Why are the world's top games publishers making solitaire games and has Playtika already won?

After enduring for hundreds of years as a world-renowned card game, solitaire has adapted to this technological age by finding a comfortable new home on mobile devices.

Whether digitised in its original form or given the TriPeaks treatment, the classic card game continues to find its way into millions of hands every year on mobile even as the games market gets more and more advanced.

While many mobile players are opting for open-world giants like Genshin Impact or battle royales like Fortnite, there are still plenty of people turning to this tried-and-tested old card game, and plenty of publishers looking to cash in too.

Among such mobile industry titans are the likes of Playtika, Scopely, Tripledot, King and Zynga – but just how much success are they finding through solitaire? And is there any room left for newcomers?

Solitaire rising

In 2024, solitaire games worldwide generated a record-breaking 348 million downloads across Google Play and the App Store, making $470.2m in gross player spending according to AppMagic estimates.

Spending fell from the 2023 peak of $564.7m, but remained at nearly double 2019’s $237.7m just five years later. Installs have also continued to rise for the seventh consecutive year.

2025 is shaping up to be even bigger. Over the first five months of the year, solitaire games on mobile have already generated a collective 163.8m downloads and earned $204.3m in player spending. April 2025 saw the most mobile solitaire downloads ever in a single month at a collective 33.5m.

Shortly thereafter, May 2025 saw player spending spike by 27% month-over-month to $53m, breaking the genre's record for its highest player spending in a single month.

Record installs last year could also result in greater revenue for the genre overall as many solitaire games feature ads - meaning opportunities to earn outside of player spending.

Speaking with game design consultant Jakub Remiar, we learn that he sees two types of solitaire games - and he doesn’t mean TriPeaks and the original. Rather, Remiar suggests that there are innovators driving player spending, and there are "quite stale" classic experiences relying on ad revenue.

Such games can also be relatively easy to develop, meaning potential gains for less expense.

Major moneymakers

Among the innovators, Solitaire Grand Harvest has achieved the highest levels of player spending among solitaire games at $1.5 billion over its lifetime. This also makes it the only mobile solitaire title to have reached 10 figures between the App Store and Google Play.

Not only is it the top earner overall, but the title also remained the market leader for player spending in 2024, having generated 63% of all spending in mobile solitaire games last year at $298.1m. And considering Solitaire Grand Harvest also has ads and an external web shop - which boasts exclusive deals and discounts - total revenue is likely even higher.

Developed by Playtika-owned Supertreat, Solitaire Grand Harvest launched in 2017 as a title building upon Robert Hogue's TriPeaks version of the classic card game, a direction many of the top solitaire mobile games have taken.

Its free-to-play formula has clearly paid off, encouraging 71.7m installs and creating a gameplay loop that has kept players choosing to spend for almost a decade.

Remiar suggests that Solitaire Grand Harvest and games like it "are not actually real solitaire games" but are rather carefully crafted level-based puzzlers, using solitaire-like mechanics and visuals to attract players.

He compares those crafted levels to "the usual Candy Crush formula", with boosters, live ops, soft currencies, APS curves and difficulty curves, as well as consideration for frustration tolerance. All of these play together to help monetise audiences.

While Solitaire Grand Harvest has long been on top for player spending, it was actually beaten to the TriPeaks mobile scene by Tiki Solitaire TriPeaks, a 2014 title originally developed by GSN Games. Publishing powerhouse Scopely acquired the social casino outfit in October 2021 for $1bn.

From 2015 onwards (the limit of AppMagic's historical estimates), the title had earned over $488.8m in player spending by the time of its acquisition, though has only earned $344m more since. Total earnings are likely higher when including alternative stores and ad revenue, however, with players incentivised to watch additional ads for in-game rewards.

Pyramid Solitaire Saga is in a similar boat, having made over $140m in player spending to date since 2015 while also featuring ads - including rewarded ads - for additional revenue.

This 2014 King title is a mobile take on classic solitaire as opposed to TriPeaks, and predates the recently released Candy Crush Solitaire by more than a decade. It has long since fallen from its prime.

A newer innovator in the space is LocalThunk’s Balatro, which took the world by storm in 2024 and landed two victories at our Pocket Gamer Awards 2024.

Despite being a premium game in a market dominated by free-to-play, it has generated $25.8m on mobile to date by combining elements of multiple card games in one rule-bending place, solitaire included.

Download Drivers

Solitaire Grand Harvest, Tiki Solitaire TriPeaks and Pyramid Solitaire Saga may be the three highest-grossing solitaire games based on lifetime player spending, but they aren't necessarily the top revenue generators overall.

That's because many top games generate their revenue almost entirely from ads.

Remiar supposes that, rather than focusing on creative level design or puzzle-like gameplay loops to motivate player spending, less innovative games rely on organic downloads from players searching on app stores for the famous Windows 95 version of solitaire. High downloads then mean a higher number of eyes on in-game ads.

"They thrive on the traffic," he says.

Zynga, for example, quietly bought four solitaire games in 2017 for $42.5m, the most successful of which has generated a relatively measly $330,000 in player spending.

The biggest of those four games, simply called Solitaire, offers a traditional experience without popular mobile puzzle elements or leveraging any of Zynga’s big brands. Yet despite its simplicity, the game has nearly double the lifetime installs of cash colossus Solitaire Grand Harvest.

In fact, at an estimated 128.7m downloads since the start of 2015, Zynga’s Solitaire currently has the second-most lifetime downloads of any mobile game in the publisher’s catalogue from the last decade, only behind CSR 2 - Realistic Drag Racing. That’s no small feat considering Zynga has published over 100 games. It even competes with subsidiary Rollic's top titles for installs.

Similarly, Tripledot’s mobile game Solitaire.com has generated just $121,000 in player spending over seven years while hitting 48.6m downloads - failing to make the publisher’s top 10 for spending but landing fourth among its most-downloaded titles.

Therefore, not only is Solitaire.com a win in scaling up Tripledot’s total portfolio installs, but it has many users to generate ad revenue from too. It continues to rake in millions of installs per year.

On the other hand, MobilityWare's App Store classic Solitaire has managed to generate more than $15m in player spending on iOS alone since 2015.

This version of the game launched alongside the App Store itself in 2008 and has generated 128.1m installs over the past decade, also taking a more traditional approach to the card game. Its higher player spending could be the result of age as well as the option to subscribe to remove ads.

New to the game

At the start of 2025, Remiar predicted that the solitaire genre would get "super hot" this year with multiple high-profile games in soft launch at the time. Those included King’s Candy Crush Solitaire, Superplay’s Disney Solitaire and Metacore’s Grandma’s Solitaire Secrets, each opting for TriPeaks gameplay.

Candy Crush Solitaire was the first to go global, on February 6th, with King taking another crack at the genre. When we asked King’s business director of new games Anna Busquet about the origins of the new title, she shared that King wanted to bring something unique to the space and saw a "clear opportunity in the growing solitaire genre".

Candy Crush Solitaire has earned $7.8m in player spending over its first four months on the major stores and does contain ads, but with just 7.7m downloads, its yet to set the world alight for a company with multi-billion dollar hits in its portfolio.

Busquet claimed that Candy Crush Solitaire has "surpassed internal business expectations", but Remiar calls the game "a major failure, regardless of what they say in public".

A new major player on the market is Disney Solitaire, developed by SuperPlay, which Playtika acquired in a deal worth up to $1.95bn. Like Candy Crush Solitaire, it has bagged 7.7m installs, but has raced to $25m since its global launch on April 17th.

Both are leveraging well-known IPs, so Remiar suggests that one big gameplay difference separating them is Candy Crush Solitaire’s Hold Slot, allowing players to set aside a card for use later.

"If you know how to use it, it trivialises a lot of difficulty. If you don't know how to use it, you are screwed as the difficulty is balanced around it," says Remiar.

"Other older games also had it but they introduced it much later - think level 200 plus. I think it disrupts Candy Crush Solitaire’s APS level curves to the point where it produces either too much churn or low monetisation push."

Ironically, he thinks the absence of this extra feature is what’s given Disney Solitaire such an edge.

Lastly, Metacore’s Grandma’s Solitaire Secrets is currently in soft launch in Australia, Brazil, Canada and Turkey.

Remiar doesn’t expect Metacore's game to compete against Playtika’s hits, but suggests that the developer decided to develop a solitaire game "because it was easy for them".

He also speculates that Metacore was tempted by the amount of traffic such games can receive and that the developer "thought that there are still enough players in the market to support more than one game on the IAP revenue side".

Meanwhile, another previously soft-launched title was Claire's Chronicles developed by Wooga, another Playtika studio. That title has been closed, however, resulting in around 50 layoffs.

Game, set and match?

Outside of Disney Solitaire, the solitaire genre is looking increasingly challenging to break into and Remiar believes the battle for dominance has mostly been won by Playtika.

He doesn’t expect to see many others making attempts at solitaire games going forward unless they discover a successful new iteration or attempt to use "some marketing trick".

At least for Playtika, the genre is still driving plenty of revenue, but moving forward Remiar expects more publishers to use "this exact setup" in other classic games instead.

Contenders include Ludo, Yahtzee, backgammon and chess.

Though, it's not like solitaire hasn’t made an inventive comeback before.