The first quarter of 2022 is over, and as is AppMagic’s tradition, they reported on changes in the most dynamic segment of mobile gaming: hyper-casual.

In the fourth quarter of 2021, the market reached 4.58В of cumulative downloads and grew by 13.5% compared to the previous period. In the new year, the market has shrunk a notch, reaching 4.2B of total downloads over the winter months and, thus, losing 8.3% of its size.

top

As you can see from the chart, half of these top 10 games are titles we already saw in the previous period of review, and several of them are well-known old timers, such as Going BallsTiles Hop: EDM Rush! и Hair Challenge. Some also continue undergoing active development by their studios — for example, Count Master, which was recently enhanced by an ASMR voiceover. However, there are five newcomers that we would like to have a look at today.

Merge Master – Dinosaur Fusion

Merge Master – Dinosaur Fusion, we can easily see that the game has acquired 51M downloads in the first quarter of 2022, with the largest shares of new players coming from India (35%), Brazil (11%) and Indonesia (10%).

From what it seems, the game was inspired by Merge Battle 3D: Dragon Fight, which ended up way less popular among users than its successor Merge Master – Dinosaur Fusion.

Find the Alien

Find the Alien has already gained almost 40M of downloads with 16% coming from India and 14% from Indonesia.

The game does not really present any significant challenges, but the visual is detailed and the settings and narrative situations are diverse.

Paper Fold

Paper Fold it sits in line five of our list with 32M downloads, the USA accountable for 11% and Indonesia for 10%.

The game is a rather standard puzzle, where the player has to fold a piece of paper in the right order to complete a picture.

Color Match

Color Match with its 29M downloads, the largest share of which comes from the US (28%). In the game, the player is offered to use colors, an item, and paper. The task is to mix colors in such a way so that the result matches the shade of the item, then to paint it and sell it at an auction.

On its website, publisher Supersonic shares some insights into the process of creating the game. The push to begin the new development process came from the color match trend on TikTok and Reddit.

Money Rush

Money Rush, concluding our top 10 with its 26M downloads, of which the majority comes from the United States (32%).

Summary

To sum things up, we can see that all of the new titles making up the top are already facing a downtrend, being released in the fall months of 2021 and gaining their largest shares of downloads from the USA, Indonesia and India. And arcade—probably one of the all-time pillars of hyper-casual games—prevails as the genre.


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