This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers -➡️HexaAway Breakdown – The 6th-Biggest sort puzzler you’ve NEVER heard of
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 am conference discussion vibe, so let’s not take it too seriously.
The Team:
Jakub Remiar- Game design consultant
Felix Braberg – Ad monetization consultant
Matej Lančarič – User Acquisition & Creatives consultant
Join our slack channel here: SLACK CHANNEL
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Summary
Hexa Away did something genuinely clever — it took the arrows/sort mechanic everyone’s chasing and rebuilt it on a hexagonal 3D grid, which turns out to be a better fit than flat arrows ever were. Then it scaled hard on AppLovin, hit a wall, and downscaled almost completely. It’s a great game and a UA cautionary tale in one.
We break down Hexa Away – a hexagonal-grid sort puzzler from the CyberAgent/GooDroid studio (yes, the Uma Musume people). They cover why the hexagonal grid is a genuinely better canvas for the arrows mechanic (escape routes, tangible blockers, room for more mechanics), the standard-but-solid IAP puzzler feature set, and the numbers that make it significant: it’s now the sixth-biggest sort puzzler by revenue (behind Pixel Flow, Magic Sort, Yarn Loop, Marble Sort, and Block Out), doing ~$90K/day IAP plus ~$42K/day in ads at peak, with 500K+ DAU on pristine US-heavy traffic. But the real lesson is the UA story: they went ~90% AppLovin, scaled to 800K DAU in April, then crashed back — because a ~4% day-30 retention simply can’t support that level of scale, and once you burn through the AppLovin audience, the ROAS doesn’t come back.
The takeaway: a great core and a clever mechanic aren’t enough. Concentration risk on one channel plus weak retention is how you overshoot your UA and torch your cash.
Chapters
00:00 Why Hexa Away is significant — the 6th-biggest sort puzzler
03:40 Arrows on a hexagonal grid — “hexagons are the bestagons”
07:40 The blocker framework and monetizing on difficulty
11:20 The numbers — $90K/day, 500K DAU, pristine US traffic
12:20 The ad-revenue breakdown — ~$42K/day, 36% of total
13:30 Four new creatives, ~200 total, and the banner problem
15:00 The AppLovin over-scale — 800K DAU then the crash
18:30 The 4% day-30 retention that explains everything
