Here are the top mobile game downloads from last month, according to Appmagic data.
Appmagic’s estimates do not include numbers from China’s fractured Android market. There’s also commentary on January’s most notable trends from the top 20 and beyond below.
You can find our look at January’s top grossing mobile games here.
In between these monthly updates, you can also keep tabs on Appmagic’s top grossing and top downloads charts here.
Block Blast and Roblox each claim first and second spot in the download chart for the second month running, each for different reasons.
Hungry Studio told us earlier this month that it’s the company’s “obsession” with A/B testing both its marketing and product that has boosted it to the top of the downloads charts.
Indeed, a quick glance at Appmagic’s marketing dashboard suggests that Hungry Studio has pushed over 2,800 Block Blast ad creatives into the market in the last 90 days, with US users the largest group by ad impressions (28%), followed by Brazil (14%) and Indonesia (8%). Applovin accounts for most of those impressions with 45%, followed by Mintegral (22%) and Inneractive (18%).
All that said, January’s Block Blast downloads are a little down on December’s record 36.9m haul, though January’s total of 32.5m is still way ahead of nearest contender, Roblox.
The UGC platform’s story is practically the opposite, as it’s a mostly organic phenomenon; the back end of the school holidays plus millions of new devices gifted in December combined to help Roblox hit a new all-time high for monthly downloads at 23.3m. Expect a drop for February, though, as normal term time and regular service resumes.
This month’s slightly random trending game is Cat Chaos: Prankster, which has come from nowhere to claim third spot. Some light Googling tells us it’s a physicsy 3D sim game that’s kind of like Hello Neighbour crossed with Untitled Goose Game, and therefore very good at creating good shareable moments.
It’s Android-only, which makes its performance even more impressive. It turns out cats being amusing on the internet is quite popular.
Subway Surfers racked up ~15m downloads for the second month running in fourth, while Garena’s Free Fire double act occupy fifth and sixth following a Naruto-themed makeover.
Though they’re effectively the same game, the older ‘main’ Free Fire game benefitted from the Naruto event most, and was up month-on-month by around 2m downloads. The hi-def Max edition was down from 14m in December to ~12.5m in January.
8 Ball Pool is coming back down after a crazy download spike in December, when it hit 15m downloads – it’s usually in the 7-8m range. Steady performers My Talking Tom 2 and Ludo King each posted similar numbers to December at around the 11m mark.
Supercent’s Pizza Ready sneaks back into the top ten with a slight month-on-month rise in downloads. It also recently passed the 200m installs mark, having pulled in 11-12m downloads for the last six months in a row.
January’s top downloads: 11-20
11. Squid Game Unleashed (Netflix): 10.9m
12. PUBG Mobile (Tencent): 10.7m
13. Offline Games (JindoBlu): 10.2m
14. Pokémon TCG Pocket (The Pokémon Company): 9.99m
15. Candy Crush Saga (King): 9.92m
16. Township (Playrix): 9.88m
17. Hole.io (Voodoo): 9.7m
18. Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (Moonton): 9.5m
19. Super Bear Adventure (Earthkwak Games): 9.4m
20. Mini Games: Calm & Relax (Galaxy Astronaut Games): 9.4m
Netflix’s Squid Game: Unleashed almost broke into the top ten in January, as the streaming giant’s decision to give it away completely free as a marketing stunt for Squid Game 2 reaped rewards. And there may be more of this sort of thing to come from Netflix, if the talk in its earnings call is anything to go by.
PUBG Mobile was up to around 10m installs in Janaury having posted around 7m per month for the last five months, while Pokémon TCG Pocket drops 11 spots as it settles into a post-launch rhythm. We’ll also see how the controversy over that new trading update manifests in the numbers soon…
Interestingly, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang saw its best monthly downloads performance since May 2020 last month, despite being taken offline in the US as it was caught in the crossfire of the US TikTok ban. US numbers for this game were small anyway, and Appmagic numbers show a sudden spike in downloads from India in late January.
It’s also worth also mentioning new entry Super Bear Adventure from French firm Earthkwak Games, which suddenly racked up over 9.4m downloads last month. Indonesian players boosted this retro-style 3D platform adventure into the top 20, accounting for 30% of its installs last month. Brazil and Russia also accounted for 9% of the game’s downloads in the last 30 days.
Outside the top 20, CrazyLabs has a new take on the ‘traffic puzzle’ subgenre with Bus Frenzy, which racked up ~8.4m installs in January. Vita Majong’s big ad spend is getting results as it rises 15 spots month on month to a high of 8.2m monthly downloads, while Supercent’s Snake Clash is rising through the ranks again, with 7.9m installs last month.
But it looks like the party’s over for viral hit My Supermarket Simulator – it saw a third straight month of monthly download decline after breaking out in the autumn of 2024.
