March 2025 Mobile Game Market Review: A Look at Growth and Shifts

Article posted on 26/04/2025

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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. Ought hyper casual creators emulate Homa Games' path in adopting hybrid casual games instead?

ver in the midcore space, we witnessed significant updates to some of the largest titles. Some of these, like the recent updates in Pokemon TCG Pocket and Clash of Clans, have been well-received by players. Others, like significant overhauls to Clash Royale, have put players into a tizzy for gacha mechanic changes. Although the update hasn't particularly affected performance, dealing with player sentiment in response to it will be a concern for Supercell in the future, and serves to indicate the comms challenges of significant updates.

As Easter looms on the horizon and there are lots of Summer events that are great opportunities to include in-game seasonal events, it's well worth noting that April Fools is also an excellent time to release new content within your LiveOps campaigns. If you have yet to jump on April Fools events within your game, we've listed out the best and most ridiculous events we came across this year. There's plenty of eggs, false game announcements, and a twerking Venom to boot.

For more information on these updates and titles, as well as the latest trends from around the mobile market, see our latest analyst bulletin below.

1. March’s casual game updates

Most profitable puzzle game Triple Match 3D redesigned its social win streak event, Arctic Adventure, and made it a solo win streak event with three different difficulties depending on the number of consecutive wins to finish the event: five levels, 10 levels or 20 levels. The harder win streaks offer better rewards, but players lose if they do not finish a level before the end of the streak.

Roblox released another platform-wide event, The Hunt: Mega Edition, that pushed players to play 25 different games on the platform, earning Mega Tokens and completing puzzles along the way. The event is comparable to other platform-wide events, and included an event hub in a custom The Hunt: Mega Edition game with portals to the 25 Roblox games and a special battle pass to earn rewards. If readable under Roblox's T&Cs, the top ten quickest players to complete the event receive an invite to a live tournament at Roblox HQ, and the winning players win a $1 million prize! In the event, players could earn two kinds of tokens: Standard Tokens and Mega Tokens.

Standard Tokens might be earned by doing relatively easy challenges in the 25 games showcased, and they redeemed rewards in the standard event path. The Mega Tokens were earned by doing harder challenges, redeeming rewards in the mega event path—also involving solving hard puzzles. The hard challenges and puzzles were made available sequentially over the course of the event, though the hardness of these puzzles did gradually lessen as the event went on.

2. Additional casual gaming highlights and other news

In our February 2025 Mobile Market Review, we highlighted the performance of a new hybrid casual puzzle title, Color Block Jam, which was ranking regularly in the top-download lists. It's continued to grow since then, and is one of the highest-grossing performances we've ever witnessed from a title in this hybrid casual puzzle genre.

This is a fantastic IAP performance for the game, and even more so as there have been few large feature/live event additions in February or March—only added levels and bug fixes. One of the reasons behind Color Block Jam's success may be due to it needing more skill-based decision making than typical Match3 games, so it is a harder game.

While this spike in difficulty is so far being lucrative, it is noteworthy that it does make churn more likely to occur if players are stuck on specific difficulty curves down the road. It would appear that Rollic has gotten the game's difficulty curve just right so far.

Color Block Jam's success proves increasing popularity among players for hybrid-casual games. Screwdom, a 3D hybrid puzzle game based on gameplay much like Screw Jam, reached the top-grossing iOS list in March and reached 99 on the US chart, where it was moving upward in terms of downloads.

Also, as downloads for the food-themed casual title All in Hole began to dwindle, it achieved a record high of monthly IAP revenues in March, maintaining a spot in the top-50 due to its ad revenue placing it as the first big hit for developer Homa Games after it shifted from a hyper casual to a hybrid casual developer.

Bus Escape: Traffic Jam, another hybrid puzzle game, has also been steadily in the top DL 100 since late 2024, gradually ramping in revenue and recently reaching the top GR 200 US iOS. Although its fundamental gameplay is not new, this shows the game might have gained 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. Speaking of merge games, Merge Mansion's performance slump has evened out and the game is now explicitly following event trends like digging and excavation events by introducing its own version of 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.

3. March’s midcore game updates

Wait-out Pokémon enthusiasts waited patiently for the update since ranked matches were introduced in Pokémon TCG Pocket's March update. Casual PvP was all that was on offer beforehand, but now players can pit themselves against each other on leaderboard ranks seasonally. The execution is very typical, with players moving up through different ranks of pokeballs (standard, great, ultra, master).

As usual with the TCG Pocket's monthly updates, a new booster pack, Shining Revelry, was included in the game as well. Besides the usual star rarities, this new booster introduces shiny Pokémon into the game. Similar to performance from previous updates, this new booster pack generated massive revenue, taking the game to a top-grossing position.

upercell implemented a super cooldown this month, and made some big changes to Clash of Clans and Clash Royale in order to enhance the game speed. Clash of Clans eliminated all training time for troops, spells, and Siege Machines, and also eliminated the healing time for Heroes, so players can now initiate a multiplayer battle in the Home Village at any time without delay.

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 got rid of timer gachas, which is interesting since the game was first to pioneer the use of timed gachas and brought that practice to a large number of other games of similar nature. The new gacha system awards instant rewards in the form of Lucky Chests three times daily, cards and coins up to 15 times daily. They also eliminated Season Shop and dispersed the items gotten through that from other sources.

The question on everyone's mind: do players like these changes? The community's reaction to the changes in Clash of Clans has been very positive, as the changes give the game a faster feel. Analyzing the game's performance, it appears that there was not a significant loss in this regard either (even when timer skips have been a part of the game's economy since day 1).

The reaction to Clash Royale's update has not been as good. High-ranked comments on the YouTube video breaking the news comment that the changes will be the death of the game, since eliminating the Season Shop shifts some rewards into the paid portion of the Battle Pass. While players have generally panned the update, there has not yet been a significant impact on performance.