (each ball is a move, run out and buy five more — match-3 logic on a physics engine), the detective work tracing it back to Toon Blast’s “Cannon Fest” event (spotted by Game Refinery back in November 2024, and run by Peak as both playables and creatives — someone put two and two together and realized it worked), why Smash Fest was abruptly pulled from Google Play right as it scaled to ~300K downloads/day, and the seven-studio clone wave (Royal Smash by Cypher Games, Carnival Knockdown, Knockout, Knock Fever, Stack Smash by Tripledot, Carnival Blast, and more). Katerina digs into the monetization — Smash Fest’s fairly basic setup (one rewarded placement, interstitial every fourth attempt) versus Royal Smash’s smarter double-your-coins rewarded flow — with estimates landing around ~$130K/day in ads for Smash Fest, and the crew guessing the true total (IAP plus ads) could push toward ~$1M/day given a reported ~1M DAU. Then the UA reality: Smash Fest scaled ~300K downloads/day on ~50 creatives and essentially one great playable, ~90% AppLovin — while Royal Smash is catching up fast with 10x the creative volume, more channels, better LiveOps, and a monetization edge.