How Azur Games has topped 8B installs for its hypercasual and casual games

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When I hear how many games hypercasual games — the mobile games you can play in a minute or less — are downloaded in the world, I’m always astounded.

Companies like Voodoo, Say Games, Rollic and others have been saying they’re reaching billions of players for several years. Azur Games said that it has now reached eight billion installs for its games. How is that possible, given that there are 7.89 billion people on the planet?

Well, Statista reports there are actually 16.8 billion mobile phones in the world, and perhaps 6.9 billion in active use. I suppose a lot of us have more than one mobile phone. And Azur Games has more than 100 games available, many of them hypercasual titles, and those are very popular. It has midcore titles too.

From the start Azur Games was focused on midcore market and then saw opportunity in hypercasual games. But thanks to Apple’s focus on privacy over targeted ads and even Unity’s recent focus on charging per download, there are forces that are pushing Azur Games back to its roots — the company is moving into casual and midcore games once again, the latter being games that are hardcore in nature but played in short time cycles on mobile devices.

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I did a written interview with Dmitry Yaminsky, cofounder of Azur Games, to explore this topic more. Google itself has had more than 13 billion installs in the last five years. That’s because many people will re-install games and apps when they