How Rollic Dominated Hybrid Casual in 2025: Strategy, Hits & Growth

In 2025, it was nearly impossible to discuss the mobile games industry without mentioning hybrid casual games. And within that space, Color Block Jam emerged as the defining case study, demonstrating how simple, accessible mechanics and thoughtful level design combined with effective monetization layers, can evolve into massive revenue engines.

Originally developed by Gybe Games, Color Block Jam first launched in June 2024 before being transferred to Rollic Games in November 2024. Under Rollic’s publishing expertise, the game reached iconic status within the hybrid casual segment. Designers studied its systems, developers drew inspirations from its structure, and the broader industry frequently referenced it as a benchmark for hybrid success. Alongside the success of Color Block Jam, Rollic further cemented its position as a major force in the hybrid casual space.

Founded in December 2018, Rollic initially built its reputation during the hypercasual boom with hit games such as Hair Challenge, Tangle Master 3D, High Heels, and Fill the Fridge. This rapid growth of the publisher attracted investor interest early on, ultimately leading to its acquisition by Zynga in 2020. Even as hypercasual success began to fade in 2022, the company successfully transitioned into hybrid casual publishing, producing hits like Screw Jam, Twisted Tangle, Seat Away and Crowd Express within 2023 and 2024.

As shown in the data above, Rollic achieved more than 2x YoY revenue growth between 2024 and 2025, despite download growth remaining below 1.5x.

This disparity strongly suggests a strategic shift towards:

• Higher LTV game designs
• Deeper hybrid monetization systems

Transitioning from hypercasual to hybrid casual requires building stronger core loops, deeper progression systems, and sustainable live operations pipelines. Rollic has supported this transition by investing heavily in its partner studios, helping them develop specialized expertise within targeted genres. Although many of these studios are geographically concentrated in Turkey, this focused studio development strategy, combined with its gamer-first mindset, has proven highly effective in strengthening Rollic’s hybrid casual portfolio.

Rollic has conducted 21 soft launches in 2025, highlighting both aggressive experimentation and genre diversification.

When looking at these launches, we can draw following conclusions.

When looked at this year’s launches, its clear that puzzles remain Rollic’s top priority, with 13 out of 21 launches falling into the hybrid puzzle category. Among these, four titles managed to achieve significant success in 2025.

When we look at these successful titles, it’s clear that they all follow the same blueprint established by the Color Block Jam, including deterministic puzzle level design, minimal meta layers, and carefully balanced progression curves.

While the rest of Rollic’s hybrid puzzle releases in 2025 also followed this blueprint, results have been mixed. Among the nine remaining titles, People Flow, Sort Factory, and Ring Clash are still undergoing iteration in 2026, while Slither Blast continued development until December 2025. A notable observation among these experiments is that two of these titles incorporate conveyor belt mechanics.

Conveyor-belt-based puzzles have seen significant growth in successful releases since Q4 2025, yet Rollic has not managed to place one of its entries in the top charts, presenting a potential opportunity moving forward. Additionally, with Slither Blast, Rollic is experimenting with the Sort Shooter sub-genre, following the success of This is Blast (By Voodoo), while combining it with the Gecko Out core loop.

Among Rollic’s remaining puzzle experiments, most have either been transferred back to their original developers or discontinued. One notable exception was Sky Rush, a Color Block Jam-inspired variant that generated over $1.8M in total IAP revenue, peaking above $500K in monthly IAP revenue between March and May 2025. Other titles, including Fridge Sort, Blasty Stacks, and Marble Puller, failed to achieve similar traction.

Overall, Rollic’s continued investment in puzzle titles reflects the genre’s dominant position within the mobile market.

Runner games were a cornerstone of the hypercasual era. As the industry evolved, many publishers abandoned the genre due to rising CPIs and increased competition from 4X strategy creatives. Rollic, however, continued iterating on runner mechanics, gradually transforming them into hybrid casual successes.

After Timeline Up (released in 2024) became Rollic’s defining hybrid runner blueprint, they continued building on its success by soft-launching four additional hybrid runners in 2025.

One noticeable trend here is that two of these games, Age Breakers and Champion’s Journey, lean heavily into RPG-style progression through strategic skill selection and deck-building mechanics. When analyzing the top IAP purchases in Timeline Up and Age Breakers, it becomes evident that energy system–related purchases dominate spending. These RPG-style progression systems may therefore represent Rollic’s attempt to diversify monetization and potentially drive long-term player spending beyond energy-based mechanics.

When looking at the runners released since 2023, Rollic has secured seven positions within the top 10 grossing chart with titles including Timeline Up, Weapon Craft Run, Age Breakers, Revolver Rush, Rapid Reload, Pressure Washing Run, and Sword Melter. Even though not all of these titles are fully hybrid runners, their cumulative learnings have allowed Rollic to consistently produce successful entries in a genre where many competitors have struggled to remain relevant.

Idle arcade games typically feature a playable character with automatic resource gathering, allowing players to build, manage, and upgrade virtual worlds or businesses. The genre recorded 3.87% year-over-year growth in IAP revenue and 0.95% year-over-year growth in downloads compared to 2024. Rollic soft-launched two idle arcade titles in 2025.

Notably, both of these idle arcade titles move away from commonly used themes such as farming, cooking, and mining. Instead, they explore more unconventional concepts, such as wood chipping and rock pushing, prioritizing presentation newness over familiar gameplay themes.

Since both titles were originally released in 2024, looking at the top-grossing idle arcade games launched between January 2024 and December 2025 provides better context. Within this timeframe, Carve Quest ranks 5th among recent idle arcade releases, just behind Rollic’s highest-grossing idle arcade title, Octopus Feast, and holds 20th place among all-time idle arcade releases.

Rollic’s CEO, Burak Vardal has publicly stated that they are observing genres where Chinese mobile publishers excel, particularly Action RPG and 4X strategy. This direction is further reinforced by several job postings Rollic has made for product specialists and developers focused on Action RPGs.

Looking at Rollic’s past efforts in the Action RPG genre, its first attempt came in 2022 with the release of Blob Hero. The game scaled to over 10M downloads and $1M in IAP revenue by 2025 and still stands as Rollic’s best-performing RPG to date. Rollic later released Nob Hero, another Action RPG, in 2022, and Squad Draw, a strategy game, in 2024, but both failed to scale well. In 2025, Rollic soft-launched Magic.io on Android after initially soft-launching it on iOS in 2024. However, the game struggled to achieve meaningful scale, remaining at approximately $70K in IAP revenue with around 70K downloads, and appears to have been abandoned, with its last update released in May 2025.

Also in 2025, Rollic expanded its RPG efforts for the first time by soft-launching an idle RPG, Lucky Adventure. It blends mechanics inspired by Monopoly Go and Capybara Go, but has so far failed to make a significant market impact, as it has struggled to find the right balance between these combined systems to appeal to its target audience. However, the game is still undergoing iteration, leaving room for potential improvement.

In this game, the player character progresses through a Monopoly-like board, battling different enemies, gaining new skills, and upgrading abilities to ultimately defeat a boss and advance to the next arena. A unique aspect of the design is that the game starts with many empty cells on the board, requiring players to use a build system that provides strategic cards to populate the board and level up. Most of the hero’s progression occurs through various mini-games encountered during expeditions, with replay elements designed to integrate them closely into the core gameplay loop. Some mini-games focus on collecting tokens used in other mini-games, while others allow players to spend those tokens to upgrade the hero’s skills.

Rollic, however, is actively collaborating with multiple studios on other promising RPG genres, including tower defense and optimization puzzle RPG hybrids, with potential launches expected in 2026.

Cartel Warfare is a cover shooter developed by Gnarly Team, who previously released another successful cover shooter, Frontline Heroes: WW2 Warfare, and a stealth cover shooter, Agent Hunt, both published with Homa. This time, they attempt to combine Shoot Out-style hypercasual cover-shooter core gameplay with RPG-like progression. The game allows players to build an eight-slot deck, where they select weapons and skills through perks between mission waves. Each mission features a boss enemy and a countdown timer, requiring players to complete the mission within the time limit, resulting in a steeper difficulty curve compared to its apparent inspiration, Shoot Out.

The game was initially launched on iOS in July 2024 and was transferred to Rollic’s account in February 2025. However, it failed to capture a significant audience and now appears to be abandoned, as its last update was released in March 2025 and the development studio has since shifted its focus to hybrid battle RPG games.

Another significant development in 2025 was Rollic hosting its first-ever game jam, which took place on November 29–30. The event brought together 12 teams consisting of 52 participants, all working around the theme “Holes,” with the objective of building a three-level puzzle prototype. Initiatives like this highlight Rollic’s ongoing effort to discover new talent and experiment with fresh gameplay ideas at an early development stage.

Rollic’s 2025 strategy highlights how the publisher is actively evolving beyond its hypercasual origins and helped shape the broader landscape of Hybrid Casual in 2025. By doubling down on hybrid puzzle leaderships, reinventing legacy runner mechanics, and cautiously exploring RPG and shooter expansions, Rollic demonstrates a balanced mix of risk-taking and formula refinement. While not every experiment succeeds, Rollic’s rapid iteration cycle and strong studio partnerships continue to position it as one of the most influential publishers shaping the future of hybrid casual games.

🎯Data and market performance insights referenced in this article are based on AppMagic analytics.