One of the highest grossing freemium games, Candy Crush launched in 2012 and has 250 million monthly users playing the 8,900 levels Candy Crush dominates the sub-sector with 255 million users in 2021 and $1 billion in revenue last year.The number of downloads of puzzle games has fallen from a pandemic peak of 5.7 billion in 2020 to 4.5 billion in 2022.Total revenue from puzzle games was $9.1 billion in 2022, a decrease from $9.5 billion the previous year.We have collected data and statistics on the puzzle game sub-sector. Adverts for Homescapes and Gardenscapes were banned by the Advertising Standards Authority in 2020 for being misleading about core gameplay. While freemium games tend to involve little or no ads, their promotional videos in other apps have at times been controversial. In an effort to retain users, games continually release new levels, challenges and features. That increase has reversed somewhat, with downloads in 2022 being closer to pre-pandemic levels. It is also consistently in the top four for downloads, although there are signs of some slight stagnation since 2020.ĭownloads in the genre as a whole jumped significantly in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic as people stayed at home and sought entertainment on their phones. The puzzle genre has been a lucrative sub-sector of mobile games, ranking third on revenue charts each year since 2019 according to Sensor Tower. A year later the developer released Gardenscapes’ successor Homescapes, and as of February 2023 Homescapes had taken the lead in lifetime downloads of Playrix’s mobile games. Gardenscapes was originally released for Microsoft Windows as a hidden objects games, with a subsequent casual game based around matching three or more tiles in a row launched in 2016. The fourth-largest mobile game developer internationally in terms of revenue, Playrix owns several of the top titles in the puzzle sub-sector, including Homescapes, Gardenscapes and Fishdom. One developer which has capitalised on this trend is Playrix. The freemium model has become ubiquitous and match-3 games dominate. In response to this success, the puzzle sub-sector has followed the model set by Candy Crush Saga. With benchmarking tools, Data.ai’s latest data product allows you to see how your app contrasts to market estimates of a predefined or customizable app group.

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