The World Cup is here, and three football games are quietly printing money — but in completely different ways. eFootball is doing $45M a month after nearly a decade of straight-line growth, and almost nobody in the industry is talking about it. Matej Lančarič, Jakub Remiar, and Felix Braberg break down the three realistic football giants — Dream League Soccer, Konami's eFootball, and EA Sports FC Mobile (the game formerly known as FIFA Mobile). They get into the wildly different country mixes (Dream League at 25% US revenue, eFootball at 43% from Japan, EA FC pulling 20% from China and 16% from Korea), the radically different ad strategies (eFootball at just 0.65% ad revenue, EA FC around 15-25%, Dream League a remarkable 68% ad-driven), the gacha and card-collection monetization, the FIFA licensing divorce that freed EA from a reported nine-figure annual fee, and the UA reality: all-real-gameplay creatives, great CPIs for the genre, and the curious fact that none of them are on AppLovin despite Dream League being a perfect blended-ROAS candidate. The throughline: same sport, same core gameplay, three completely different businesses underneath. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 The numbers — eFootball at $45M/month 01:30 Three games, big structural nuances 05:30 Ad revenue split — 0.65% vs 15% vs 68% 06:50 The country mix that changes everything 11:00 Inside the games — gameplay and gacha 17:30 The FIFA license divorce and EA's escape 26:30 The ad stacks and what they get wrong 35:30 UA reality — real gameplay, cheap CPIs, no AppLovin -------------------------------------- PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers. Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/ They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it. - Scale fast - Keep your shares - Drawdown only as needed - Have PvX take downside risk alongside you + Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors --------------------------------------- For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale. Our sponsor FastSpring: Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 years They power top mobile publishers around the world Launch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg. --------------------------------------- This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. 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 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously. Panelists: Jakub Remiar, Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric Podcast: Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA Chapters --------------------------------------- Matej Lancaric User Acquisition & Creatives Consultant https://lancaric.me Felix Braberg Ad monetization consultant https://www.felixbraberg.com Jakub Remiar Game design consultant https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar --------------------------------------- Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it! Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple! Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me --------------------------------------- If you are interested in getting UA tips every week on Monday, visit lancaric.substack.com & sign up for the Brutally Honest newsletter by Matej Lancaric
