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.
