In-game collaboration events with popular IPs are an effective way for mobile game developers to boost their revenue and downloads. Two popular casual games, Capybara Go! And Phase 10: Casual Card Game hosted their first-ever collaboration events in June, but did these collaborations with The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Snoopy from The Peanuts win over new players?
June was a significant month for download and revenue spikes in mobile games, which can be attributed to the resumption of wider in-person events. Love Island: The Game – Interactive Story enjoyed a significant download boost off the back of a new series for the TV show, Love Island, while sports games such as NBA 2k25 MyTeam, MLB Clutch Hit Baseball and Chess: Play & Learn found success in the charts through a combination of major sports events and UA campaigns. Roblox’s Grow a Garden also became one of the most popular games of all time after hitting more than 21 million concurrent players!
Several mobile games embarked on global releases in June, including Umamusume: Pretty Derby and Persona 5: The Phantom X. But do these regional hits have what it takes to win over new fans in the West? 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.
June’s casual game updates
HABBY!’s roguelite game Capybara Go! enjoyed a hugely successful launch by tapping into capybara viral trends (more on that in our November 2024 bulletin), but revenue and downloads have been on a downhill trajectory. Its collaboration event with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hoped to turn that around by introducing a separate event area with TMNT-themed sub-events and IAP bundles.
While GameRefinery data shows RPD on iOS increased by 48%, the collaboration didn’t bring in many new players or have a major impact on overall revenue. The TMNT IP is most popular in America, which is also the biggest market for the game on iOS, so the collaboration’s monetization mechanics may not have resonated with players.
Mattel’s Phase 10: Casual Card Game also hosted its first-ever collaboration event with Snoopy, part of the Peanuts comic strip franchise. Mechanically, the event was similar to the 2024 Eggs Merge event. Players had to merge items to get dishes and serve them to customers, but all the characters in this event were from the Peanuts franchise. The event also introduced a collectibles task where players received a reward for serving 69 different characters. Overall, the collaboration event caused a 23% increase in revenue and 59% increase in downloads on iOS (compared to seven days prior).
Additional casual gaming highlights and other news
Tasty Travels, a Merge2 title from Century Games with a base-building meta and food theme, has been scaling in downloads and revenue since its launch in Februrary 2025. It finally cracked the US iOS top-grossing 100 in June, making it a serious contender in the competitive Merge2 genre.
Century Games is best known for its 4x strategy games such as Whiteout Survival and Kingshot, but is rapidly growing its portfolio into the wider casual gaming market. Its Match3 game, Truck Star, has overtaken Chrome Valley Customs in momentum as the top ‘male-targeted’ Match3 game.
Love Island: The Game – Interactive Story surged into the Top 50 grossing ranks, scaling significantly in both revenue and downloads. It reached an all-time performance peak in mid-June 2025, coinciding with the launch of its 12th season, Sun Kissed Secrets, and the seventh season of Love Island USA. While revenue per download saw a slight decline, the revenue spike was likely driven by a massive influx of new players who watch the show on TV, supported with a UA campaign that leveraged the series’ recent popularity.
It’s worth highlighting that 30% of TV viewing occurred on mobile devices. Not only does this make the show Peacock’s most-watched entertainment series on mobile to date, but it also makes conversions from viewer to player much easier.
June also saw an influx of new games scaling in the hybrid casual puzzle space. Knit Out is one of the latest editions to Rollic Games’ catalog and entered the top-grossing 150 in June. It features a unique puzzle mechanic where players clear colored yarns by strategically selecting matching yarn balls positioned beneath the puzzle board.
Car Match: Traffic Puzzle is the second hybrid puzzle casual game from Grand Games (known for Magic Sort) and is also scaling in downloads and revenue. The game entered the top-grossing 200 in mid-June and continues to scale, peaking at #143 in the US top-grossing iOS chart.
There’s a new Roblox game taking the world by storm. Grow a Garden was initially developed by one person and launched in March 2025, and then scaled by two Roblox game development teams, now being the most-played Roblox game of all time. In June, it skyrocketed in growth and broke the record previously held by Fortnite, reaching a staggering 21.3 million concurrent players, making it one of the most played games in the world. It’s a simple, cozy tycoon game with idler/offline progression mechanics, with viral TikTok and YouTube Shorts videos contributing to its popularity.
If you’re interested in learning more about Grow a Garden’s success, check out our analyst’s full deconstruction of the game and the contributing factors to its success.
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June’s midcore game updates
A new update for Brawl Stars added Brawl Arena in June, a limited-time 3v3 PvP mode with simplified MOBA-inspired gameplay mechanics. Players battle to destroy the enemy base while using allied bots, neutral jungle enemies, and even a Kaiju boss to gain XP and level up during matches.
Brawl Stars also revamped its Trophy League system with the introduction of Starr Park: Trophy Road, which includes a UI overhaul and a new visual progression journey through Starr Park Worlds, the home of the Brawlers. The new system features an expanded trophy cap (70k > 100k) and updated rewards – Rare and super Rare Brawlers are no longer purchasable with Gems, and must be unlocked via Trophy Road.
June was a busy month for Fortnite as it launched its first-ever mobile-first PvP mode, Blitz Royale, on the 18 June following the game’s reinstatement on the US App Store in May 2025. This new mobile mode of battle royale caps the player count to 32 and takes place in a unique mini-map derived from the original map of 2024’s quick-match mode, Reload.
While the shorter match times of Blitz Royale were developed with mobile players in mind, it’s been incredibly popular with PC and console players, even surpassing the game’s main battle royale mode with an all-time peak of 443,000 players. It was set to end on 15 July, but has been extended to 12 August because of the mode’s popularity.
Elsewhere in Fortnite, June saw the arrival of Chapter Six, Season Three, ‘Super’, which added new mechanics such as Hero Ranks. The superhero-themed reason also introduced a variety of themed content in a wide selection of other games in the Fortnite ecosystem, notably LEGO® Fortnite Odyssey’s latest update, a hero-themed battle pass, and the all-new collaborative PvE mode, “LEGO® Expeditions.”
A new season of Fortnite Festival also launched, adding Bruno Mars as its Icon for Season Nine. As before, the season collaboration brought a new themed battle pass, collaboration-exclusive offers, and more. Fortnite also collaborated with Squid Games to celebrate the release of the third and final season of the popular TV series. The collaboration
introduced special IAP offers, tournaments, and an all-new map, Squid Grounds, brought into Reload PvP mode. The map is filled with buildings inspired by the series and includes special features, such as a hidden minigame of “Red Light, Green Light,” familiar from the show.
Additional midcore gaming highlights and other news
Netease has a new Marvel game: MARVEL Mystic Mayhem, a grid-based tactical battler which launched at DL #2 and GR #96 in June, peaking at GR #49. Mystic Mayhem features a unique art style to stand out, while gameplay focuses on strategic real-time combat with auto-attack and card-driven abilities for its Heroes.
Each Marvel Hero in your team has two card skills that are shuffled and drawn randomly (with a max hand size of three), and every time players use a skill, they draw a new one into their hand. The party has a shared energy for skills, and each Hero has its own Ultimate charge separate from the energy used for skills.
Umamusume: Pretty Derby, one of the most popular mobile games in the world, is finally available in the West as of June. The game was originally released in Japan back in February 2021, and dominated the top-grossing rank for most of the year without ever falling below GR 5. Even today, it has a sustained grossing rank of #27. Gameplay focuses on racing girls through a special training program loop. After each race, the girls perform idol concerts.
The US version of the game hasn’t enjoyed the same levels of success as Japan, but still launched with a respectable GR 50–70 range performance for the end of June. It’s worth noting that the core mechanics of the game are popular in Japanese mobile games but haven’t really reached the West yet. We’d recommend reading our blog post on the game back in 2021 if you’re interested in learning more about it.
Umamusume: Pretty Derby is also available on Steam with cross-save functionality, which might explain the lower revenue on mobile.
Sega Atlus’ Persona series is one of the most popular turn-based RPG series in the world. The mobile version of Persona 5—Persona 5: The Phantom X—is finally available globally following its 2024 release in China and South Korea.
In the US, the game peaked at No.1 in the US and Japan top-download charts, and at GR #47 and GR #2 in the US and Japan. The game is a spin-off of the original game and plays largely like the original, aside from some monetisation modifications such as the addition of gachas.
Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond, a sequel to the popular Shadowverse card game, was launched in the US and Japan. While Shadowverse’s core gameplay is based around CCG mechanics, there’s also a social hub where you can hang out with friends and play various minigames like soccer.
In Japan, the game launched to the top of the GR and DL charts, and remained in the top-five GR until the end of the month. Performance has been more modest in the US, with its download rank peaking at #26 while it spent three days in the GR top-200 before falling off. It seems Western gamers still prefer their CCGs to be based around massive brands, indicated by the success of games such as Pokémon TCG Pocket and new Final Fantasy cards in Magic: The Gathering Arena.
June saw some interesting new releases in China, such as the time-management game, 暴吵萌厨 (Noisy Chef). It initially ranked #1 in downloads and #82 in top-grossing. While downloads remain strong—consistently within the top 10—its grossing rank has declined to around #200.
The game’s publisher, FriendTimes Inc., has multiple fairly successful titles under its belt before getting into the time management genre, mostly with RPG games such as 浮生为卿歌 (Fúshēng wéi qīnggē) and 凌云诺 (Língyún nuò).
There are currently no other titles of this time-management genre in the market that are both of Chinese origin and in Chinese, making this a relatively new genre in China. The game is very similar to the popular time management title Overcooked on console and PC, but with some differences, most notably in the visual style of the characters and the inclusion of typical mobile game elements, such as events and gacha systems.
Last Z: Survival Shooter is a 4X Strategy game by Florere Game, globally released at the end of April 2025. The game has been scaling in May and June, peaking at GR #29, and utilizes AI art for its character portraits, a trend that has been emerging in 4X for the past year. Character portraits depict sexualized women with revealing outfits, but these outfits were made a little more modest ahead of its global launch. The core mechanics of the game bear a close resemblance to Last War: Survival.
