AppMagic, Tampa, FL (2026)

09/01/2026

Winning Creatives: A Framework for Ideation and Testing in Mobile UA 💡

Why does the creative you spent hours perfecting flop? While a throwaway lunch-break concept becomes a UA superstar.

To help you hit the bullseye with your creatives, we teamed up with Ramiz Trtovac, Head of UA at GameBiz Consulting, to create a step-by-step guide 🤩

Inside, we cover:
— How to organise your ideation process and balance safe and experimental concepts
— Where good ideas actually come from
— How to set up an effective creative testing loop

The guide is already available via the link — don’t forget to save it for your future projects: https://appmagic.rocks/blog/mobile-ua-creative-framework?utm_source=AMFacebook

08/27/2026

Top Freindslops Breakdown 🤌

Friendslop games aren’t slowing down on their hype wave, so to help you ride it, we teamed up with our good friend Anton Slashcev to create a breakdown of the top 8 friendslop games on Steam.

There you will discover:
🔄 Game flow breakdown
🖥️ UI windows
⚙️ Gameplay, core loop and features
🤝 Onboarding and friends invite
📊 Metrics, sales, wishlists

The full analysis is already available via the link: https://go.sensortower.com/AppMagic-Friendslop-Steam-Games-Breakdown.html?utm_source=AMFacebook

08/25/2026

AppMagic New Feature Alert: A*O Plus Is Now Available 🥳

How much of your app’s growth relies on organic search? We know you’re looking for a synonym for “a lot” 😉

To make sure a great app you’ve worked nights on gets easily found by your audience and help you outmaneuver your competitors, we launched A*O Plus, powered by the data engine and interface behind Sensor Tower’s enterprise A*O product.

A*O Plus allows you to:
🔎 Find the right keywords. Discover opportunities and track what your competitors rank for.
📈 Connect A*O changes to app growth. Link metadata and store listing changes with download trends.
💡Understand what users think. See what users love and hate without reading thousands of reviews manually.
⭐️ Learn what drives your rating. See why it changed, which version drove the change, and which countries are affected.

Learn more about A*O Plus and how it can help you improve your app’s visibility: https://appmagic.rocks/tool-descriptions/aso-plus-keywords?tm_source=AMFacebook

08/20/2026

The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan Sparks Interest in Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Driving Daily Revenue to $220K 🤯

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey hit cinemas in mid-July and left its mark not only on the director’s fans, but also on Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, sending the game’s daily revenue soaring to $220K on Steam. It’s a a whopping 22x increase compared to $10k on the same date in 2025 🤌

Ubisoft also timed a sales period with the movie’s release, offering up to 80% off the game starting August 3 and warming up interest with related social media posts, amplifying the effect even further.

The last time Assassin’s Creed Odyssey saw comparable revenue was in January 2025, when discounts of up to 85% may have been used most likely to re-engage players with the franchise ahead of the March 2025 release of Assassin’s Creed Shadows.

Another interesting detail is the regional split of the 2026 spike. As expected, the US accounted for the largest share at 23%. But Australia stood out, contributing 6% of revenue, despite historically not being one of the game’s top markets.

This could be linked to The Odyssey’s strong performance in Australia. The movie had the third-biggest opening weekend for a Universal release in the country, potentially giving the game an additional boost there 💪

This is a great example of how events outside the gaming market can create unexpected opportunities for game developers. The key is to spot these moments early and move quickly with discounts, promotions, or other campaigns to capture the additional demand.

Learn more about Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s metrics on its AppMagic Public Page: https://appmagic.rocks/steam/812140?country=US?utm_source=AMFacebook

08/19/2026

Smash Fest: From LiveOps Minigame to Chart-Smashing Puzzle Trend 🚨

The Hybridcasual Puzzle market keeps coming up with new trends. We’re still not over Arrows, and now we have Smash 🤌

In July 2026, Flow Game’s Smash Fest! rapidly climbed the charts, reaching #10 in Top Grossing and #4 in Top Free. As of today, the game has generated $4M in lifetime IAP revenue and reached 16M installs.

With Advanced Search, we’ve already spotted 50 new games with “Smash” in their titles, launched after Smash Fest started climbing the charts in June. What is more, big players like Moon Active and Azur Games are already testing the mechanic in Splash Kingdom: Tower Blast and Hit Fest: Cannon Smash.

But guess what? The trend apparently came from Casual LiveOps! 👀

That’s exactly what we break down in our recent article, including:
— Which offers are driving Smash Fest!’s success
— How Royal Smash builds on the game’s core
— How Casual games are leveraging the trend through misleading ads

Don’t wait another moment, dive right in: https://appmagic.rocks/blog/smash-fest-hybridcasual-trend?utm_source=AMFacebook

08/18/2026

Last Asylum: Plague Reached a New Weekly Revenue High of $3.8M 🚀

After plateauing for several months, Last Asylum: Plague returned to growth at the end of June 2026, reaching a new weekly IAP revenue high of $3.8M last week August 10-16, 2026.

This helped the game climb to 6th place in the Midcore 4X Strategy market by IAP weekly revenue just five months after its release, overtaking Puzzle & Survival and Evony: The King’s Return, which generated $3.5M and $3.2M, respectively 🔥

The growth may be linked to the release of the game’s “Era of Revival” expansion in mid-July, which introduced new progression systems, content updates, and rewards.

Ahead of the content update, Last Asylum: Plague also ramped up its ad creative efforts, releasing some of the best-performing creatives in the game’s history. The game followed a trend we’ve recently spotted in leading Strategy titles like Whiteout Survival and Kingshot: opening with an AI-generated hook directly tied to the game’s plot before transitioning into other parts of the creative 💡

This approach helped boost weekly installs to 918K even before the content update was released — an 80% increase in just two weeks!

Learn more about trending mechanics in 4X Strategy games and other Midcore subgenres in our Midcore Insights 2026 report: https://appmagic.rocks/research/Midcore-Insights-Q2-2026?utm_source=AMLFacebook&utm_campaign=MidcoreQ226

08/12/2026

Sensor Tower Tracker: Your Best Way to Track GTA VI Sales in Real Time 🤩
Save it and watch the numbers grow as they happen!

The market is getting ready for the next chapter of the legendary Grand Theft Auto franchise, with GTA VI set to launch this November and pre-orders already open since June 25.

We know you’ve already set up your PS5 or Xbox, pre-ordered GTA VI, and maybe even got a Netflix subscription just to catch every new trailer. So, what’s left?

Monitoring the sales in real time with a free Tower gaming tracker, of course! We checked it today, and GTA VI has already generated $421M in revenue from 4.3M copies sold since pre-orders started 🔥

GTA V gives us a glimpse of what might be coming. The 2013 release saw 7M pre-orders, followed by 11M units sold globally on launch day and 16M in its first week.

If you also can’t wait for the release and want to see how quickly GTA VI can catch up with its predecessor, make sure to save Sensor Tower’s GTA VI Sales Tracker: https://sensortower.com/grand-theft-auto-VI/sales-tracker?_gl=1*12v302q*_up*MQ..*_ga*Mjg4ODA3ODcuMTc4NjUyNDk3Nw..*_ga_7P9W2ZETPG*czE3ODY1MjQ5NzckbzEkZzAkdDE3ODY1MjQ5NzckajYwJGwwJGgw

08/11/2026

Top 10 Steam Simulation Releases in 2025-2026

Looking at the ranking, we found that the most successful Steam Simulator releases from the past year fall into three main categories:

💰 Business Sims
🤝 Co-op Sims
🫧 Clean up Sims

Business Sims continue to build on the familiar buy, sell, and restock formula. Supermarket Simulator generated over $46M in revenue from 3.4M copies sold at a $19.99 base price.

Meanwhile, Retro Rewind: Video Store Simulator added a dose of ’80s nostalgia, earning $8M+ from 480K+ copies at a $19.90 base price.

For Co-op Sims, the business concept mattered less than the fun of playing together with friends. And that’s exactly where most of the “friendslop” hits fit in 🤪

Schedule | quickly climbed the rankings with the w**d empire business offering players familiar tasks and adding chaotic fun from the co-op layer. Altogether, resulting in $190M revenue and 10M copies sold all at a $19.99 base price.

Roadside Research looks like a typical Business Sim where you run a gas station, except the employees happen to be aliens secretly studying humans. The concept landed, earning over $8M in revenue and 788M copies at a base price of $12.99 👽

What about Clean up Sims? Find out in our latest article where we breakdown new Steam Simulation releases: https://appmagic.rocks/blog/steam-simulation-games-2026?utm_source=AMFacebook&utm_campaign=Simulators2026

08/10/2026

Let’s meet at Gamescom in 2 weeks 🇩🇪

Our Head of SMB Sales, Kirill Vaganov, is getting ready to dive into all the hottest mobile gaming trends in Cologne on August 26–30.

Kirill is not only a mobile gaming expert but also a true beer connoisseur. So, you know who to stick with 😉

08/06/2026

Top 10 Hybridcasual Puzzles in H1 2026

In H1 2026, the Hybridcasual Puzzle market was dominated by three key genres: Sort, Screw, and Block 💪

The chart leader was Pixel Flow, which generated 23% of total Hybridcasual Puzzle revenue and 30% of Sort Puzzle revenue despite launching only in August 2025. The top also includes three more Sort titles: Yarn Loop, Marble Sort!, and Knit Out, all three, however, more than 2x behind Pixel in terms of monthly IAP revenue.

The second-largest title in H1 2026 was Screwdom, accounting for 10% of Hybridcasual Puzzle revenue and 40% of Screw Puzzle revenue. The game maintains a steady IAP revenue level, followed by two other Screw titles in the top 10 — Happy Screw Trip 3D and Yarn Fever! — though both remain more than 3x behind Screwdom.

The third top-grossing title was Color Block Jam, which contributed 9% of Hybridcasual Puzzle revenue and 30% of Block Puzzle revenue. Its monthly revenue has also stabilized, with other leading Block Puzzles — Gecko Out and Hexa Away — still trailing by more than 3x.

Learn more about the Puzzle market and its growing Hybridcasual subgenres in our Casual Games Report H1 2026: https://appmagic.rocks/research/casual-report-H12026?utm_source=AMFacebook

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