Where Will Hyper Casual Games Go?

I've talked about hyper casual games, those (mostly) stick figure games that rise to the top of the charts for a few days and then disappear, quite a bit last year. At least once a month when running through our most downloaded games report.

Hyper casuals monetize with ads usually, so the key to success is downloads. Lots and lots of downloads.

Thanks to great ad targeting tools, that's pretty easy these days. Well... Was. The party got put on pause when Apple's App Tracking Transparency hit and caused targeted ads to be less targeted and convert less.

I'm going to analyze them a bit differently. To get not just a good idea of downloads but also of how hard those developers are pushing, I scanned all of our most downloaded games charts for this year (which you can find here) and filtered them down to only include hyper casual games. Then, summed up the downloads and charted the total by month.

In case I didn't lose you yet, here's what it looks like:

And right off the bat, you can probably guess where I'm going with this...

Now, these downloads are a sum of downloads from the App Store and Google Play, so growth on the latter is masking the decline of the former. But, even with that in mind you can still see the trend is declining.

In January of 2021, 7 of the 10 most downloaded games in the world were hyper casuals. Those brought in a total of 163M downloads, according to our estimates. By the "hot" season for games (summer break), both numbers rose even higher! 9 of the 10 top games in August were hyper casuals and together they saw 183M downloads.

But look at that sharp decline right after.

October dropped to just 4 games and 77M downloads, and in November they dropped even more. They rebounded a teeny tiny bit in December, but we're looking at a drop of 50% from January.

Is it the end of hyper casuals? I don't think I can give you an answer there, but if we zoom out a bit, between the higher costs of advertising, shortening attention spans, and enormous amounts of content out there, I think 2022 will usher in an even more hyper set of hyper casual games.

What do I mean by that? Even simpler game mechanics, that are easier to churn out, with higher emphasis on having everything based on data.

I'm not the audience for these games so it doesn't matter how much I like or dislike such a future, but strictly looking at market trends, I think it's inevitable.