Top 10 Hypercasual Games in Q4 2022
The year 2022 is over, which can only mean one thing: it is also time for our regular quarterly report on hypercasual games.
— by Diana Levintova
The year 2022 is over, which can only mean one thing: it is also time for our regular quarterly report on hypercasual games.
Firstly, we’re going to look at the general market trends.
Comparing the downloads in 2022 to their total of 2021, we see that the market has grown slightly: it went up by 5%, reaching 15.5B annual installs. However, if we look at the downloads in Q4 2021, we will discover they were 7% higher than in Q4 2022 (3.97B VS 3.68B). As for the quarter on quarter 2022 dynamics, we can also notice a small downtrend: installs went down by 2% since the third quarter (3.79B VS 3.68B). Now, the year on year regional split demonstrates that countries faced decrease in downloads are the ones from Tier 1 West and Tier 1 East regions (a 5% and a 8% drop respectively), while the general dynamics of all other countries picked up by 7%.
Now, let’s look closer at the top 10 leading games in the fourth quarter of the year.
As always, the list features several old-timers which we have already reviewed in our previous articles: Race Master 3D - Car Racing, Bridge Race, Tall Man Run and Going Balls.
Also, there are a couple of games that we’ve seen in the top 10 by downloads in the previous quarter of this year: Snake Lite-Snake .io Game and DOP 4: Draw One Part. While downloads of the first title went down by as little as 5%, the metric of the second game jumped up by 42%. Let’s keep an eye on it in the next quarter, and see how the dynamics will change!
It’s about time we reviewed the newcomers that ascended to the top just this quarter! The first one up is hypercasual puzzle game with 30M installs called Save the Doge. The title is the leading game inspired by the viral Save the Dog social media trend mixed with the popular doge meme. The trend comes from TikTok, where videos of people saving dogs from different life-threatening situations have become very popular. To put a number to its query, “save dogs” has 769M views. We will leave here the link for the article with the deconstruction of this trend, because something tells us it won’t be the last time we see games inspired by it in the top by downloads.
One more new title this quarter is Car Games 3D: Car Racing with 28.8M downloads gained after its release in October 2021 (!). However, the upward trend only started in April 2022 right after Version 1.26 was introduced to the users. The game looks like a mix of trends from GTA 5 and aquapark.io with high-quality production and reminds us a lot of another leader from our top 10 that, as we mentioned, has been there for a while now: the Race Master 3D - Car Racing by SayGames. While games of this type frequently go viral on TikTok and Twitter, let’s keep track of this one to find out if it’s going to be the case for Car Games 3D: Car Racing as well.
Number three is Color Page ASMR. Released in September 2022, it has already gained 28.7M downloads, most of which (22%) come from India. The drawback that is often associated with coloring games is the challenge of complying with all the contours strictly and filling the figures in precisely. Color Page ASMR were able to avoid it, making their experience easy for users and allowing them to accomplish tasks at their fingertip(s).
The last game this quarter is Fish Go.io - Be the fish king with 23M installs. The game looks like a typical representative of the .io subgenre that was super popular about two years ago. The interesting thing about it is that the game was released back in 2019, and while for an extended period of time it kept gaining about 50K daily downloads, its installs spiked in October 2022, reaching 680K daily at their peak. It isn’t too obvious as to what happened there; for example, they only launched an ad campaign in December 2022, two months after the spike. We’ll see if we can figure this out by our next report!
In conclusion, the first thing that catches the eye is that half of the top by downloads newcomers belong to the puzzle genre. Coincidence? We don’t think so. Seems like the puzzle genre is gaining popularity. However, we will confirm or refute it in our annual report on genres. Another trend that isn’t new concept-wise but is innovative with its content concerns developers: they continue to dig into social media for inspiration.
The article was written with the support of AppMagic invited experts - Anatoly Maximov and Sabina Magomedova. Anatoly is a game developer with 10+ year of experience, who currently is focusing on the hypercasual segment. Sabina is Business Development Producer at Playducky.com.