Merge games haven't overtaken match-3. Not in money, anyway. Match-3 still brings in more than half of all mobile puzzle revenue, and Royal Match and Candy Crush Saga are still the two games everyone else is chasing. But on almost every measure of momentum, merge is the one moving. It was the fastest-growing puzzle subgenre of 2025, its share of puzzle revenue jumped from 14% to 20% in a single year, and it has been pulling players away from match-3 while match-3's own downloads slid.
Full disclosure: we make a merge game, so we're hardly neutral. That's why this piece leans on the numbers more than our opinions.
First, what counts as a merge game?
"Merge" covers three fairly different kinds of game, and most articles blur them together.
The first, and by far the biggest earner, is what the industry calls Merge-2 with a complex metagame. You combine two identical items on a board to make a better one, and those items feed a larger goal like renovating a house or following a soap-opera storyline. Gossip Harbor, Travel Town and Merge Mansion all live here.
The second is number merging, the family that started with 2048 and continues through games like 2248.
The third is physics drop-merge, the Suika Game style, where you drop objects into a container and matching pairs fuse when they touch. It's the smallest of the three commercially, and it's the one we build.
When market reports talk about merge revenue, they almost always mean the first group.
What the numbers actually show
According to AppMagic's 2025 casual games report, mobile puzzle games earned more than $8.2 billion last year, and puzzle was the only one of the three biggest casual genres to grow.
Inside that, the split is lopsided. Match-3 still accounts for over half of puzzle revenue. Merge sits at about 20%, with its leading segment making roughly $1.4 billion in 2025, up about 80% on the year before.
Match-3's growth, though, has come almost entirely from its two giants. In the first half of 2025, its downloads fell 17% year over year. And of the 367 new match-3 games launched in 2025, only four ever reached $100,000 in a single month. That's a tiny bar in a genre this size.
So you have a very large, very mature market that has become hard to enter, sitting next to a smaller one where the growth and the new players are.
Why merge grew
A few things lined up at once.
The mechanic got simpler. Early hits like Merge Dragons asked you to combine three matching items. When the genre shifted to pairs, the loop got quicker and more satisfying, and analysts at Gamigion single out that change as the point where merge began taking share from match-3.
The stories got better. Merge-2 games wrap the board in renovation projects, characters and ongoing plots, so players come back to see what happens next as much as for the puzzle itself. The audience skews adult, roughly 35 to 64, and AppMagic found merge was partly drawing that audience straight from match-3.
The frustration eased off. A match-3 level is pass or fail with a fixed number of moves, and most of us have been stuck on one level for a week. A merge board rarely hard-stops you. You tinker, you plan, you come back later.
And match-3 got expensive. Dream Games alone takes more than 30% of all match-3 revenue with just two titles. For a new studio, merge was simply the open door.
The quiet part
The shift showed up inside match-3 games well before it showed up anywhere in the charts.
Homescapes and Township, two of the biggest casual games around, added merge events where players combine items to earn rewards. When the incumbents start borrowing your core mechanic, the change is already well underway, even if the revenue tables haven't caught up.
Where physics merge fits
Suika Game opened up a third path when it went viral in 2023. No story, no renovation, no energy timers, just fruit falling into a box. It spread through streamers and VTubers and passed ten million downloads, which taught a lot of players the word "merge" who had never touched a Merge-2 game.
Commercially it's a different business. Physics merge games tend to be smaller and simpler, and many earn from ads more than from in-game spending. That's the lane Fruit Fall: Match Puzzle Game sits in. We aren't what's moving the revenue charts, and we'd rather say so plainly.
Will merge actually pass match-3?
Not soon on revenue. The gap is still more than two to one, and match-3's top titles keep growing.
What looks more likely is blurring. More match-3 games with merge metas, more merge games with match-3 levels, and plenty of hybrids in between.
There's a warning sign too. Gossip Harbor alone now takes about a third of Merge-2 revenue, and the top ten titles hold close to 80%. In a few years, merge may look a lot like match-3 does today: dominated by a handful of giants and hard for anyone new to break into.
Quick answers
Have merge games overtaken match-3? No, not in revenue. Merge is growing much faster, but match-3 still earns more than twice as much.
What's the difference between merge and match-3? In match-3 you swap tiles to line up three or more of a kind, which then disappear. In a merge game you combine identical items into a new, bigger item that stays on the board.
What's the biggest merge game right now? By revenue, Gossip Harbor from Microfun, which takes about a third of Merge-2 earnings on its own.
Is Suika Game a merge game? Yes. It's a physics-based drop-merge game, a different branch from the board-based Merge-2 titles that lead on revenue.
If you'd like to try the physics side of the genre, Fruit Fall: Match Puzzle Game is free on iPhone and iPad. Download on the App Store
Sources: AppMagic Casual Games Reports (H1 2025 and full-year 2025), Gamigion, Udonis, Breaking The Lines.