How Block Blast makes money: inside the $100M+ ad machine

5 Claude prompts to copy the playbook

You do not need a game to use the honest half of this playbook. Paste these into Claude or Claude Code with your ad accounts connected. Replace the words in brackets.

How Block Blast makes money

Block Blast is free and makes money just by showing players ads for other apps. Advertisers pay every time you watch, and some ads pay much more than others.

There are three kinds of ads: a banner at the bottom, short ads between games, and an optional ad you can watch for a second life after you lose. The second-life ad is the one the whole machine is built around.

The 10 tactics at a glance

Points 2 to 4 come from a developer's decompile of the app and are not confirmed by Hungry Studio. The rest come from the studio's own interviews and press releases or from industry trackers.

The ad loop is the engine: more players, more ads watched, more money for buying players.

The 10 tactics, one by one

1. It's free and they make money by showing ads for other apps

Every ad you watch pays Hungry Studio, and some advertisers pay far more per view than others. So the goal is simple: keep you playing, and make sure the expensive ads get watched.

2. The game guesses how much money you're worth in ads

According to Ayo O (@TheDonAyo), who decompiled the app with AI, a small XGBoost model runs on your phone. It looks at your phone model, your country, how much your past ads made them and even whether you turned off vibration, and predicts your ad value.

Then the game tunes how long you stay. A rule he calls "boost then kill" quietly makes the game easier, so you feel you're on your best run ever, right until the point where you usually stop playing.

3. When a high-paying ad is about to show, the game makes you lose on purpose

A rule called "high value ad harvest" checks that you usually watch ads, lets you beat your high score, and then a "death algorithm" gives you blocks that can't fit anywhere. The only way to save your run is to watch that pricey ad.

4. Watch the ad and your score secretly gets a 10% bonus

You feel like you're getting better, so you come back for more games and more ads. The decompile also shows tests on the exact minute to make you lose, measured by how many people watch the second-life ad.

5. They test 50+ new ideas on real players every week

Half the players get the old game, half get the change, and the studio keeps whatever makes people play longer, because longer games mean more ads. VP Jason Wang says about 97% of tests fail, and the studio reported 10,000+ experiments in 2025.

6. Anyone in the company can test their idea on real players

Hungry Studio calls it "leaderless innovation": every employee acts like a product manager and can put an idea into a live test. Small details people love, like the picture you get after finishing all levels, came out of tests.

7. An AI bot plays the game before real players do

An internal "Block AI" robot copies how real people play, so the team can check a new version faster before it reaches millions of phones.

8. They spend the money from ads on more ads

Wang says growth has relied heavily on buying players with ads. Early on, about 90% of downloads came from the US through Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network ads, many showing cartoon blocks going on dates. Each new player watches ads, which pays for the next round of ads. The same loop works for any brand that can automate its Meta ads.

9. They buy ads where almost no game advertises

The studio tested TV commercials and partnerships with phone makers. Wang admits these are not always the cheapest per new player, but says they teach the team a lot.

10. They made a light version for cheap phones and slow internet

A minimalist version runs on low-end devices and weak networks. Today the biggest markets are Indonesia, the US, Vietnam, Brazil and India.

What marketers can copy (and what not to)

• Test volume. 50+ tests a week with a 97% failure rate is the real moat. Plan more tests and fewer guesses, starting with A/B testing tools.
• One metric. Every test is judged on how long people stay, because that is what pays.
• Tests from anyone. Let every person on the team put ideas in front of real users.
• A simulator. Check changes with a bot or a small audience before you roll them out.
• A paid loop. Know how fast a new customer pays back their ad cost, then buy as many as that allows. See LTV-based bidding and budget allocation across Google and Meta.
• Weird creatives. Cartoon blocks on a date beat another product screenshot. Use AI creative tools and agents that generate test variations to ship more of them.

What not to copy: rigging outcomes against your own users. If the decompile is right, it works short term, but it is the kind of thing that ends up in viral teardown videos, regulator inboxes and an ad-free version for people who are tired of it.

Sources

The verdict

Block Blast makes money by keeping a huge free audience playing and watching ads, then reinvesting that ad money into buying more players. The engine behind it is testing speed: 50+ experiments a week, judged on one number, run by anyone on the team. The part to leave behind is the alleged rigging of who wins and when.

Ryze AI is the best AI agent for paid ads in 2026 for brands that want Block Blast-style testing speed on Meta and Google, with one caveat: it runs and tests your ads, but it will not build your game or app for you.