How Did a Standalone Puzzle Game Top the Global Download Charts? Decoding the Winning Formula of the Hit Game

The mobile gaming market is diverse and complex, but hyper-casual games stand out with their pure and simple gameplay experience. These games, with their universal appeal and addictive mechanics, have successfully attracted hundreds of millions of users worldwide, emerging as a significant force in the mobile gaming industry.

This phenomenal standalone puzzle game is a prime example of success. By stripping away complex mechanics and intricate designs, it distinguished itself with a back-to-basics core gameplay loop, winning the hearts of players globally and securing a top spot on casual game charts.

1. Product Introduction

In November 2024, the game’s DAU (Daily Active Users) surpassed 40 million, while its MAU (Monthly Active Users) reached 150 million. By March, downloads surged by 34%, exceeding 100 million and claiming the top position on the global mobile game download charts.

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Over a 365-day promotional period, the game accumulated 37,479 creative ad sets and deployed over 131,920 ad campaigns, generating massive market visibility.

For ad creatives, the game primarily used vertical videos (90.7%), with a core strategy focused on showcasing gameplay. The ads leveraged the classic "near-failure to instant success" design to trigger a sense of satisfaction, incorporating elements like color-changing blocks and irregular puzzles to diversify the experience. Additionally, some ads featured real players, while others innovatively blended short dramas with puzzle mechanics on platforms like TikTok to enhance engagement.

Image source：AppGrowing

In terms of channels, the game adopted a diversified approach. Beyond Meta and Google Ads, it strategically partnered with global ad platforms such as Mintegral, Unity Ads, AppLovin, and Flat Ads to build a comprehensive user acquisition network. Geographically, it pursued a "dual-engine" globalization strategy, targeting both mature markets (e.g., the U.S., Germany) and high-potential emerging markets (e.g., the Philippines, Turkey), ensuring balanced coverage across regions.

Image source：AppGrowing

Amid rising global user acquisition costs, the game faced challenges in ad optimization. To further expand its market presence and brand influence, its current focus is on acquiring highly engaged and retained core users while refining ad monetization efficiency to maximize both user scale and revenue. However, obstacles such as increasing acquisition costs, slowing download growth, and suboptimal ROAS persisted. To address these issues, Flat Ads designed a tailored, multi-dimensional

2. Flat Ads: Global Marketing Engine

Optimizing User Acquisition Costs

In an era of diminishing traffic dividend, game developers must establish precise traffic funnels to maximize the value of every marketing dollar, avoid ineffective ad placements, and minimize trial-and-error costs.

For bidding, Flat Ads leverages real-time data analytics to implement a tiered bidding strategy, securing high-value users while activating intelligent price-reduction mechanisms for low-quality channels. Additionally, we increase ad placements during low-competition periods to reduce bidding costs, achieving an overall 22% reduction in CAC.

At the same time, Flat Ads utilizes big data to analyze user historical data, building a comprehensive user segmentation model. By deeply tracking key user behavior paths, we deliver ads to the most relevant audiences, significantly enhancing ad effectiveness and enabling precise customer acquisition. Furthermore, drawing on extensive experience in advertising for similar games, Flat Ads mines historical data on high-performing channels and combines it with the game’s unique features and target user profiles to optimize channel portfolios. This approach drastically reduces the time and testing costs traditionally required to identify target users and high-quality channels, resulting in a 35% improvement in acquisition efficiency.

Dual-Optimization Strategy Drives Daily Installs

Flat Ads has a strong presence in both mature and emerging markets globally like the U.S., Canada, and Germany, as well as high-growth areas such as Turkey, Indonesia, and Brazil. Tailored to regional characteristics, our team has developed a library of 200+ high-conversion creatives. Using Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) technology, we intelligently combine creative elements, with core gameplay showcases (45%) directly boosting conversion rates, situational short dramas (30%) effectively increasing user dwell time, and special effects-driven creatives (25%) significantly improving click-through rates. This intelligent creative system has helped increase the game’s average daily downloads by 37%, consistently breaking through user acquisition bottlenecks.

In channel expansion, Flat Ads leverages an exclusive developer traffic ecosystem covering 200+ countries and 700 million+ users, enabling the hit game to reach hundreds of millions of devices daily and efficiently engage global users. Additionally, our multi-dimensional data model rapidly identifies high-quality traffic, while a dynamic budget allocation mechanism concentrates 80% of the budget on high-ROI traffic. This combined approach has driven daily impressions to exceed 120 million, with premium channels consistently contributing over 65% of total downloads.

Powered by the dual engines of "intelligent creatives + precision channels," the game achieved 30 consecutive days of growth in daily new downloads, peaking at over 30,000 downloads in a single day. This success has established a sustainable global growth model.

Precision Operation Continuously Boosts ROAS

As a leading advertising platform, Flat Ads has a deep focus on the casual gaming sector, operating hundreds of hit H5 mini-games that rank at the top of various casual game charts. These premium traffic pools cover diverse gamer demographics, with daily active users exceeding tens of millions, providing the game with vast high-quality user base and a golden acquisition scenario combining scale and precision.

Within the ad delivery chain, Flat Ads has established an intelligent A/B testing framework to continuously evaluate creatives and channel combinations, as well as their synergy with ad placements. Additionally, by testing time slots, we identify the most effective windows in each region, relentlessly pursuing the optimal solution for high-efficiency conversions.

Backed by our premium traffic and continuously optimized testing system, Flat Ads has built an end-to-end chain from user acquisition to conversion, achieving a 30%-40% increase in D1 & D7 ROAS.

3. Outstanding Results

Core Market ROAS Anchored to Industry Benchmarks

In mature markets, 30-day ROAS grew from 10% on Day 1 to 120%, a 12-fold increase. Emerging markets also performed exceptionally well, rising from 8% on Day 1 to 105%, a 13-fold growth. The game achieved steady revenue growth across all markets.

Daily Installs Breakthrough Across All Regions

Core markets maintained stable dominance, with daily scale reaching 1,800–2,200. Russia sustained a high range of 1,500–2,000, demonstrating the strong user stickiness and stable monetization capabilities of mature markets.

Emerging markets exhibited explosive growth. Southeast Asia stood out, with Indonesia reaching a daily scale of 15,000–17,000. LatinAmerica also showed strong momentum, with Brazil and Mexico both exceeding 1,000 daily, reflecting robust growth potential and significant commercial promise.

As a globally leading intelligent marketing platform, Flat Ads remains committed to advancing performance marketing through precision delivery technologies and global channel resources. We provide global enterprises with more efficient and intelligent digital marketing solutions. Through continuously optimized algorithm models and localized operational strategies, we empower partners to reach target users and maximize overseas market expansion. Moving forward, Flat Ads looks forward to collaborating with more outstanding companies to explore new global opportunities and achieve sustained brand value growth.