Royal Match earned 51% of all match-3 IAP revenue in 2024 as casual genre made $15.2 billion

• AppMagic’s Casual Games Report 2024 found casual games earned a combined $15.2 billion in in-app purchase revenue last year

Match-3 games saw a 13% increase in revenue in 2024 driven by Dream Games’ Royal Match.

According to AppMagic’s Casual Games Report 2024, the title earned 51% of all match-3 revenue in "tier one" Western countries, which include the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany and Australia.

Notably, the market didn't see a revenue rise when excluding Royal Match from the match-3 genre’s performance. Rather, it declined by 8% year-on-year.

And even including Royal Match’s performance, the genre still saw a 12% decline in downloads.

"For Royal Match, 2024 was the year when audience scaling gave way to focusing on ways to improve monetisation and live ops," the report observed.

"This is also reflected in the revenue per download (RpD) ratio, which grew quite steadily throughout the year and reached an impressive $55 in December."

Collectively casual

AppMagic’s report highlighted the broader casual genre’s 4.1% increase in downloads in tier-one Western countries, plus revenue growth of 11.7% year-on-year in 2024.

As a whole, the casual mobile market generated $15.2 billion in net in-app purchase revenue last year between the App Store and Google Play. AppMagic identified five key subgenres, namely match-3, merge-2 "with complex meta", match 3D, sort puzzle and casual casino.

Merge-2 especially saw a major revenue rise in 2024, up 106% year-on-year from $248 million to $527 million. Installs increased by 43%, hitting 60 million.

Unlike match-3, this wasn’t carried by any one game but was rather the result of "collective growth", with Metacore’s Merge Mansion, Moon Active’s Travel Town, and Microfun’s Gossip Harbour and Seaside Escape leading the way.

Similarly to Royal Match, AppMagic suggested that this growth was fuelled by "market leaders adopting new monetisation and live ops strategies".

Meanwhile, sort puzzle as a genre saw a major 460% growth in 2024, up from $20 million to $112 million. Match 3D grew by 97% to $381 million and casual casino rose almost 60% to $2.19 billion.

Monopoly Go "firmly established" itself at the top of the casual casino genre, so much so that "discussing the genre’s trends essentially means analysing how the game’s revenue evolves". The title generated 55% of the whole genre’s revenue in 2024, followed by Coin Master’s 18% and Dice Dreams’ 7%.

Casual casinos are one of the industry’s most monopolised markets as a result, with just 20% of player spending going to games outside the top three.

AppMagic expects Playtika’s acquisitions of InnPlay Labs and SuperPlay to shake things up in the genre during 2025.

"While no one can say for sure, we’d recommend keeping a keen eye on hypercasual subgenres in 2025, especially puzzles," AppMagic said.

Note: AppMagic's revenue data is reported in net, estimating player spending from Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store.