🎮 The Top Mobile Games in May by Downloads and Revenue

Can you smell it in the air? That smell that screams "school's out" and in our neck of the woods means more downloads now that kids are done with their full-time job.

That also means May's over, and so it's time for our monthly analysis.

Everybody's Bursting

May was a big(ger) month in downloads for games across both platforms. The usual suspects earned the most downloads, but this time there were more of those to go around.

Bounce and Collect from Voodoo was the most downloaded game in the App Store, scoring more than 4.6M new users in May. On the other side of the fence, Bridge Race from Supersonic Studios took the crown on Google Play with nearly 38M new users.

Bridge Race wins Google Play for the second month in a row, but May was significantly bigger than April. 55% bigger, to be specific.

With a total of 41M downloads, Bridge Race was the most downloaded game in the world in May across both stores, followed by Hair Challenge (which was the 2nd most downloaded game in the App Store in April) and Paper Fold, both also claiming the tops of the individual store lists.

Together, the top 10 most downloaded games in the world were downloaded 209 million times in May. That's a hefty increase of 17% over April's 178M.

Even though school was strange in 2021, it's summertime, and even that's over, which means more downloads but more so, more competition for hyper-casual game developers. For two reasons:

1. The top of the store, be it Apple or Google Play, is getting crowded. Between apps that go viral on TikTok and casual games that burst, climbing to the peak will get more expensive.
2. ATT is continuing to wreak havoc on targeting, making it even more expensive to get the right number of downloads to gain momentum.

I don't expect that'd stop any of the companies who are pushing now because they have the resources, but I expect things to take a bit more preparation and research before pulling the trigger.

Dancing the Dance

Let's talk turkey—money, not the country. Like last month's report, we're now analyzing games by revenue. May's list is practically a copy of April's list. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Candy Crush was the highest-earning game across both platforms in the U.S. in May, adding $32.1M of net revenue to their bottom line, according to our estimates. In very close second place was Roblox with an estimated $32M, followed by Garena Free Fire, which hauled in $29M from U.S. players.

Genshin Impact made the cut in May, joining at the bottom of the list with $17M in net revenue in the US. The game's revenue has been growing steadily this year, so we expect it to remain on the list this summer.

Together, the top 10 earning mobile games brought in $240M of net revenue from the U.S. in May, an increase of about 7% over April's $224M.

With summer officially here June, should look even better.

App Intelligence for Everyone!

The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.

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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.