Mobile app analytics website AppMagic has listed their “Top 10 Hypercasual Games” from the first quarter (Q1) of 2023. This examines the monetization practices of popular apps within the first quester of the year from January to the end of March 2023.

In researching these figures, AppMagic focused particularly on different methods of monetization used in the most successful mobile games of the quarter.

These were the top 10 Hypercasual Games that they listed:

The five games with red-circled numbers are newly released games. This includes the highest-ranked hypercasual game: Attack Hole – Black Hole Games with almost 44 million downloads.

AppMagic notes that all ten games use the Meta Audience Network as their monetization partner. All five of the new games use also used a hybrid model with both In-app Ads and a few In-App Purchase Offers (IAPs). The in-app ads usually come in the form of rewarded videos. This is where users will be given in-game currency for watching an ad. 

Other reoccurring types of Monetization include a Wheel of Fortune who extra prizes as well as banner ads placed at the bottom of the game at certain points. Alternatively, many also use “in-app purchase offers”. These allow users to skip rewarded ads and ads in general as well as unlock addition items in the game. This is essentially a premium subscription to the game.

Main Conclusions

The big trend seen with the AppMagic data on hypercasual games in Q1 is that a lot of old favorites are making a comeback.

“It’s worth noting that this quarters top 10 mostly features newcomers that not only did not hit the market in 2023 but had done it even earlier than late 2022. Some of these games have been around since as long as 2017, yet they have managed to maintain a steady downloads rate, sometimes even surpassing their past performance”

They also noted that there has been a slight dip in the first quarter of 2023 compared previous quarters.

“Upon comparing the total downloads in Q1 2023 with the same metric in Q4 2022, a decrease of 5% can be observed. The market declined from 4 billion installs in the previous quarter to 3.8 billion installs in Q1 2023. However, an even more significant downtrend can be noticed when comparing Q1 2022 to Q1 2023. Last year, the number of downloads was 4.2 billion in the first quarter, which is 10% higher than this year”.

These are departures from previous trends in Hyprercasual games. It begs the question if old games and getting a second wind or if newer titles aren’t able to hold players’ attention. As for monetization, rewarded ads seem to be a go-to strategy for income with a mix of banner ads and ad-free subscriptions also becoming more common.

AppMagic speculates that in the future we may see more game developers “offer users the option to pay for an ad-free experience with extra rewards, hoping to generate more revenue from converted players”.