Sensor Tower: Last year, Americans spent $4.6 billion on mobile puzzles

Sensor Tower analysts in a recent study decided to see how the mobile puzzle genre was doing in 2020. It turned out that it was not bad. During the year, US gamers left more than $4.6 billion in such games. Among the highest-grossing projects, two games from Playrix were noted at once (and another one became the leader in downloads).

Sensor Tower divided the puzzles into 11 subcategories: Puzzle & Decorate, Classic match-3, the rest match-3, Word games, Hidden object, Tile Blast, Merge, Bubble Shooter, Action puzzles, quizzes and other puzzles. In each of them, analysts studied revenue/downloads statistics for the past year.

Income

• in total, last year, the spending of American players on puzzles increased by 31.4% compared to 2019;
• Puzzle & Decorate became the most profitable subcategory, collecting $1.6 billion — 65.6% more than a year earlier. Such growth rates have made it the fastest growing in revenue among all puzzles. In addition, it was also the subcategory with the highest average income;
• at the same time, the game Candy Crush Saga, which belongs to the classic match-3, turned out to be the best at the box office. Its revenue was $643 million;
• but the second and third place went to Homescapes and Gardenscapes from Playrix. Both titles are included in the Puzzle & Decorate subcategory.

Downloads

• In 2020, puzzles were downloaded 685 million times in American mobile stores (an annual growth of 11.7%);
• the leading subcategory by downloads was “the rest of the puzzles”, which scored 183.7 million installations. Among the most successful games of the subcategory are Brain Test and Brain Out;the fastest growing subcategory was “the rest of match-3” — their installations grew by 174% at once and reached the mark of 29.6 million.
• This category can be illustrated by such titles as Match 3D and Tile Master;
• The first place in terms of revenue from the installation was taken by classic match-3 — one download brought developers an average of $34. Tile Blast subcategory took second place, and Puzzle & Decorate — third. However, analysts noted that they did not take into account LTV RPD here;
• The top three most downloaded games were led by Fishdom from Playrix with 15.6 million downloads (subcategory: Puzzle & Decorate). Project Makeover from Magic Tavern is on the second line, and Brain Test from Unico Studio is on the third.