Block Blast! tops world downloads 2024-25 on Hungry Studio's no-IAP bet

An ad-monetized casual puzzle game: players drag Tetris-like blocks onto an 8x8 board and clear rows and columns with no falling pressure; modes are endless Classic and a 96-level Adventure, and the game sells no in-app purchases at all.

A block puzzle stripped to a drag-and-place toy, monetized purely by ads and refined by thousands of A/B tests, could beat hybrid IAA and become a global evergreen.

Lei Jun personally invested about ¥90,000 for 5.8% of Beijing Jiayou in 2020 and exited in 2023, before the breakout.

Founder Liu Xuezheng, a core member of Chinese web-game portal 7k7k, built Beijing Jiayou in 2018 around H5 mini-games. In 2021 the team created the Hungry Studio brand for global casual development, and in 2022 it launched Block Blast! — a deliberately simple block puzzle aimed at every device, language and age.

The studio ran the game like a lab: more than 3,000 A/B experiments (about 50 a week) plus an AI bot that mimics player behavior, all anchored to retention. Growth leaned heavily on paid UA — DataEye put Block Blast! first among overseas-bound Chinese games for ad-creative volume in H1 2024 — yet monetization stayed pure IAA, with 2024 daily ad revenue reported at $584K. Downloads went from 138M in 2023 to 216M in 2024, hit a record 35M+ in December 2024 alone, and reached 368M in 2025; by end-2025 the game claimed 300M+ MAU and 70M DAU. On 2026-02-26 Bloomberg reported that Tencent was in talks to buy a minority stake after months of closed-door negotiation.

Still scaling in 2026. Chinese media reported that Tencent planned to invest a minority stake in Hungry Studio (analyst valuation estimates above ¥10B), a capstone for a company that went from a small H5 workshop to about 1,000 staff and a 6,000-sqm Beijing headquarters by end-2025.

Liu Xuezheng came out of 7k7k, where the craft was squeezing fun out of tiny Flash games — the same discipline carried over to a deceptively simple mobile block puzzle.

Block Blast! removed Tetris's pressure — no gravity, no timer — and cleared in both directions, turning a stress game into a zen toy anyone can start in seconds.

Hungry Studio ran the game as a lab: 3,000+ A/B experiments and an AI bot that mimics player behavior, with retention as the only north-star metric.

The studio rejected hybrid monetization, keeping the game ads-only with restrained formats; that restraint kept retention high enough for IAA revenue to compound to $584K a day by 2024.

Tencent's reported minority-stake talks (Feb-Mar 2026) turned a 'boring' Chinese casual studio into proof that simple, global, ads-only games are assets giants will pay for.

Simplicity is a strategy, not an absence of features: a frictionless, ads-only puzzle won two straight years of global download races by making retention the only KPI and buying scale with ads.

As of 2026-03-03, Block Blast! is still running and scaling. Chinese gaming media reported that Tencent was negotiating to buy a minority stake in Hungry Studio after months of closed-door talks first reported by Bloomberg on 2026-02-26; no final deal had been announced by the asOf date. The company had grown to roughly 1,000 staff, moved into a 6,000-square-meter Beijing Chaoyang office, and launched follow-ups including Sudoku Master! and Mahjong Blast! in 2025, while analysts estimated Hungry Studio's valuation above ¥10 billion.