🟥🟩🟨🟦Did Block Blast finally peaked? And why they added 7 more minigames??? 👀 by Jakub Remiar

And that wouldn't even come because Gary Numan FIFA is my better sitting here. And then we have DAU where again Gary Numan FIFA sitting here on my 80 million as I said. That's there.
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Hello, hello. This is two and a half gamers and today we're going to have a special solo episode as always because every solo episode is special. But yeah, honestly when I was thinking what to do today, I wanted to look a little bit more briefly on Block Blast actually because we covered it last year and there's been some new developments for those who don't know, it was actually taken down off the store for a day and yeah, some new things are happening with it. So let's get a little bit of a special radar episode with just one game and look through it because let's say the charts are kind of moving around. So let's get right into it so we have all the insights immediately. Okay. So we covered it on and you can find this on the YouTube So, the podcast was done on January

20th, 2025. When if you look at the current numbers here, uh Yeah, it was something like 40 million active users. Uh it went all the way to 60. Remember we had this bet with Felix that I said it's not going to be bigger than Garena Free Fire. He said it's going to be Uh this is the Yeah, thanks, Pocket Gamer. Here you can see the news from May 28th, Block Blast no longer available on Google Play, but again, it was I think just 1 day or something, so it was taken down. This is, yeah, May 28th here. Maybe let me zoom in a little bit more. So, May 28th, yeah, somewhere here or maybe a little bit more. Uh where were we doing? Yeah. So, here May 28th, and you see this kind of a drop here. So, there definitely was a drop from something like

56 to 50 million DAU, but it's still oscillating and it's nothing tragic. So, let's see what happens there. Um the other interesting part is that there's finally a competitor. Because if you look at the block category, this is the block category. Uh by DAU, there's still no competitor, as you see here, but it's getting there because it's growing. Uh it's called Color Block Combo Blast. And Block Blast is still doing something like 50 million downloads a month. Uh it's still It's less than it used to, uh because again, if you look into the download chart, you could clearly see that they actually uh let me get this this way. You could clearly see that actually they downscaled a lot. But it's nothing under their, let's say, support, I would say, based on the financial graph. This I would say would be their support, which is something like 600k downloads a day, which they're

still doing, but they're definitely not doing that frenzy that they were doing in December, like 1 and 1/2 million downloads a day. Oh my god. So, yeah, they really went big, but uh yeah, so now they downscaled, but again, not downscaled as tragically. I'm guessing they're just waiting for the right moment to kind of push up again. Uh as as you saw with the active users, they are still holding very well around that 50 million mark. Um so, that's there. But again, if we look at the downloads in the category, it seems Color Block Combo Blast it's not really uh small anymore. Um because if we look at that game, yeah, it started aggressively scaling somewhere around January last year, let's say, somewhere here, yeah. Here you have this kind of a jump. Let me just keep uh the downloads chart now for this one. Um

yeah, last 12 months could be good. There we go. So, you see uh yeah, somewhere here, around the time we actually covered the podcast, they went like 300k downloads a day, and they're still doing quite strong, like quarter million downloads a day, uh very big. So, that's there. Uh one very important tidbit that even if we look at their active users, they are still growing, of course, and they're hitting record high of like 3 million DAU, which is compared to Block Blast, like, you know, funny, but still, it's getting there. What I wanted to show you is the country's difference, because that's very, very different, because Block Blast has 10% US users. It's around 5 million DAU, more than 5 million. While as if you look at these guys, uh again, country filter here, there is no US big DAU. It's like 20k.

So, even though they're growing and they're like doing all these things like it's basically tier two, tier three traffic or even worse, basically. So, yeah, they're definitely not making even uh same amount of money as Block Blast guys. Uh but, if you look at their creative gallery, you can see that again, they're taking what, 4 million creatives Oh, sorry, 4,000 creatives currently on their spend. Whereas, we look at uh Block Blast guys, they do like something like 5k. So, it's close. But again, it's different traffic because um that's why I'm talking about this. Don't take this as like this is going to be the same thing. It's uh yeah, downloads-wise. Uh Block Blast is not doing that much US, but still like 50k US downloads day, which is a lot. Again, if you look at the call at the competitor here that's actually going against them, they do what they do,

like 15k. So, like four times less in the US. But, yeah, let's see. Anyway, um but, as I said, they Block Blast scaled down, definitely. Because if you look at again current Block Blast spend, it's something like 5k creatives. If you look at December last year, uh December 2020 when they were doing their blitz, like 1 and 1/2 million downloads a day, it's like nearly 30k creatives. So, it's giant downscale. But again, it's nothing under like it's not just normal way. Just going there. The big question is uh if they can again uh go from there even higher and uh win win their bet that I have with Felix because uh both the DAU and downloads seems to have peaked somewhere around March this year. So, even before it was taken down. So, I don't think so this taken down thing has as much of an impact on it. But, you see here how downloads are kind of stabilized now and the DAU is

actually going down. So, let's see what happens. Like, it's a big question. I don't think so this competitor makes big of a dent to them, but it's interesting. Let me just show you. Uh this is how it looks basically. So, if again, looks exactly like Block Blast. So, that's there. Even if I understand correctly, the sounds are the same. So, why? Uh because it's a Chinese company. And the Chinese company is called Flyers Technology, uh and they have quite a few games here, but only the ones that are interesting, of course, is Color Block Combo Blast and their Car Racing 3D Master. And, of course, because the Chinese company every Chinese company has a scaling match three game, so they have Mistfall Match which is already like 40K from this May app. So, that's nice. But, the other thing I wanted to show you also is something happened with Block Blast itself.

Okay, real talk before we start. This episode is brought to you by Potensys. And, if you're a mobile game publisher tired of leaving money on the table, uh listen up. Potensys is a premium ad network built by people who've actually been on both sides of this industry, game publishers, agencies, successful exits. So, they get it. Here's the thing. Potensys has direct deals with Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, Vodafone. It's not programmatic. It's direct. Those budgets land in your game at premium CPMs, no middleman tax. And, they handle everything with their in-house team in terms of the creatives. Plus, they've partnered with Playable Maker, Vungle. So, they will take brands' YouTube videos or static images and actually turn it into playable ads or reward video. Proper interactive format built for gaming inventory. Brands getting a gaming native creative, publishers are getting a higher CPMs. Everyone wins. Head to potassios.com to get started, or

check their creative portfolio in the link in the show notes. Thank you very much Potassios for sponsoring this episode.
And Block Blast itself, uh if you remember in our episode as I was talking about it, um they had the uh where is it? This is how the menu looks before, like a year ago. Yeah, so they just had adventure and classic mode. And as you would go and want to go into the settings, you could go into the adventure mode and then in the settings you would have more games. And it would give you this kind of Tetris style horizontal thing. So, that's there. And if you look at it now, currently, there's actually a fully fledged button in the main menu of Block Blast called more games. Uh it's should be also, if I go here, in this one. Let's not get Yeah, it's also here. And if you go into it, you see

there's a plethora of games. There's actually eight different games now, not just one. And there's like fully fledged big games, like Fruit Merge, Mahjong, Sudoku, and so on and so forth. And I mean like it's really high level. It's not something like this is literally looks like Vita Mahjong. So, why can I merge this?
[sighs and gasps]
Uh like you see here, fully fledged with everything, with effects, boosters, like everything. If you go again through Fruit Merge, this is exactly what you would expect. It's a normal copy of Fruit Merge. Uh same goes for all these other games. So, yeah. Before it was just this Block Slide, now it's like seven different games on top of it. Yeah, they're definitely increasing this thing. The question is how big of a you know, percentage of DAU is actually interacting with these, but it's definitely something of the DAU because

they now moved into the main screen. It's not hidden. Before it was literally hidden, like you seen in our video of the podcast. So, let's see. I'm guessing what will happen now because they cannot grow more into the vertical of Block Blast itself, they will try to pretty much reinforce their DAU dominance with different games and turn this into more of a something like we did with the no Wi-Fi offline games, if you remember that episode we did in the blue, where they just have like giant amount of games which are the top top ad-based games, all put into this one app. So, I'm guessing they're now doing also this, that they're trying to pretty much more and more get mainstream to get more and more scale because I'm I'm guessing that they hit their limit on the scale that they can hit with Block Blast core gameplay. So, let's see. It's a quite interesting setup. And again, as I said, we'll see if these guys have peaked or again they will do the blitz during

autumn or winter, like they did here because again you see same thing happened last year. Well, from May they went down. And then somewhere October, December they started scaling like crazy. Which happened also in 2024 again. You see this giant peak. Uh again, December 2024. So, this kind of a movement I'm guessing will also happen here. So, don't think that it's peaked, but again, we'll see. Maybe. Because this like we're talking giant giant scale like 60 million DAU. If we check uh what's currently there uh on monetization because Sensor Tower has now the estimates on the ad monetization. It's saying that Block Blast makes 22 million in ad ad ad base revenue a month. Right after VNG which makes kind of the same, 19 million. And then we have Candy Crush, Solitaire Association, Happy Color, Wordscapes, Paper io and Pixel Flow.

Let's see how this fares. Uh last time if I remember Felix estimate in January last year was that it was making 1 million a day. So this would make something like 30 million a day. Uh so 30 million a month, I'm sorry. Now it's a little bit bigger. So I'm guessing that the US and and I'm hoping that the US uh
[gasps]
active user base increased from that time. So if we go here and check again January which is here. US 5 million 600,000 and now it's actually less. Yeah, so maybe it's not that bigger, but it's still making definitely 1 million a day for sure. [clears throat] So I'm guessing the Sensor Tower estimate is kind of lowballing it, but let's see. On the other hand, if you look at all of the charts uh by downloads, it's still the fourth most biggest game by downloads even when counting Roblox which again I wouldn't

even count because Garena Free Fire is is my bet is sitting here. And then we have DAU where again Garena Free Fire is sitting here on my 80 million as I said.
[laughter]
That's there.
[gasps]
Uh 33, I don't know why is there only 33. There's like 50. Like this is counting some kind of a I don't know what, maybe just some average or whatever. But uh yeah, stuff pretty much remains as the same block plus it's the fifth biggest game by DAU and by downloads it's now fourth because many arrows basically are here which are even bigger. But again, seems these numbers are a little bit of a hazy based on the overall numbers. Maybe it's not counting some of the regions or I have some Yeah, 19 countries regions, sorry. This was the problem. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, so 19 million and then on the AU

Yeah, here here's the right estimate. So yeah, it's basically the same. We are getting a FIFA that's even bigger, 105 million DAU. So still on the fifth spot. Let's see. Let's see how how it kind of comparison fares. But I still think it's worth like looking at how they will continue their evolution if they have hit the peak because again it's the biggest game basically by itself. Uh Brawl Stars seems to have also kind of put pedal to the metal. Uh Do I need to check it because it's something 64 million, really? Didn't they went down again? Oh, okay. They're doing their usual up and down thing. So I'm guessing yeah, this is what
[sighs and gasps]
This is Yeah, it's it's not US. US is basically even less than they were before. I mean, US DAU. So it's like

Yeah, Russia again, Brazil, so on and so forth. So Let's see. I guess we'll need the separate episode to like look and what happened with Brawl Stars and their like uh rise again because if you look at the revenue filter, yeah, they're definitely doing some things there, but it's not definitely that big moon spike that they had in 2024. It's what, like 50 million against 90. So, they're definitely doing good, but you see they're already going down. It seems they're already going down hard, so I don't know what's happening with their economy. But, uh yeah. It's definitely not that big of a thing as it was before. So, let's see. Anyway, uh that was Block Blast update. Hope you find it insightful. Don't sleep on this game. It's still one of the most important industry games uh that we have on the market and more to follow even like between monthly basis what they're doing with their creatives, their downloads, and the app itself. So, yeah. Uh we'll keep an eye on it.

See you next time. Ciao.