Aside from these unicorns, the games in the top 10 remained relatively static. Only 2 games have broken into the top 10 puzzle games in the last 4 years: Royal Match (full deconstruction here) and Project Makeover. While there were a few notable 2021 releases including Good Job Game’s Zen Match, Rovio’s Angry Birds Journey and Supernatural City, Wooga’s Switchcraft, Fusebox’s Matchmaker: Puzzle and Stories and Qiiwi’s MasterChef: Match and Win - Puzzle and Cook, none of these are big enough (yet) to break into the top 40. Looking at the top 2000 Puzzle games, about 140 were new (or did not have a ranking the year previous).
Outside of Merge, 2021 felt a bit empty with respect to new puzzle games. Top 20 in 2020 vs 2021 and Notable New Games There are less new players but Puzzle is monetizing them better, some games and publishers more than others. Revenue, on the other hand, still grew YoY, just not as much as the year prior (17% vs almost 30%). This year, mostly due to the consequences of the changes to IDFA, but potentially to a lesser degree due to the small bouts of freedom from restrictions and a pent up desire to travel/adventure/leave the house from the year prior, we saw installs shrink by about 15% YoY. We saw a 30% increase in downloads from 2019 to 2020 and a similar increase in revenue over the same timeframe. The lifestyle changes of 2020 saw an increase in people becoming players and downloading games to likely pass the time at home. If one thing can be predicted, it’s unpredictable. We’re starting the year strong with continued masks, work-from-home orders, and social distancing. Just when we thought that looming lockdowns and hazmat suits were going to be a memory of 2020-2021, enter 2022. Drawing and Coloring games also declined as platforms clamped down on the misleading subscription selling. Meanwhile, Interactive Story games went down (-22%) due to the decline of all three main franchises: Choices, Episode and, Chapters. The Simulation genre was propelled to 14% growth by the seemingly unstoppable success of Roblox as well as the rise of Family Island after the developer Melsoft was acquired by Moon Active. This is perhaps the most interesting puzzle genre as seemingly every year there’s a hit game that has some kind of a new twist to the puzzle gameplay.
Noteworthy in the Puzzle genre is the Other Match-3 sub-genre that grew 90% with games Match 3D (AppLovin) and Zen Match (Good Job Games). Hypercasual games increased in-app purchase revenue by a respectful 26% while Puzzle games, the second-largest genre on mobile after Strategy, continued to grow at a market rate of 15% year-over-year. The growth was across the whole genre with honorable mentions going to Playtika’s Solitaire Grand Harvest ($53M, +56% YoY), Yalla Ludo from Yalla Technology ($49M, +187% YoY), Solitaire Cruise Tripeaks from Applovin ($34M, +504% YoY) and Dice Dreams from Superplay ($18M, +1446% YoY) The fastest IAP revenue growth (+42%) occurred in the Tabletop Games genre. And to be even more accurate, Hypercasual games was the only genre that continued to grow in terms of downloads last year. The downloads for the mobile games market declined 5%. When it comes to downloads, casual games were downloaded 33 Billion times, which despite the astonishing number is just a tad less than a year ago. While the double-digit growth is impressive, it’s nothing compared to the year before 2020 when the category boomed by a whopping 36%. As a whole, the growth of the Casual Games category in 2021 generated 17% more in in-app revenues (excluding China, Japan, and Korea), while the overall mobile games market revenues grew 14%.
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