A mini-game played by 300 million people has been invested in by Tencent.
In the global gaming market dominated by AAA blockbusters, hardcore esports, and immersive metaverses, a Beijing-based company that has been extremely low-key and almost "invisible" in the mainstream media's view is subverting the perception of capital in a seemingly "old-fashioned" way.
Recently, according to Bloomberg and several authoritative industry media, Internet giant Tencent is planning to acquire a minority stake in Beijing Hungry Studio. The two parties have been in closed-door consultations for several months. What makes this deal so shocking is not only that Tencent, under its "evergreen game" strategy, has rarely set its sights on the pure casual game track, but also that Hungry Studio's flagship product, "Block Blast!", has grown into an astonishing behemoth.
The global mobile game report in 2025 shows that this "old game" launched in 2022 ranked second globally with an annual download volume of 368 million, only after "Roblox". Its annual download volume even exceeded the total of "Arena of Valor" international version, "PUBG Mobile", and "Genshin Impact". By the end of 2025, its global monthly active users exceeded 300 million, and the daily active users reached as high as 70 million.
While all major game companies are competing in technology, storytelling, and art design, Hungry Studio has proven that even in the simplest block elimination field, one can still build an enviable "mountain of gold" by accurately capturing people's fragmented time. Tencent's move to invest in Hungry Studio is not only a way to "collect" a super hit but also a landmark footnote for reevaluating the value of the global casual game track.
A game team that emerged from 7K7K,
Once invested by Lei Jun
Hungry Studio didn't emerge out of nowhere. Behind it stand the figures of China's first-generation game pioneers.
The predecessor of this company has a deep blood relationship with the 7k7k mini-game website, which once carried the childhood memories of countless people. Liu Xuezheng, the founder, was a core member of 7k7k. In the era of PC web games, he delved deeply into the field of casual games. Developers in that era were best at digging out the most fundamental addiction mechanisms of humans with limited computing power and simple interactions.
With the end of the Flash era and the full explosion of the mobile Internet, this team went through a painful transformation from H5 games to native apps.
In 2021, they officially established the overseas brand Hungry Studio, focusing on the R & D and distribution of global casual games. In the early days, Hungry Studio was more like a "dark horse in traffic" targeting the sinking market. It launched mini-games with strong online novel elements such as "The Schemes of the Legitimate Daughter" and "The Strongest King". Although it was not well-known among hardcore gamers, it developed strong advertising and traffic operation capabilities.
In the growth history of Hungry Studio, the figure of Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi, once flashed by.
In 2020, Lei Jun invested in Hungry Studio in his personal capacity, holding about 5.8% of the shares with a subscribed capital of about 90,000 RMB. However, it's a pity that Lei Jun chose to withdraw in 2023. At that time, the mobile game market was in an anxiety of becoming more complex and high-quality. A company that focuses on simple block elimination seemed to lack an "attractive" narrative space.
However, within just one year after Lei Jun's withdrawal, "Block Blast!" experienced exponential growth. If Lei Jun had held on until now, the book return rate of this investment, which was only a few thousand dollars at the beginning, would have increased hundreds or thousands of times. This dramatic "miss" proves from the side the suddenness and strong momentum of Hungry Studio's explosion - it didn't rely on capital but won through the "genetic match" of the product in the fragmented era.
The core logic of Hungry Studio's success lies in its adherence to "extreme simplicity" and the abandonment of commercial noise. In "Block Blast!", the team transformed the traditional Tetris into a drag-and-drop elimination game more suitable for mobile phone operation and boldly removed the falling pressure, turning it into a zero-threshold, Zen-like puzzle form.
This "anti-trend" design not only appeals to users in more than 200 countries and regions around the world but also shows extreme "restraint" in the business model. It doesn't sell skins, props, or passes and relies entirely on in-app advertising (IAA) for monetization. In 2024, the product's daily advertising revenue alone reached as high as $584,000, and the monthly profit easily exceeded 100 million RMB.
By the end of 2025, this company had transformed from a small workshop into a global matrix company with nearly a thousand employees, integrating R & D and operation. Its headquarters moved into a 6,000-square-meter top-grade venue in Cheng'ao Building, Chaoyang District, Beijing, which was once the former site of another overseas expansion giant, FunPlus. This change in physical space seems to be a metaphor: on the track of overseas game expansion, the era of "heavy cavalry" relying on high investment and high-quality graphics is facing challenges, while the "lightweight guerrillas" relying on high turnover and high DAU are taking over the battlefield.
This kind of "hidden master" success is inseparable from Hungry Studio's sensitivity to data. In its office area, the beating real-time data boards monitor the clicks and retention rates in every corner of the world. By 2026, its annual user retention rate still remained at an astonishing 50%. According to the current market's conventional price-earnings ratio for casual game manufacturers, some experts believe that the valuation of Hungry Studio will exceed 10 billion RMB.
They don't participate in the technology arms race of major game companies and don't compete in art precision. They only care about the trace amount of dopamine produced in users' brains when a block is eliminated. This precise targeting of human nature is the reason why a giant like Tencent can't sit still. For Tencent, technology can be bought, and art can be improved, but this kind of extreme simplicity that can penetrate cultural barriers and span all age groups is the rarest strategic asset.
The explosion of the casual mini-game track
For a long time, casual games have always been at the bottom of the gaming industry's contempt chain and are regarded as "leftovers" that can't reflect R & D strength.
However, with the peak of the global mobile Internet dividend and the soaring customer acquisition cost (CPI) of heavy games, casual games are quickly moving from the "cold palace" to the center of the stage with their extremely low new user acquisition threshold and massive user base.
The global game market size in 2025 is expected to reach $360.4 billion, and mobile games account for "half of the country". Among them, the weight of casual and hybrid casual game categories is significantly increasing. According to the prediction of authoritative industry data institutions, the global online game industry scale will further expand in 2026, and the Asia-Pacific region will still be the core engine of growth. However, the source of growth has shifted: from heavy online games relying on "big whales" (high-paying players) to ultra-casual and hybrid casual games relying on "small shrimps" (a large number of players who watch ads). Against this macro background, the casual game track is undergoing an unprecedented value reshaping.
A very representative case is the Turkish team Loom Games. Its casual puzzle mobile game "Pixel Flow" exceeded 200 million RMB in monthly revenue just four months after its launch in 2025. Immediately afterwards, Scopely, a distributor under the Saudi sovereign wealth fund PIF, acquired a majority stake in the company at a valuation of over $1 billion. From the product launch to the completion of the major acquisition, it took less than a year. This "lightning-fast deal" reflects the capital market's extreme hunger for casual products with high DAU and high retention.
Similarly, Miniclip, a subsidiary of Tencent, also acquired the casual game giant EasyBrain at a price of $1.2 billion at the end of 2024. These transactions worth billions of dollars mark that casual games have evolved from "small-scale operations" to key pieces in the global game of giants. What capital values is no longer the depth of single top-up but the width of user time (Time Spent). In today's increasingly fragmented attention era, whoever can lock in the few minutes of 300 million people around the world will master the most efficient digital asset transfer right.
The reason why "Block Blast!" can stand out in the fierce competition is not only due to the product's design but also its powerful traffic operation. Monitoring data shows that the product can place 50,000 ads within three months around 2025, and the annual ad placement volume exceeds 100,000. Its advertising materials cover very "down-to-earth" content such as online memes and KOL mini-theaters.
In the field of casual games, the efficiency of buying traffic is the lifeline. Compared with the heavy games' traffic acquisition cost of dozens or even hundreds of dollars per user, the single-user acquisition cost of casual games may only be a few cents. This means that as long as a high retention rate can be maintained like Hungry Studio, a high-margin business closed-loop can be established.
Industry analysis believes that the current extremely restrained pure IAA model of "Block Blast!" still has a huge "gold mine" to be explored. Once the mixed monetization model such as in-app purchases of props or skins is introduced in the future, its revenue potential will be limitless. This highly certain growth prospect is the core driving force for Tencent to "close the door and talk for several months".
This "great migration" of capital also reflects a certain fragile balance in the global game ecosystem. With the global inflation and the accelerating pace of life, players are spending less time on immersive heavy games and becoming more dependent on light games that can be played and stopped at any time and provide instant feedback.
This trend is particularly obvious in emerging markets such as Indonesia, Brazil, and India. In mature markets such as the United States and Japan, office workers under high pressure are also becoming the core supporters of products like "Block Blast!". It can be said that Hungry Studio has caught the global "emotional value" trend.
In this regard, casual games are no longer just for entertainment. They are more like a "pressure relief valve" in the digital age. The crazy influx of capital is essentially looking for a more resilient business model that can resist economic cycle fluctuations. When a AAA blockbuster may lead to the bankruptcy of the developer due to a cycle delay, the "fast-paced, low-risk, high-traffic" attributes of casual games have become the best haven for risk-averse funds.
Game giants turn into investors
Tencent's investment in Hungry Studio is another precise move in its "evergreen game" strategy. Although Tencent prefers to talk about cross-platform flagship projects in public, its layout in the global casual game track has been deeply rooted.
Since the acquisition of Miniclip in 2015, Tencent has used it as a carrier to start a crazy "collecting" mode overseas: from Sybo, the developer of "Subway Surfers", to "the king of mini-games" Voodoo, and then to EasyBrain, the number of casual game studios under Tencent has soared from the initial 2 to 17. Tencent's investment logic is clear and practical: it prefers products with a large DAU base, stable revenue scale, and extremely high long-term retention.
A super hit like "Block Blast!" with "tool attributes" can not only contribute stable cash flow to Tencent but also be the best tool for it to obtain underlying user data in the global market and build a defensive traffic moat. For Tencent, investing in Hungry Studio is like buying a "permanent pass" to the mobile terminals of hundreds of millions of users around the world.
However, in 2026, the appetites of Chinese game giants are no longer limited to "playing games". A notable trend is that game giants represented by Tencent, Mihoyo, 37 Interactive Entertainment, and Century Huatong are collectively "changing careers" to become deep-tech investors.
With the rise of cutting-edge technologies such as AI, chips, and brain-computer interfaces, game companies have found that instead of waiting passively for the revolution of hardware technology, it's better to get involved and become the behind-the-scenes promoter of the "arsenal". At the beginning of 2026, domestic GPU leader Biren Technology and Zhipu AI were listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange one after another, and the figures of game giants appeared behind them. Century Huatong benefited a lot from its strategic investment in Moore Threads at the end of 2025, while 37 Interactive Entertainment heavily invested in the brain-computer interface company BrainCo at the beginning of 2026, trying to explore the commercialization path of brain-computer technology in the cultural and entertainment and health fields. This ambition "beyond games" marks that the Chinese game industry is reverse-infiltrating from the application end to the technology base.
This change in investment logic reflects the deep fear of game giants towards "computing power anxiety" and "technology bottlenecks".
After Mihoyo invested in MiniMax in 2022, it quickly applied its large model technology to NPC dialogue generation, achieving a closed-loop from investor to downstream customer. For these giants, games are the key to opening the door to the future, while AI and hardware are the infrastructure to keep the door open. In the future, market share will no longer depend only on who has the more fun games but on who can use AI to achieve lower development costs and faster iteration speeds. Casual games play an excellent "experimental field" role in this process.
Because casual games have a large user base and simple interactions, they are very suitable for training AI's personalized recommendation algorithms and generative content. Tencent's investment in Hungry Studio may be a part of a bigger plan: combining the massive casual game user data with Tencent's Hunyuan large model to explore how to use AI to automatically generate levels and match advertising materials, thereby maximizing the efficiency of the IAA model.
Looking back from the node of 2026, Tencent's investment in Hungry Studio is a convergence of "returning to the basics" and "technological ascension".
On the one hand, it proves that at the highest end of digitalization, the most basic elimination gameplay still has dominance; on the other hand, it indicates that game manufacturers are accelerating their departure from simple content production and moving towards platformization and infrastructure.
When AI can largely replace human production of ordinary content, what the big companies will compete for is "people's attention time" and "the right to speak in computing power". Chinese game giants are trying to both hold on to their current "cash cows" and buy "tickets for the future" through this combination of software and hardware investment. In this regard, the small block really hides the digital password to the next era.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Rongzhong Finance", author: Wang Tao, editor: Wuren. Republished by 36Kr with permission.