August can be a quiet month in the mobile market as we move out of the holiday period, so we’ve combined the biggest updates from the mobile market in July and August into an absolutely mammoth Analyst Bulletin covering everything you need to know.
One of the hottest trends off the back of Summer BBQs is ingredient gathering/formula events, which are surging in popularity as major names like Coin Master and Disney Solitaire implement these new events to create a larger event framework that incentivizes players to participate in as many events as possible. While most people might associate ingredients with cooking, the formula-based nature of ingredient gathering means this event type can be repurposed for different themes, which is exactly what Match Villains did by building this event type around a safe-cracking event.
Outside of trending events, the last couple of months have seen some notable mobile launches for AAA PC and console franchises, namely Riot Games’ Valorant in China and Sony/Bungie’s Destiny. Both games are off to a strong start, but can they sustain this in an increasingly competitive mobile market? In addition to these AAA mainstays, you’ll find plenty of exciting new releases you should be keeping an eye on in this month’s bulletin.
You can find more information about these updates and titles, as well as the latest trends from across the mobile market, by checking out our latest Analyst Bulletin below.
July & August casual game updates
Cash Tornado Slots added a full achievement system in August, something not often seen at this scale in social casino games. Players earn badges across categories such as Missions, Slots, Merge, Friends, and Teams, which feed into a central trophy that upgrades through multiple tiers. This new achievement system is tied to a cosmetic reward track, while a leaderboard tracks which players are collecting the most points.
Achievement systems such as this are a proven way to incentivize engagement, as they set long-term goals for players to work towards. Coupling this achievement system with a leaderboard is a clever move, as the leaderboard element taps into players who are motivated by social recognition. The cosmetic reward track further incentivizes engagement as it provides players with a way to show off their mastery of the game.
Stumble Guys expanded its social systems at the end of July with Clubs / Clubs Goals, a community tournament event that turned task completion into a team effort. Running for about four weeks, the event drives retention through shared objectives and milestone-based rewards.
Players could join or create Clubs to complete rotating daily and weekly goals, earning points toward a shared reward track. Progressing through the Club reward track unlocks exclusive cosmetics, incentivizing long-term participation and teamwork.
It’s been a busy couple of months for Moon Active’s Coin Master, which spent the Summer experimenting with a variety of completely new event types. Coin Cafe launched at the beginning of August, a simplified ingredient-gathering event where players could earn dishes (bronze, silver, gold) and collect ingredients from around the game and core spins. Dishes open instantly when unlocked to provide ingredients, which are collected and used to complete orders in the event window.
Serving orders in turn grants tickets for a progression bar with threshold rewards and a grand prize at the end.
Disney Solitaire also launched an ingredient-gathering event called Chef’s Kitchen, perfectly themed around its animated movie Ratatouille. In the event, players collected ingredients from baskets, which were used to cook dishes and win rewards. The baskets are randomly awarded as rewards from other in-game events and offers, creating a larger event framework that incentivizes players to participate in as many events as possible.
Top-performing games have been introducing and utilizing umbrella events to connect different event types together, with seasonal collectible albums and mission list events being some of the most popular choices. Ingredient gathering and formula events are now one of the latest trends. They’re similar to seasonal albums, as you have to collect items from a variety of events, but instead of collecting these items to make a photo album, you combine them to create a formula, with ingredients for a cooking recipe being the most popular.
Disney Solitaire, Coin Master, and Match Villains are just some of the top-performing games that have introduced ingredient gathering events in the last two months. While the mechanics of Match Villain’s event are almost the same, the event has you gathering tools that are used to crack open safes. This is a better match for the game’s villain theme and shows how this event type can be tailored to fit a specific narrative or gameplay theme.
Another unique event is Boss Fight, a special minigame event where players use an event currency, Boss Gold, to spin an event-specific wheel and fight through 12 boss stages. This event might feel familiar to fans of boss rush modes in adventure games, but combat mechanics are completely new to Coin Master and highlight the game’s strengths with event hybridization.
Players spin a wheel to deal damage, block incoming attacks, heal themselves and even trigger special attacks with lightning strikes. Bosses attack at timed intervals with pop-up warnings shown in the main gameplay beforehand.
Boss Gold can be earned from core spins, offers, or purchases, with the cost of a spin scaling with multiplayers (x1–x10). The main goal of the event is to beat all 12 bosses and reach the end, picking up stage rewards after every boss defeat and a Grand Prize for making it to the end.
Outside of major events, Coin Master has been experimenting with new monetization models. Progressive Bundle: Video Value is a new ad-monetized progressive offer where players solely watch ads to claim rewards, up to a maximum of three rewards. This offer was also supplemented with a new gacha-based reward type, Scratch Time. The reward plays a scratch card animation upon revealing the randomized reward.
Epic’s victory over Apple and Google earlier this year has had a major impact on the mobile market as more game studios try to dodge App Store fees by encouraging players to visit external web stores to purchase items. These web stores often have better prices than in-game purchases, and Coin Master has introduced several Web Value Offers in the last couple of months. These offers are advertised in-game, but direct players to a new pop-up browser to complete the purchase when interacted with.
- Web Value Offer: Choose Your Bundle: A side-by-side offer from which players can choose to either buy the in-app offer or the webstore offer with an added value
- Web Value Offer: Flying Time: Basic bundle offer, indicating up to 20% off for the webstore purchase of these rewards
- Web Value Offer: Forest Charms: Basic bundle offer, indicating up to 20% off for the webstore purchase of these rewards
- Web Value Offer: Token Power Pack: A Webstore value offer version of the already familiar Token Power Pack that offers tokens for the Thor’s Wheel event.
Match Factory added a new permanent Super Ball win streak system. The system requires players to complete 10 main progression levels in any order to activate the Super Ball. The benefit remains active as long as the player doesn’t fail a level.
Similar win streak systems have been implemented in many top puzzle games for some time now. We covered these in greater detail in the GameRefinery October Analyst Bulletin, but some pioneering examples can be found below:
- Super Lightball in Royal Match
- Magic Disco in Toon Blast
- Super Rainbow Ball in Homescapes
- In Match3 puzzle games, the benefits of win streak systems are the same, which doubles the benefit of the rainbow bomb booster to clear two colors at once. However, 3D Match titles have a minor tweak to the win streak system’s benefit to fit their core gameplay, such as Meteorite Strike in Triple Match 3D, Extra Slot in Match Manor, and Super Ball in Match Factory.
Additional casual gaming highlights and other news
Acecraft: Sky Hero is a new vertical shoot-’em-up from Moonton Games (Mobile Legends) with roguelite mechanics, featuring the rubber-hose animation style (Cuphead-like) of the ‘30s. The meta/progression systems will feel familiar to anyone who has played HABBY’s games. The game launched with a Tom & Jerry crossover, giving it a major boost at launch as it peaked at DL #2 and GR #134.
Villain-themed Match3 game Match Villains started to scale heavily at the beginning of July, jumping from #GR 150 to grossing #GR 84 (as of September 8) in the US iOS chart. Contributing factors are a noticeable UA push and the constant introductions of new overarching event features to strengthen and connect the game’s framework together, including ingredient gathering events, battle passes, seasonal collectible album, and more. Of course, all of this comes with a price, but development studio Good Job Games recently raised $60m to scale the game even further.
Wittle Defender: Habby’s hybrid casual-midcore game that blends tower defence, roguelike, and auto-battle RPG elements, released in June. It broke into the top-grossing 200 chart (US iOS) in July and remained there throughout August, peaking at GR #139, but this still fell short of the launch success experienced by some of their recent hits, such as Archero 2 and Capybara GO.
Flambé: Merge and Cook, a Merge2 game from developer Microfun was released in May, reaching the top-grossing 200 (iOS US) and peaking at #GR168. It features a familiar restaurant renovation meta, food theme, and innovation with a recipe mechanic supplementing the core gameplay.
July and August midcore game updates
Free Fire and Naruto Shippuden teamed up again for a major collaboration event following the success of their first collaboration event back in January. The Free Fire X Naruto Shippuden: Ninja War event introduced new gameplay elements in Battle Royale and Clash Squad modes, along with original bundles, cosmetics, a unique social top-up event, and more.
Players could participate in BR-Ranked matches with Naruto Shippuden-themed challenges and alterations to the map, which featured Tsukuyomi areas where players could find Akatsuki keepsakes and Jutsus from Naruto to unlock special ninja abilities such as the Deidara Kepsake move, which launches a controllable clay bird that explodes in midair.
The highlight of the collaboration was the introduction of Squad Treasure, a first-of-its-kind social top-up event that encouraged players to join forces with friends to purchase premium currency, unlocking rewards for the entire squad rather than just individuals.
Whiteout Survival launched new permanent exploration game modes, Tundra Trek and Frontier Trek, with highly randomized encounters and narrative-driven elements. These game modes lightly resemble the proven casual exploration formula in Habby’s Capybara GO!.
These game modes are tightly connected to the new non-combat Expert character system, offering permanent buffs to core 4X gameplay through relationship progression. Players can unlock and increase their relationship with Expert characters by playing exploration game modes, with the new character system creating a mid to long-term growth layer targeting whales and endgame players in mature servers facing power bottlenecks.
It isn’t just the casual market embracing recipe-collecting and cooking-themed events. Dark War: Survival launched a festive cooking-themed event called Yummy Carnival. In this event, players gather ingredients across sub-events to cook dishes in a timing-based mini-game, unlocking milestone and leaderboard rewards.
Players earned ingredients in sub-events like Grub Hub and Yum Puzzle to use in the Art of Cooking mini-game to score points for personal and alliance rewards. This is an interesting iteration of the trending ingredient gathering event loop, wrapped into one of the 4X genre’s signature overarching formats: tying together multiple sub-events to create a flexible structure for layering in progression systems, monetization hooks, and player engagement across the full event window.
Clash Royale is currently experiencing a massive comeback following its controversial April update, which removed chest timers and overhauled the game’s seasonal event system. Revenue started to scale slowly in April as a result of these changes, but the launch of Merge Tactics in July, an autochess-style mode where players fight against four other players, had a significant impact on DAUs.
The matches for Merge Tactics are completed in phases, and the mode also has its own League system to incentivize engagement. Matches follow the structure below:
- In the Deploy Phase, players purchase/upgrade Troops
- In each Battle Phase, the Troops automatically fight against one another’s Troops.
- The player who loses the Battle loses HP. If your HP runs out, you are out of the Match.
- Based on the Battle Phase results, each player earns currency to make new moves in the Deploy Phase
Your card collection provides boosts to your available troops in Merge Tactics, incentivizing engagement with the game’s meta gameplay systems. It also introduces an entirely new card type, Rulers, to collect/upgrade and purchase, with each ruler having a unique skill that changes playstyle.
Speaking of auto-chess updates, Zenless Zone Zero launched “En-Nah” Chess Legend in July, an auto-chess minigame mode with story-focused PvE challenges and a separate PvP mode with support for up to six players. This is the first time an auto-chess mode has featured in Zenless Zone Zero, but miHoYo has launched similar modes in other games, such as Heated Battle Mode: Automatic Artistry and Battle of Imagined Arrays in Genshin Impact. This could be miHoYo warming players up for the launch of their upcoming game, Honkai: Nexus Anime, which will feature PvE autochess in its core gameplay.
This game mode operates in a similar way to bigger auto-chess games, such as Team Fight Tactics, featuring similar synergies and power-ups. Players can choose a character from the given choices at the start of the game, each with different kinds of powers (similar to Hearthstone Battlegrounds).
Additional midcore gaming highlights and other news
Valorant Mobile made its debut in the Chinese market in August. It’s a classic FPS/TPS co-created by Riot Games and Tencent’s Photon Studio, and is essentially a mobile-friendly version of Valorant with some minor changes to monetization with the addition of mobile-exclusive weapon skin bundles. Since its initial release, the game has consistently ranked among the top 10 grossing titles, while downloads have remained in the top two—underscoring its strong and sustained market performance.
Destiny: Rising is a mobile version of the Bungie and Sony’s PC/Console sci-fi RPG shooter. The game made its debut at the top of the download charts and at #54 in the top-grossing chart, quickly jumping to #GR 20 after three days.
Similar to Valorant’s approach, this game brings the same gameplay format and mechanics from the PC/console version of the game to mobile, although there are some major changes to monetization. On PC and console, the monetization is built around mainly gating content such as DLC expansions and cosmetic purchases behind paywalls, whereas Destiny Rising uses gachas for character collection.
HAIKYU!! FLY HIGH is a volleyball sports game with RPG mechanics based on the popular anime series, Haikyu!!. The matches are spiced up with special attack cutscenes from the Haikyu!! anime. The game was released on July 30 and quickly broke into the top-grossing chart, peaking at GR #74 while hitting the top spot for downloads.
The selection of sports that appear on mobile game charts tends to be limited to soccer, baseball, basketball, golf, and 8-ball pool, so it’s refreshing to see volleyball appear as a new sport with top-grossing potential.
DC Worlds Collide, a hero collector Idle RPG with an auto-battle core, celebrated its global release in July, peaking at DL #5 and GR #77. This is ok debut, but downloads and revenue quickly started to decline after launch, raising massive suspicions about the game’s staying power.
In the game, players form teams of five made of superheroes and villains from the DC universe. The launch of DC Worlds Collide comes at a time when the market is overcrowded with superhero-themed gacha games, including the character collector RPG DC Dark Legion. That said, the game has fared much better than other hero-based gacha games due to its unique 4X strategy-influenced design choices, helping it stand out in the market.
Dream League Soccer 2025 (launched 2020) hit an all-time high in daily revenue in July 2025, entering the top-grossing 50 charts for the first time (iOS US). This revenue surge is likely driven by a major update introducing new top star characters from peak seasons. The FIFA Club World Cup also coincided with this period, boosting the performance of several soccer games in the market.
