Mobile Gaming OG Akin Babayigit: The real truth about mobile gaming success
This episode is special. We sit down with Akin Babayigit — early Facebook gaming, Audience Network launch team, King, co-founder of Tripledot, investor at Arcadia — to talk about what actually builds winning game studios.
We go deep into:
Why Pixelflow exploded
Why Match Villains keeps growing
Why China, Turkey & Vietnam are ahead
Why copying doesn’t kill winners
Why are ads misunderstood?
Why execution beats everything
And why is there no such thing as an “end game” in your career
This is not surface-level advice. This is 15+ years of pattern recognition distilled into one conversation.
🧠 Key Takeaways
Execution beats ideas (but intuition is back)
If you know you have something, scale aggressively
Ads are not the enemy. Poor integration is.
Turkey’s gaming ecosystem is structurally advantaged
China wins because of patience + scale
Match-3 is not dead — the bar is just brutal
Long-term greedy beats short-term greedy
There is no finish line in building
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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
Special guest: Akin Babayigit
https://www.linkedin.com/in/akinbabayigit/
Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA
Chapters
00:00 – Why This Episode Is Special
02:10 – Akin’s Background (Facebook → King → Tripledot → Arcadia)
06:00 – The Birth of Audience Network
10:00 – Ads: The Most Misunderstood Revenue Stream
16:00 – Hybrid Monetization & CPM Decay
20:00 – Pixelflow’s Explosive Growth
27:00 – Copycats, China & Scaling Fast
34:00 – Why Match Villains Keep Growing
40:00 – Turkish Gaming Incentives Explained
48:00 – China’s Work Ethic & Competitive Edge
55:00 – Career Philosophy: There Is No End Game
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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
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Please share feedback and comments - [email protected]
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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
Do you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask Matej AI - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai
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