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The puzzle game market is changing. For years, Match-3, Merge-2, and Blast dominated the space, together making up more than 80% of in-app purchase revenue in the genre. But that combined share has fallen from 95% to 80% over the past decade, and the drop in downloads is even sharper, falling from over 75% of puzzle installs a decade ago to below 25% today.
According to AppMagic, the games gaining that ground are not one single breakout hit, but three related types known as Hybridcasual Puzzles: Sort, Block, and Screw.
Sort games were once a small, ad-heavy niche built mostly around simple Water Sort gameplay. That changed with a string of games that added more depth, including Block Jam 3D in 2023, which introduced board and storage mechanics, and Hexa Sort in 2024, which added a hexagonal board and constant new pieces. At the start of 2026, Pixel Flow helped push Sort past Blast to become the third-largest puzzle type by revenue. Unlike some other genres, new Sort games tend to draw in different groups of players rather than compete with each other, which has helped the category keep growing.
Block games are the oldest of the three, based on the classic Tetris mechanic. Block Blast built a large ad-supported audience through familiar, easy-to-understand gameplay. Color Block Jam later shifted the format to fixed level designs with built-in challenges, making the games better suited for in-app purchases. Newer titles like Car Jam and Gecko Out added themes and obstacles on top of that formula. Block games now run on a mix of ad and purchase revenue, which makes their true earnings hard to measure from purchase data alone.
Screw is the newest of the three, only around for about two and a half years. Screw Jam set the basic format in 2023, and Screwdom built on it in 2024 by hiding most of each level until players start, creating more tension and encouraging purchases when players get stuck. Other games have copied this format with limited success.
Match-3 and Merge are still expected to lead the puzzle market for now, but their advantage keeps shrinking. Many of the newer Hybridcasual games earn close to half their revenue from ads, meaning their real business size is often larger than purchase numbers alone suggest. As these newer types continue to develop, they are expected to keep taking a bigger share of the puzzle market.
