After Supercell’s Squad Busters smashed its way into soft launch, it was far too easy to miss all the other expansive updates, exciting new releases, and breakout hits that supercharged the mobile market during April. One title that definitely deserves your attention is Persona 5: The Phantom X, which marked the long-awaited arrival of Atlus’ award-winning JRPG series onto mobile platforms — with newcomer Perfect World taking the reigns for this pocket-sized high-school dungeon crawler.
Plenty was going on in the world of Call of Duty, too. Call of Duty: Mobile launched the Challenge HQ, a dedicated menu area that brings together the missions, store, and rewards of the current session, while Warzone Mobile started using gacha mechanics to boost its revenue numbers. Speaking of gacha, League of Legends: Wild Rift launched one so successful that it resulted in the biggest daily revenue spike in the game’s entire history.
Meanwhile, there was a notable focus on collecting across the midcore and casual sides of the market, with both Gossip Harbor and State of Survival driving engagement by encouraging players to hunt down rare cards to complete sets for rewards and other gameplay boosts. Seasonal events continue to be as important as ever too, with Angry Birds 2 and Stumble Guys looking to Earth Day for a planet-friendly spin on new content.
Read on for the full breakdown of all the biggest mobile game updates, developments, and game launches from April.
April’s casual mobile game updates
Fishdom allowed a limited number of players to test out a new type of casual minigame event that included merge and mining mechanics reminiscent of idlers such as Gold and Goblins. It saw players delving through a series of Emerald Mines, strategically clearing obstacles to unearth a hidden set of Keys used to unlock the “mine gates” and move on to the next, more challenging mine.
To clear the way, players used Emeralds (the event currency) to generate industrious crabs that mined for them. These crabs could be combined to create higher-level crustaceans capable of clearing obstacles faster. More crabs could also be obtained by beating regular match3 levels.
The Emerald Mines were also launched alongside a new permanent win-streak system to better engage players and guide them toward the main gameplay levels. Players who clear ten levels now unlock a Super Lightning booster that, once activated, requires maintaining a constant winning streak. The Super Lightning booster is twice as powerful as the regular one, removing two colors instead of one from the playing field.
This win-streak system first appeared in the Royal Match in May 2023, where it had a positive impact on performance. Since then, it has become a trend followed by several puzzle games, including Toon Blast, Toy Blast, and Triple Match 3D.
Filling up a photo album was a retro pastime until Monopoly GO! came along and used it as the basis of a seasonal rotational event, tasking players with completing in-game objectives to fill up their digital stickerbooks. Since then, several prominent titles have jumped on the trend, with the latest addition being Gossip Harbor and the Springtime Keepsakes.
During this event, players collected cards from the core merge game and concurrent events to complete nine unique card albums. Each completed album granted rewards, and players unlocked a special grand prize upon finishing all nine. Additionally, players earned rewards through duplicate cards: Each card could be traded in for rewards from an event-specific star store, with the value determined by their rarity rating (cards were ranked from one to four).
However, albums weren’t the only trend Gossip Harbour followed during April, as the game also launched its own 1v1 competitive (race) event. In the Galactic Grand Prix, two players faced off in a short race to claim a grand prize. Players were given four thresholds to reach, completed by finishing event-specific orders on the game’s regular merge grid. Completing the orders faster than your opponent earned special boosts that supercharged progress.
Additional casual game highlights and other news
Performance highlights: Piggy Kingdom
Piggy Kingdom, a casual match3 puzzle game that takes strong inspiration from Dream Games’ super hit Royal Match and its spiritual successor Royal Kingdom (still in soft launch), reached the top 200 grossing. Piggy Kingdom builds on Dream Games’ hits with simple narrative elements, including short dialogue sequences that introduce and close off each new area. Both titles also feature a renovation meta layer.
The merge and hybrid casual powerhouse
We’ve written a lot in the past about the success of merge games, as well as the continued rise of hybridization. With that in mind, it was very much business as usual in April, with multiple titles from across both genres performing well:
- Screw Jam by Rollic Games (hybrid casual) hit the top 100 grossing.
- Seaside Escape (merge2) got to the top 50 grossing.
- Adventure Island Merge (merge2) reached the top 200 grossing.
Earth Day Events
Most of the top-grossing mobile games use seasonal events as part of their LiveOps framework, building new content around holidays, religious occasions, and national calendar dates. The usual suspects like Christmas and Halloween are a given, but so are lesser-known events like Earth Day (a global occasion held every year on 22 April since 1970 that aims to highlight the importance of protecting the environment).
This year’s Earth Day was celebrated in two notable titles on mobile:
- Stumble Guys launched a limited-time gacha, the Earth Day Wheel. Players spun the wheel using gems for a chance to win one of several new planet-themed skins, including Mr Bush, Gaia, and Sir Recyclesalot.
- Angry Birds 2 launched a new hat collection for Earth Day. This also meant a reskin of its hat event, a unique collection of PvE levels that are only available to players who own a hat from the current exclusive collection. The Earth Day hats were only available from the Tower of Fortune: Healing the World gacha or IAP offers.
April’s midcore game updates
As we highlighted above in Gossip Harbor, a number of casual games have launched collection events as part of their LiveOps strategies. However, that trend seems to have grown so popular that even midcore games are taking note, such as State of Survival. This 4X strategy game launched its own card collection system last month with eight unique sets of cards for players to obtain. Completing a collection (and upgrading the cards within it) unlocks permanent gameplay boosts and other useful items.
Players build up their collection by opening Card Packs, which are available through event rewards or purchasable offers, in a dedicated gacha menu. Players can also obtain specific individual cards by acquiring card shards through normal gameplay. Cards are upgraded by fusing together ten duplicate cards or using Card Fusion Tickets, which are acquired by dismantling unwanted cards.
State of Survival also added a new PvP mode, Doomsday Express, where players send out trucks on timed deliveries across the 4X map. Each delivery takes around four hours, but other players can raid the truck to steal the rewards before it reaches its destination. Each player has four shipping attempts and four raid attempts per day.
Several new additions came to the various iterations of Call of Duty across mobile and other platforms during April. Starting with Call of Duty: Mobile, players gained access to the Challenge HQ. This new area in the game’s menus acts as the “headquarters” for the current season, where players can find all the ongoing missions, earn progression toward milestone rewards, and use Challenge Tokens to redeem rewards from the event store.
Previous seasons in Call of Duty Mobile felt somewhat disconnected, as they were made up of several individual events rather than a cohesive whole. The Challenge HQ addresses this by bringing everything together through a more linear seasonal progression that better incentivizes players. Players now complete missions to earn Challenge EXP, which, in turn, pushes them toward rewards on the Challenge Pass. These rewards include Challenge Tokens, which act as a currency to purchase various items from the Challenge Store.
Meanwhile, only two weeks after the launch of Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile, the game has ramped up its monetization by introducing gachas — likely in direct response to its current performance. These utilize basic box gacha mechanics, meaning the cost to draw rewards increases each time. All the rewards available from these gacha are designed purely for Warzone Mobile, meaning they cannot be used across PC and console.
Similarly, Call of Duty also started to pursue more aggressive monetization on PC and console last month through the Godzilla x Kong collaboration. The unusual crossover launched with several bundles that utilized a Titan collection mechanic, where the player needed to purchase all the available bundles to get a unique melee weapon.
Another exclusive addition to Call of Duty on PC and console over April was a tongue-in-cheek seasonal event that capitalized on 420 Day. This included a limited-time platforming mode, G3T_H1GH, where players had to quite literally race to the highest point of a cyberpunk-esque map decorated with digitized marijuana plants.
League of Legends: Wild Rift launched two initiatives to promote a new skin collection, Calligraphia. This included the game’s first-ever Top Up event, Spenders’ Splendorous Gifts, as well as the Legacy of the East limited-time gacha. During the launch of these events on 28 April, the game saw a colossal spike in daily revenue in the US of more than 1800%, propelling it into grossing rank 28 and marking the biggest ever increase in its history. You can read more about the mechanics of these events in our Live Events Tracker.
War Robots launched the next part of its Echoes of the Past story event, Battle for Ground Zero. Interestingly, this latest addition merges aspects of both single-player and multiplayer content. Players were tasked with collectively destroying a certain number of enemies in the single-player Extermination PvE mode, which then unlocked the new Ground Zero multiplayer PvP map. A special leaderboard was also connected to the event, with players unlocking rewards for hitting certain milestones.
Additional midcore gaming highlights
Squad Busters
Squad Busters, Supercell’s first new game in five years, has been garnering a ton of attention since it entered soft launch last month. The game is due to launch globally on 29 May, with Supercell already running various promotional campaigns across its other titles (such as Clash of Clans, Clash Royale and Brawl Stars) to drum up hype for the full release.
Squad Busters is a PvEvP multiplayer battle arena title in which ten players gather a squad of characters (made up of heroes from across Supercell’s portfolio) and compete for gems. Controlling the squad is easy as the characters automatically perform actions when the player is not moving. It’s monetized through gacha, which are opened as match rewards, with drop rates dependent on the player’s current win streak.
Persona 5: The Phantom X
A mobile spin-off of SEGA and Atlus’ critically acclaimed high-school JRPG series Persona launched exclusively in China last month. Persona 5: The Phantom X was developed by Perfect World and peaked at grossing 18 and download 13, although it has since declined.
Much like the console installments, The Phantom X is set in modern-day Tokyo and combines social simulation with dungeon crawling. It features new and original characters and is monetized through a gacha system, which players pull to acquire new Personas (in-game monsters you control in battle), and character summons (featuring popular heroes from Persona 5).
Happy Fishing Master
Another game in China that has been reeling in players is Happy Fishing Master (欢乐钓鱼大师), which has been at downloads 1 since its launch on 28 March. Unlike the many “casino-fishing” titles that are popular in the region, Happy Fishing Master is a “real” fishing game that lets players visit unique fishing spots worldwide and catch over 200 types of aquatic creatures.
The game looks to capture the same feeling of relaxation that comes from fishing in real life but with a few added surprises, like big catches and broken fishing rods. Happy Fishing Master is the first purely fishing title our analysts have ever seen to top the charts in China.
AFK Journey
The Idle RPG hit AFK Journey kept going strong in the top 40 for all of April, peaking in the top 10. One thing to note is that the game didn’t have any substantial updates during that time and instead managed to maintain its performance thanks to the idle mechanics slowing down the player’s character upgrades. The players are also divided across a multitude of servers, which gives them a little extra motivation to push for top spots on the game’s leaderboards.
