AppMagic spoke about the situation with hyper-casual games in the third quarter of 2022

Key findings

• Hyper-casual games for July-September totaled 4 billion downloads in the App Store and Google Play. This is 10% less than in the second quarter.
• Analysts expect that by the end of the whole year, the downloads of hyper-casuals will grow by 5-7%. The bulk of downloads will be in developing countries, while in developed countries there will be a slight decline.
• The cumulative quarterly revenue of hyper-casual games with IAP was $51 million. At the same time, 58% of the amount fell on developed countries.

Top 10 most downloaded hyper casual games for the third quarter

• The first place in the rating was again taken by Bridge Race, which collected 44 million downloads in the quarter.
• Other old-timers also got into the top 10. These are Race Master 3D (second place with 35.9 million downloads), Going Balls (sixth place with 26.6 million downloads) and Tall Man Run (ninth place with 25.6 million downloads).
• The rating also includes four new items. Released just two months ago, Snow Race was placed on the third line of the list of the most popular hyper-casual games of the period. She has 34.4 million downloads on her account.

According to AppMagic analysts, Snow Race is a clear example of hyper—casual developers actively borrowing ideas from each other. The authors of Snow Race copied the mechanics of bridge construction from Bridge Race and added snowballs from Snowball.io , creating a kind of hybrid. In their game, the user needs to make a snowball of sufficient size so that it can be rolled to another platform over the bridge.

• The next novelty in the top is Snake Lite, which debuted in fourth place with 33.4 million downloads.

“The game looks like a regular clone of Warm Zone.io . No matter how hard we tried to find out the reasons for its success, we didn’t find anything special,” the analysts said.

• Hair Tattoo: Barber Shop Game from Azur Games, ranked eighth in the top, collecting 26 million downloads in the quarter.

AppMagic noted that Azur Games was inspired by viral videos about haircuts in TikTok. Such videos have become so popular that they have given rise to a separate style of men’s hairstyles, which is called TikTok boy hair.

• The latest novelty in the top 10 was the Dream Wedding runner. It was downloaded 24 million times during the quarter.

Dream Wedding managed to achieve success largely thanks to mislids, analysts say. To promote their runner, the developers used videos that showed what was actually not in the game.