Meowdoku Passes 57 Million Downloads as Puzzle Games Surge

A cat-themed puzzle game called Meowdoku passed 57.8 million downloads by October 30, Sensor Tower estimates, almost entirely on advertising revenue. [How Meowdoku finds the ads that carry 58 million downloads — Sett]

The game, a Sudoku-Minesweeper hybrid with one cat per row, column and color region, averaged 5.7 million daily players over its last measured month. It sat second on the US download chart on November 1, with about $32,000 in in-app purchases since launch. [How Meowdoku finds the ads that carry 58 million downloads — Sett]

October was its biggest month yet: 15.9 million downloads by the 30th. The game carries a 4.8-star rating from about 395,000 App Store reviews. Its maker sells almost nothing inside the game; the business is the ads shown between boards, bought through thousands of tested video creatives. [How Meowdoku finds the ads that carry 58 million downloads — Sett]

Meowdoku isn't an outlier, it's the chart. Puzzle games took eight of the top 15 download slots in October and 51% of the top 15's installs. Roblox led all games with 22.4 million downloads, Free Fire MAX followed with 21.4 million, and puzzle title Block Blast! took third with 17.9 million. [Review of revenue and download charts: games and a genre to track in November — Naavik digest via Medium]

The money chart looks nothing like it. Honor of Kings was October's top earner at $104.4 million, the only game above $100 million. Meowdoku's lifetime in-app revenue would cover about three hours of that. Downloads measure attention; in mobile's biggest genre, attention is sold to advertisers, not to players. [Review of revenue and download charts: games and a genre to track in November — Naavik digest via Medium]