China's Shifting Trends - The Most Downloaded Games in November

An app from China dominated downloads in the App Store in November as hyper casuals are making a comeback.

I crunched the numbers and ranked the most downloaded mobile games in the world in November and here's what's new.

Subway Surfers was the most downloaded mobile game in the world in November. The incumbent wasn't the most downloaded game in either the App Store or Google Play but rather ranked fourth and third, respectively. However, together, it saw 16M new downloads, according to our estimates, which gave it the lead.

8 Ball Pool, another oldie-but-goodie managed to rise to take on the second spot for the first time with 15M estimated downloads. It also managed to snag the #1 spot on Google Play.

Roblox managed to snag third place with 15M downloads as well. Just a tad less than 8 Ball Pool.

Spider Fighting and Block Blast round out the top 5 with 13M(ish) downloads each.

It's almost all hyper-casuals from here on down.

On the App Store, Rythm Master (节奏大师), a game that's only available in China, managed to get more downloads than games available globally and was the most downloaded game on the App Store in November challenging Monopoly Go. Both saw 4M downloads from the App Store, according to our estimates.

China's App Store continues to grow faster while the government restricts who can publish games there and how. I see this becoming an international problem in the future.

According to our App Intelligence, the top 10 most downloaded mobile games in the world made their way into 125M devices in November. A tad up from last month's 122M which is nice but nothing crazy.

Let's see what happens in December.

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