Korea's Most Opened Game Last Month Was Not Really a Game
Number One Is Not One Game, It Is a Box Full of Them
MobileIndex GAME counted Android and iPhone users together across the month of August. Roblox 2.81 million, Block Blast 2.02 million, Pokemon GO 1.69 million, Brawl Stars 1.54 million, Royal Match 1.19 million, Minecraft 990,000. The report says up front that these are estimates rather than a head count, so the order and the gaps tell you more than the exact figures do.
The top spot is an odd one. Roblox is not a single game, it is an app where you pick from games other people built. You can play tag inside it, drop out and switch to an escape room. Getting bored of one thing in there never turns into a reason to delete the app.
Minecraft in sixth with 990,000 sits in similar territory. There is no fixed ending to walk toward, you decide what to build. Having both the first and the sixth slot taken by apps with no ending is a coincidence worth noticing.
Second Place Fits in One Sentence
Block Blast sits on the opposite side from Roblox. Drop the block pieces from the bottom of the screen onto a grid, and when a row or a column fills up it vanishes. That is the whole explanation. Someone opening it for the first time knows what they are doing within thirty seconds.
Royal Match in fifth with 1.19 million belongs to the same family. A round is short and quitting costs you nothing. That size fits the three minutes you spend waiting for a bus, so it gets opened several times a day, and in a ranking built on user counts that counts for a lot.
The Top Six Did Not Move All Month
The line that stands out in the report is that first through sixth are identical to last month. Not just the same names, the same order.
The numbers themselves moved in different directions. Roblox went from 2.54 million in July to 2.81 million, Block Blast from 1.89 million to 2.02 million. Pokemon GO, Brawl Stars and Minecraft all lost users compared with July and held their places anyway. The gaps up there are wide enough that a few tens of thousands reshuffles nothing.
A frozen ranking does not mean August was quiet. The top six are already apps people open every day, so a few days of buzz around something new rarely reaches that high. In a chart like this the news always shows up further down.
The Movement Starts Around Tenth
The biggest climb in August belonged to a CookieRun raising game, up 71 places into tenth. Seventy-one places is not an ordinary jump on a chart like this, and it rose in the revenue ranking at the same time.
Three titles were new to the top 50, landing at 47th, 49th and 50th, right on the threshold. Whether those three hold on or get pushed out in next month's report is the most interesting thing about the August chart.
If you want to feel why a one-sentence rule does not get old, play one. In DoYouBox 2048, two matching numbers merge when they meet. That is the entire rule. Sudoku runs on nothing more than never repeating a number in a line. Hangul Anagrams has you gather scattered syllables into words, and the answers change every board, so there is nothing to memorise. All three run short, about the same length as the games at the top of that chart.