August and the summer months in general are always a funny time on the app stores. Historically a slow period for hyper casual game releases, this year seemed to follow the trend but there was still a fair few games especially towards the end of the month.
Here’s our top picks for the month and the latest hyper casual games that caught our eye.
Table of Contents
What’s New this month
August saw the launch of our brand new series “Hyper Elite Live Workshops” inside the Academy and we had a blast!
Think of these as companion workshops to Hyper Casual Elite and we’ll be deep diving into each section one by one.
These live workshops are great exercises in brainstorming ideas and flex your game ideation muscles and hopefully spark some fresh ideas.
We kicked things off with a deep dive into the Drawing Genre and took a birds eye view of the games in our Hyper Casual Elite Game Genre Reference Library.
After playing some of the drawing games from our list, along with some newer released titles, we then moved over to the Academy StoreSpy and the new top charts to brainstorm some ideas for prototypes.
This is a really powerful exercise and great for sparking outside the box thoughts and getting those creative juices flowing. We shared a few seeds of ideas including fusing a drawing aspect into the increasingly popular “Choosing” mechanic.
Next up we explored the Idle Genre and in particular the new sub-genre “Arcade Idle”.
Coined by Homa Games back in July 2021, we dove into this new trend of hyper casual playable Idle games.
The Idle genre is certainly alive and kicking and wide open for land grab right now in the Hyper Casual space.
I’ve spent way too much time than I care to admit making cafe’s and serving coffee by tapping mindlessly on my screen!
But hey, it’s kinda fun.
It was a perfect time for a deep dive as TapNation just released their new game “Idle Maggots” and BoomHits launched “Raft Life” just last week.
We explored this new era of “Arcade Idle”, or playable Idle games, and figure out why it’s a perfect example of game fusion and why the opportunities are almost endless to “Hyper Casual’up” this genre to the max.
September we’ll dive into the “Mini Games” and “Multiplayer / .IO” genres and how we can innovate and potentially discover any new opportunities there.
If you want to get involved and stay up to date with all the latest hyper casual games trends then we’d love for you to join us inside the Academy.
More Crazy Hyper Casual Acquisitions!
Well it’s all happening again as we predicted and there’s been some notable acquisitions!
Top hyper casual publisher CrazyLabs announced that they acquired India-based studio Firescore Interactive.
Based in Mumbai and formed just short of 4 years ago, Firescore boast over 200 Million downloads with their hit games Soap Cutting, Acrylic Nails and most recently Hair Dye!
Pretty darn impressive and they’ve certainly found their groove and know what works and how to deliver popular games.
Furthermore, CrazyLabs also announced that they are 1 of 8 new companies to join the Embracer Group.
We’d never heard of Embracer before and as you can imagine, with billions of dollars involved, it get’s pretty complicated. We briefly went through the slides of the press release presentation on Academy Live 209, and if you are interested to know more, you can watch that in full here.
Rovio throws it hat in the Hyper Casual Games Ring
In more acquisition news, big guns Rovio announced that they have just snapped up hyper casual studio Ruby Games.
Ruby Games employs 34 people in Izmir, Turkey, and was founded in 2018. They’ve launched 13 games of which eight have reached Top 10 in the iOS Free games chart with three hitting the #1 position.
The combined downloads of Ruby Games exceed 600 million.
Probably best know for Hunter Assassin which was the sixth most downloaded game across all categories in 2020 worldwide. More recently last month, and a game we deconstructed in Academy Live 207, is Streamer Life!
That hit the No.1 spot at the end of July and stayed there for a week.
I thought this was a super interesting quote from Rovio CEO Alex Pelletier-Noramand. ( Epic Name BTW! )
‘’With the acquisition of hyper-casual game studio Ruby Games, we are taking an important step forward in our growth strategy. By entering the rapidly growing hyper-casual market we are enriching our audience base and offering our players a more diverse portfolio of titles’’.
I think it’s safe to mention that all those nay sayers who reckoned hyper casual games won’t last have some serious egg to remove from their faces!
So all in all, whilst the summer months are historically slow for games on the App Store, there was still plenty of activity and here’s our roundup of the best Hyper Casual Games that we played this August.
Top Hyper Casual Games List for August 2021
Castle Raid!
Down The Hole!
Flex Run 3D
More Snacks!
People Wheel
Make the biggest human wheel possible in this hyper casual runner from Tastypill. Start off running alone and gather up as many people as you can, then lead your rotating humans over obstacles and gaps. The bigger wheel you have, the more your humans can help bridge gaps and reach platforms, they’ll even line themselves up on the finish wall to help you reach the treasure chest.
Race Master 3D
Raft Life
Shape-shifting
Text or Die
Get your thinking caps on folks, the longest answer counts here if you don’t want to get eaten alive by sharks in the water! Build your tower the tallest by finding the biggest answer, outlast all your opponents and keep your feet, and more, from getting wet in the rising tide! As hyper casual games go, this is a super fun and well made trivia quiz from Rollic Games.
Tippy Toe 3D
Tower War
Zoo - Happy Animals
Final Thoughts
These were the best Hyper Casual games to hit the store this month and we hope you find some inspiration and new game ideas!
Don’t forget, you can watch all these games deconstructed in full along with dozens more inside the Academy.
Academy Membership also includes Academy StoreSpy, Hyper Casual Elite, Academy Live, all our workshops, tools and courses covering every aspect of powerful, effective and creative hyper casual game design techniques.
We love it, our Academy Members love it and we think you’ll love it too.
Click here to get started and we’ll see you inside the Academy.
