Liftoff: Casual Game Market in 2023
Hypercasual is losing the market share; Merge is ready to rocket.
Data were collected from February 1 2022 to February 1, 2023. More than 390B impressions, 16.7B clicks, and 100M installs have been analyzed.
An average CPI in casual games is $0.98. The price on Android is $0.63; on iOS - $2.23.
An average D7 ROAS in casual games is 7.6%. On Android this number equals 7%; on iOS - 7.8%.
The highest CPI is at the NA market - $3.59. EMEA shows a CPI price of $0.9; APAC - $0.76; LATAM - $0.55.
However, the NA region shows the highest ROAS D7 - 8.1%. In EMEA the return is 6.5%; in APAC - 6.4%; in LATAM - 4.8%.
Casual games (Liftoff includes hypercasual games here too) generate 86.9% of all downloads. Sports and racing games are generating 6.6%. Midcore games - 3.3%, casino titles - 3.2%.
Interesting that 74.7% of all mid-core games downloads are coming from ads that are shown in casual titles.
Trends
Only 2 successful Match-3 games have been released in the last two years - Garden Affairs and BTS Island.
The share of downloads of hypercasual games decreased dramatically from 50% in Q1 2021 to a little above 30% in Q1 2023. More and more developers are moving from traditional hypercasual to hybrid-casual titles.
Merge is the genre where the next revolution might happen.