Azur Games: "the number of releases of hyper-casual games in 2022 has increased fivefold compared to last year"

The developer and publisher of mobile games Azur Games has prepared a study on the situation on the market of hyper-casual games. We share his key theses and graphs.

According to the study:

• the total number of hypercausal releases in 2022 increased more than fivefold compared to 2021;

The number of hyper-casual games released in 2021 and 2022at the same time, the number of installations themselves has grown less than twice (that is, the growth of competition in the niche significantly outstrips the growth of the niche itself);

The number of downloads of hyper-casual games in 2021 and 2022hyper-casual games released before 2018 are responsible for 47.7% of downloads this year (this suggests that new products have to compete not only with new products, but also with old-timers of the market);

Segmentation of the top 300 most downloaded hyper casual games in 2022 by year of release  following increased competition, eCPM began to fall;

eCPM dynamics of Azur Games hypercase games in the USA (2020-2022)also, against the background of increasing competition, the quality of games came out on top, which led to an increase in production costs;

• the most popular genres in the hyper-casual niche are arcade games, puzzles and scrollers, they show the largest number of installations every month;

Dynamics of downloads of hyper-casual games by genreif we talk about trending hyper-casual subgenres, then Azur Games highlights Draw Line Puzzle, Power Level Puzzle and clickers;

• once one of the most trending genres — runner — remains very popular, but its downloads are rapidly decreasing from month to month.

Dynamics of cumulative downloads of hyper-casual games in the runner genre
The full version of the study can be found at this link.