Mobile Games Market Review: A ‘Wicked’ Good Look at What’s Trending in Mobile Gaming
GameRefinery, a Liftoff company, has unveiled its latest monthly report on the mobile games market. Backed by the latest data and expert insights from GameRefinery’s analysts, the report highlights all the new releases, performance-boosting live events, and notable game updates that shaped November 2025.
Here’s what GameRefinery found:
- Popular hidden-object mobile game June’s Journey launched “Wicked Mystery,” a multi-month event tied to the global release of the major Disney film Wicked: For Good. This large-scale collaboration saw the entire game receive a complete thematic makeover, including reskinned interfaces, an updated soundtrack with movie music, and existing challenges transformed into Wicked-themed events and collectable albums. Although the game’s developer, Wooga, invested considerable effort into this prolonged seasonal campaign, critics noted that the experience primarily offered cosmetic changes without introducing new gameplay mechanics.
- Capitalizing on the enduring cultural relevance of SpongeBob SquarePants, especially with The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants, releasing this month, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang launched its Undersea Restaurant event. This unique collaboration is a restaurant-management minigame where players cook and serve customers, completely shifting the core gameplay of the MOBA to align with familiar SpongeBob characters, dishes, and visuals. Players are motivated to upgrade the restaurant and hit milestones to collect special collaboration rewards and cosmetic bonuses.
- MapleStory: Idle RPG, an Idle RPG and MMORPG hybrid, has become the latest RPG success story in the US, after it was released on November 5th. The game quickly entered the top 50 of the top-grossing chart and successfully leverages the nostalgic appeal of the original MapleStory IP, automating core grinding to allow players to focus on manual control during key moments like boss battles and on social activities like the world chat.
- Solitaire Associations Journey launched in September 2025 and quickly became a major hit by successfully combining the classic mechanics of solitaire with word puzzles, which drove it to the #1 download rank that month. Despite its simple design that lacks complex long-term engagement features, relying instead on ads and basic in-app purchases, this novel blend of familiar gameplay pushed the title to a peak of #93 on the top-grossing chart.
- Merge-2 remains a very popular game type in the casual market, thanks to big hits like Gossip Harbor and Seaside Escape. However, this gameplay is now popping up outside its usual titles. App developers are adding Merge-2 as a side activity in casual games like Coin Master and Royal Match to keep players interested longer and offer new ways to advance, despite having completely different core gameplay loops.
To see the full breakdown of the mobile games market during November 2025, visit the GameRefinery website via the link below: https://www.gamerefinery.com/mobile-game-market-review-november-2025/
About GameRefinery, a Liftoff Company
GameRefinery, a Liftoff Company, is the leading provider of feature-level data in the mobile games market, with an ever-growing database covering hundreds of thousands of games. GameRefinery’s customers include leading mobile games companies such as Zynga, Wargaming, King, and FunPlus. The GameRefinery platform uses unique algorithms and a team of expert analysts to help developers, investors, and publishers delve into the very building blocks of mobile games to uncover the drivers behind success, understand why games are successful, and how to achieve success from pre-production to LiveOps.
