two & a half gamers – 🧠 Everything Is AI Now: Mel Gibson From Wish Is Selling You a 4X Game

Summary

A general smacks a soldier so hard he turns into a chair — and then into Mel Gibson. That’s a real Top Force ad. Century Games isn’t testing AI creatives anymore; it’s running the whole portfolio on them: Lord Rush pumping out roughly 5,000 ads a month across every era in history (Spartans, pirates, Egyptians with AK-47s), the King Shot slap-skit upgraded so the guy saves a princess first, fake “watch an ad” callouts on a game with no ads, and the same skit shipped with the actor’s nationality swapped per region. Matej Lančarič, Jakub Remiar, and Felix Braberg tear through 107 AI creatives: Block Blast’s genuinely clever “frame anything into a level” trick, Last Asylum’s Attack-on-Titan-style spot with no end card (you don’t need one — slap a playable after it), a new Lilith 4X scaling from 100K to 200K downloads a day on golden-AK “mushroom budget” ads, Dream Games lifting Travel Town’s strawberry micro-drama wholesale, 37 Games’ Walking Dead-alike, Top Heroes’ Rock-from-Wish mermaid genie, and Supercent’s Bulldozer Master doing 200K downloads a day on Truck-Star demolition and the “I own a mine, you can too” meme. Jakub’s closing puzzle: how do King Shot and Lord Rush both scale on identical creatives? Matej’s answer: nobody cares. It’s mobile.

📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS

— Century’s AI budget is migrating: Whiteout → King Shot → Lord Rush and Top Force.
— Lord Rush runs every era at once; King Shot stays medieval. Only the transition into gameplay matters.
— Instant localization: same skit, actor’s nationality swapped per region.
— Block Blast can turn any AI scene into a creative by freezing it into a level.
— You don’t need an end card — a story-driven AI hook plus a playable is enough.
— Lilith’s new 4X and Supercent’s Bulldozer Master are both scaling at ~200K downloads/day.