Top 10 Hypercasual Games in Q4 2024
Together with Anatoly Maximov, we’ve put together a year-end wrap-up of the hypercasual market, showcasing the most exciting shifts and some unexpected highs.
— by Diana Levintova
Kicking off the brand new year with our Q4 2024 summary of the Hypercasual games market: the trends, the newcomers, and the figures. Featuring our regular guest expert, Anatoly Maximov!
It’s the early days of 2025, and we’re fully back on the work track after the winter holidays. While still recovering from numerous festive dinners with friends and family and trying to lose the quickly acquired habit of daytime napping, we cannot possibly start the year without the Q4 2024 Hypercasual market summary. Traditionally, we’re joined by our regular guest expert, Anatoly Maximov. Off we go!
General Market Trends
As always, we’re starting with an overview of the general trends of the Hypercasual games market.
In Q4, the market remained almost flat compared to the adjusted numbers of Q3, reaching 3.12B total installs, and went down by a mild 3% compared to the previous year. This year's QoQ trend was more positive than in 2023, which had seen the market shrink by 6%.
Regional QoQ dynamics were a bit more active, with Tier-1 West downloads increasing by 5%, Tier-1 East decreasing by 11%, and all other countries' installs going down by 4%.
YoY changes were less notable, and the YoY downtrend finally smoothed out compared to 2023: Tier-1 West installs increased by 3% (versus a 21% YoY decline in Q4 2023), Tier-1 East remained flat (versus a 23% YoY drop in Q4 2023), and all other counties' figures went down by 4% (an improvement of sorts on the 10% YoY fall in Q4 2023).
Top 10 Games by Downloads
Moving on to the top 10 Hypercasual games by downloads in this quarter!
To our surprise, 50% of this quarter's top are newcomers! Are these the first signs of the market returning to growth? But shhh, let’s not jinx it!
For starters, here are the 5 games that we and you are already familiar with from the previous periods: Pizza Ready! (-14% QoQ), Hole.io (+29% QoQ), Car Race (+14% QoQ), Build A Queen (+5% QoQ), and Mob Control (+12% QoQ).
Now, it’s time to turn to the newbies.
Mini Games: Calm & Relax
The first one at the top of our list (both figuratively and literally) is Mini Games: Calm & Relax with 66M installs over the quarter. It is yet another proof that ideas for Hypercasual games are always somewhere out there, just around the corner. The game takes inspiration from TikTok mask games and creates a standalone list of various mini-games within one app. TikTok videos with masks of this kind are getting millions of views, proving their vitality and offering an easy and effective type of content that can be used to acquire traffic.
We can also say that, at the beginning of the fall of 2024, there was a quick trend among the apps that used TikTok mask games to generate ideas: have a look at this dashboard with a few examples.
Perfect Tidy
Number two is Perfect Tidy with its 34M downloads. You probably remember that, a couple of years back, similar games for space organization and cleaning for tidy perfectionists were on the rise. However, while those titles used to be centered around only one mechanic, Perfect Tidy, in its infinite wisdom, offers users a whole set of them, which allows the game to reach a wider audience.
Anatoly shared that this game reminded him of the popular Steam title A Little To The Left with its authentic idea, cute 2D art, and some similar levels. He also recommends that all our readers pay closer attention to Perfect Tidy’s publisher, ABI Games, which continues to hit the market with successful products.
Tik Tap Challenge
The next one up is Tik Tap Challenge with 30.8M downloads. Similarly to Mini Games: Calm & Relax, Tik Tap Challenge uses TikTok mask games as the baseline for its mini-games and TikTok videos for acquiring traffic. We asked Anatoly why, in his opinion, the Mini Games: Calm & Relax was way ahead; he believes it is most probably a testament to better traffic acquisition as much as to its first-mover advantage.
Bus Out
Right after Tik Tap Challenge comes Bus Out with a hefty 26M downloads. The game has a special approach to the “tap to release” mechanic, originally well-known thanks to Parking Jam 3D. A unique touch of Bus Out is that users are not only asked to release the buses but also have to follow the certain indicated color sequence to help the stickmen hop onto the bus of the relevant color. Therefore, you’re not simply tapping away at items: you need to strategize to make sure you pick the optimal order of working your way through the colorful bus fleet.
Paper.io 2
Last but not least is Paper.io 2 with 21M installs. We’re sure you already know everything about Paper.io, which can pretty much be deemed a classic today. Just to give you a brief recap, Voodoo was one of the trailblazers in switching to hybrid monetization—and continues to leverage it quite efficiently. In Paper.io, they use the same approach, and we can see that during the last year, its iAP revenue increased about 5- to 7-fold, which also provided an additional budget for traffic acquisition.
Conclusion
Wrapping up! The Hypercasual market seems to be dealing with its headwinds quite nicely, possibly seeing the light at the end of the downtrend tunnel. Awesome news for the new year, right?
This statement rings true enough, given the 5 new titles in the top 10: we haven’t seen a figure this high for more than just a few quarters.
Lastly, a couple of words on the trends we’ve identified in the games. Nothing unfamiliar here, especially to our regular readers: we’ve got inspiration from TikTok trends, we’ve got additional touches to the existing mechanics that up the ante, and we’ve got hybrid monetization.
Can’t wait for the current quarter’s results: stay tuned to be among the first to find out if the market’s uptrend sticks!
*The article was prepared with contributions by AppMagic’s guest expert Anatoly Maximov. Anatoly is a game developer with 10+ years of experience who is currently focusing on the Hypercasual segment. *