The hybrid casual hype train shows no signs of slowing down, with a growing number of releases making appearances in the top-grossing charts in March. One of the most recent success stories is Rollic Games’ hybrid casual puzzle game, Color Block Jam, which managed to reach the highest IAP performance on the GameRefinery charts we’ve ever seen for a game in its genre. Should hyper casual developers follow the lead of Homa Games by embracing hybrid casual games instead?
Over in the midcore market, we saw major updates for some of the biggest titles. Some of these, such as the latest updates in Pokemon TCG Pocket and Clash of Clans, have been warmly received by players. Others, such as major changes to Clash Royale, have sent players into a frenzy for changing gacha mechanics. While the update hasn’t had a major impact on performance, managing player sentiment off the back of it will be a challenge for Supercell moving forward, and highlights the comms challenges of major updates.
With Easter creeping up and plenty of Summer events providing opportunities for in-game seasonal events, it’s worth remembering that April Fools is also a fantastic time to introduce new content in your LiveOps campaigns. If you’re yet to embrace April Fools events in your game, we’ve provided a rundown of the most impressive and wildest events we saw this year. Expect plenty of eggs, fake game announcements, and a twerking Venom for good measure.
For more information about these updates and titles, as well as the latest trends from across the mobile market, check out our latest analyst bulletin below.
March’s casual game updates
Top-grossing puzzle game Triple Match 3D reworked its social win streak event, Arctic Adventure, and turned it into a solo win streak event, adding three different difficulties based on the number of consecutive wins to complete the event: five levels, 10 levels or 20 levels. The more challenging win streaks have better rewards, but players lose if they fail to complete a level before reaching the end of the streak.
Roblox launched another platform-wide event, The Hunt: Mega Edition, which encouraged players to compete in 25 different games on the platform, collecting Mega Tokens and solving puzzles along the way. The event is similar to previous platform-wide events, and featured an event hub in a bespoke The Hunt: Mega Edition game with portals to the 25 Roblox games as well as a special battle pass to unlock rewards. If legible within Roblox’s T&Cs, the ten fastest players to finish the event get invited to a live tournament at Roblox HQ, with the winning players taking home a $1 million prize!
In the event, players could collect two types of tokens: Standard Tokens and Mega Tokens. Standard Tokens could be collected by completing fairly simple tasks within the 25 featured games, and they unlocked rewards in the basic event track. The Mega Tokens were obtained through more challenging tasks, unlocking rewards in the mega event track—also requiring completing challenging puzzles. These challenging tasks and puzzles were unlocked progressively throughout the event, although the difficulty of these puzzles did become easier as the event progressed.
The $1 million prize pool and the exclusive nature of the event rewards incentivized engagement with the event, making it the most popular platform-wide event to date, with more than 180 million visits.
Additional casual gaming highlights and other news
In our 2025 February Mobile Market Review, we noted the performance of a new hybrid casual puzzle game, Color Block Jam, which was consistently ranking in the top-download charts. It’s continued to scale since then, and is one of the highest-grossing performances we’ve ever seen from a game in this hybrid casual puzzle category.
This is an impressive IAP performance from the game, and even more notable as there have been few big feature/live event additions in February or March—only added levels and bug fixes. Part of the reason for Color Block Jam’s success might be down to it requiring more skill-based decision making than regular Match3 games, making it a more challenging game.
While this difficulty spike is proving profitable for the time being, it’s worth noting that it does increase the risk of churn if players get stuck at certain difficulty curves in the future. It seems that Rollic has mastered the game’s difficulty curve so far.
Color Block Jam’s success demonstrates the growing interest from players in hybrid-casual games. Screwdom, a 3D hybrid puzzle game with gameplay similar to Screw Jam, hit the top-grossing iOS chart in March, peaking at 99 on the US chart while showing an upward trend for downloads.
Similarly, while downloads for the food-themed casual game All in Hole started to slow down, it reached an all-time high for monthly IAP revenues in March, sustaining a position in the top-50 thanks to its ad revenue making it the first major hit for developer Homa Games following its transformation from a hyper casual to hybrid casual developer.
Another hybrid puzzle game, Bus Escape: Traffic Jam, has been consistently in the top DL 100 since late 2024, gradually scaling in revenue and recently hitting the top GR 200 US iOS. While its core gameplay is nothing new, this performance suggests the game may have picked up new players from successful UA campaigns on socials.
It’s been a while since we’ve mentioned Gossip Harbor, but the game keeps on growing and recently hit a new high by breaking into the top-10 grossing. One of the reasons for this is there’s been a significant push on LiveOps, such as discounts added for bubble items on the merge grid—something that’s totally new for merge2 games. On the topic of merge games, Merge Mansion’s performance dip has leveled out and the title is now clearly following event trends such as digging and excavation events by launching its own take on minigames.
It was Among Us that popularized the idea of assassination games, but Splashin is an interesting new spin on the formula, peaking at GR4 on the download charts. It’s a real-world game app where players are assigned targets and use location tracking to eliminate each other. It supports game modes like Battle Royale and includes features like in-app chat and power-up IAPs. The game’s success in the top-grossing charts is due to its viral spread amongst high school and college students, who are using it to organize large-scale social games.
March’s midcore game updates
Die-hard Pokémon fans finally got the update they were waiting for as Pokémon TCG Pocket’s March update introduced ranked matches. Until this update, only casual PvP was available, but players can now compete on leaderboard rankings on a seasonal basis. The implementation is quite standard, with players progressing through various ranks of pokeballs (standard, great, ultra, master).
As is typical with the TCG Pocket’s monthly updates, a new booster pack, Shining Revelry, was also added to the game. In addition to the standard star rarities, this new booster adds shiny Pokémon into the game. Mimicking performance from earlier updates, this new booster pack drove significant revenue, pushing the game to a top-grossing spot.
Supercell had a super cooldown this month, making some major changes to Clash of Clans and Clash Royale to improve the speed of gameplay. Clash of Clans removed all training times for troops, spells, and Siege Machines, while also removing the healing time for Heroes, meaning players can now start a multiplayer battle in the Home Village anytime without waiting.
In addition, training-related boosts have also been removed, although players in Legend League are still limited to eight battles per day. To cater to the increased battle numbers, players will now earn and lose fewer Trophies in multiplayer attacks.
Clash Royale removed the timer gachas, which is noteworthy as the game was originally the trendsetter with timed gachas and introduced their usage across many other titles with similar gameplay. The new gacha system gives instant rewards such as Lucky Chests three times per day, as well as cards and coins up to 15 times per day. They also removed Season Shop and spread the items obtained through that to other sources.
The big question: how do players feel about these changes? The community’s response to Clash of Clans’ changes has been largely positive, as the changes make gameplay feel faster. Looking at the performance of the game, it seems that there was not a big loss in this area either (even when timer skips have been part of the economy of the game since day 1).
The response to Clash Royale’s updates hasn’t been so positive. Top-rated comments on the YouTube video announcing the news say the changes will kill the game, as the removal of the Season Shop moves some rewards to the paid track of the Battle Pass. While players have largely criticized the update, there hasn’t been a notable impact on performance yet.
Additional midcore gaming highlights and other news
DC: Dark Legion is a new strategy game focused on PvP battles between your favorite DC heroes, but it takes influence from a mix of genres. The main focus is on the RPG elements from character collecting and upgrades, but it also takes some influence from 4X games through its base building and alliance features. That said, it lacks the proper world map and training aspects that are popular in successful 4X games.
Dark Legion hit the top download spot after launching in mid-March and has sustained good grossing ranks since, peaking at top-grossing 30. Character collector RPGs have really struggled in recent times, so it’ll be interesting to see if the addition of 4X elements helps its performance in the future.
March also saw the arrival of a new game from Supercell, mo.co, a top-down monster bashing game which launched with an unusual strategy. While the app was downloadable for everyone, you needed an invitation to get into the game. Invitations could be received by applying on one of their websites, being invited by a friend who plays the game, participating in giveaways by influencers, or reportedly even finding an ad plastered on the streets.
The gameplay itself is top-down monster bashing done on a map with other players. While one can hunt the monsters alone the most effective way to play the game is to run around in a spontaneous large group of players. The game is very generous, as there are no penalties for dying, and you can even collect full experience points if others defeat the monsters while you are waiting to respawn.
Monetization is the biggest question mark for the game as it focuses solely on cosmetics. Power progression has to be earned, and there is no way to boost this through in-app purchases. Considering how busy the gameplay and general UI can look when it’s done effectively, it’s hard to see the appeal of cosmetics, as it can sometimes be difficult to see your character properly. The game failed to reach the top-grossing 200 chart in the US two weeks after its release.
There have been plenty of new 4X games hitting the market recently, with Century Games’ 4X game Kingshot continuing to see success following its release in late February, as it hit the top-grossing GR 200 in mid-March, peaking at GR 79. It’s almost a reskin of the already-successful Whiteout Survival from the same publisher, featuring a simulation-like resident management system, base-building system and live event framework. The biggest difference is its medieval art style and Rebel Assault stages, which closely resemble those in the Steam strategy game, Thronefall.
High Seas Hero, another 4X strategy game developed by Century Games, has been in the top download charts since its launch in January and finally entered the top-grossing 200 at the end of March. It features a distinct naval battle theme with a Fallout Shelter-style base-building system.
Other Highlights
April started with the April Fool’s events, and while they don’t fall under our March coverage we wanted to briefly highlight some findings while the topic is hot. Seasonal events are a fantastic opportunity to drive revenue with LiveOps updates, and we noticed a surprising number of games doing something special for a day that many developers might not be embracing yet.
Here are some of our favorites:
- CookieRun: Kingdom brought back an earlier April Fool’s event in which you unlock alternate looks for the characters by handing them a usable item called shroomies. The shroomies were obtained by completing various tasks within the game.
- Brawl Stars returned to a joke from earlier years by bringing back Egg-skins for its characters.
- Marvel Rivals gave players a free twerking emote for Venom if players completed the Galacta’s Cosmic Adventure-event.
- Overwatch 2 ran its annual April Fool’s seasonal event, this time titled Totally Normalwatch—which lasted a total of two weeks rather than a single day. It included a limited-time mode with absurd hero balance changes for its characters (such as Hanzo being able to ride on Orisa in battle like an archer on a warhorse, Wrecking Ball being very tiny but growing like a snowball when hitting enemies, and Reinhardt being able to charge and potentially stun a player without time limitations), a task event for unique rewards, and googly eyes on all heroes.
- PUBG: Battlegrounds ran a larger scale waifu-themed April Fool’s event which turned the game’s weapons into anime girls. The main highlight is the “Winner Winner Romantic Dinner” interactive story dating web minigame made in collaboration with Krafton’s AI game development studio ReLU. The game includes various April Fools’ themed task mechanics such as having the player mimic the sound of a pigeon into their mic.
- Summoners War had an April Fool’s Day minigame event, free gift, and limited-time bundles.
- Hay Day had players hunt for cosmetic frogs in various Frog-themed events. Players could collect exclusive King Frog decorations by visiting Greg’s Farm and opening free surprise boxes. Additionally, by completing the Croak Croak collection—by gathering a specific number of frogs—you’ll unlock even more frog rewards.
- Fate/Grand Order developer Aniplex launched a special April Fools game in Japan, Fate/Final Journey, with top-down shoot ’em up gameplay. The game was downloadable from App stores and only available to play on April Fool’s Day. In the news section of Fate/Grand Order, two news tongue-in-cheek articles announced both the launch of the new title and the end of service for it!
