This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers -🧠 The Creative trends nobody wants to admit! (July 2026 trends)
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
Some months the creative trends are wild. This one, Matej says it straight: it’s quieter — everyone’s copying the same big 4X and Golden Goblins playbook, AI is everywhere, and studios are scaling down for summer. But the detective work underneath is where it gets good, including a live investigation into who actually spends the most on UA and who really leads on revenue once you account for the money Sensor Tower can’t see.
We run the month’s creatives and end up somewhere more interesting than the creatives themselves. They cover the copy-paste economy (Golden Goblins reskinned with bears and trees as AppQuantum’s new Animal Valley; Idle Zombie Miner cloning the original one-to-one), Pantheon’s ~9,600 creatives iterating on a single three-year-old winning concept, the “revenue down but DAU up” signal that reveals hidden D2C web-shop money (Raid Rush, Monopoly Go), the sad death of Match Villains (UA turned off, ~30% DAU lost in two months), and a genuinely useful data segment ranking the biggest publishers: Century Games leads both UA spend and revenue (~$228M/month), with Scopely likely second once web shops and Loom/Niantic are counted. Plus Playrix’s AI flood (not a full pivot — just a separate AI team out-producing everyone), the Simpsons/Monopoly Go collab hitting diminishing returns, and a China Joy meetup announcement.
The honest through-line: the creatives are converging, so the edge is in the data — reading DAU vs revenue, spotting the D2C dark pools, and knowing who’s really winning.
Chapters
00:00 A quieter month — and why that’s still worth watching
02:40 Top creatives by impression share — how to read the tab
05:10 Golden Goblins reskinned — Animal Valley, bears and trees
09:40 Pantheon’s 9,600 creatives and the D2C revenue tell
12:30 Match Villains is dead — UA off, 30% DAU gone
16:40 The data detective — who spends the most on UA
24:50 The revenue ranking and the D2C “dark pools”
31:20 Playrix’s AI flood and the Simpsons diminishing returns
