Puzzle & Dragons: The Orb-Dragging Hit That Started Japan's Mobile Boom
Six developers, six months and a five-second timer. In 2012 GungHo's puzzle RPG became the first mobile game to gross $1 billion and reshaped Japan's game industry.
In 2013, commuter trains in Tokyo had a new soundtrack: the soft click of thumbs dragging coloured orbs across a grid. On screen, a team of monsters waited for the combo to finish, then unleashed it on a dragon. Players called it simply Pazudora.
That is Puzzle & Dragons, released on iOS in Japan on 20 February 2012 by GungHo Online Entertainment. It reached North America that November and became, by most counts, the first mobile game to gross $1 billion. By October 2018 its lifetime revenue had reached about $7 billion, and for years it was the highest-grossing app in the world.
Six people, six months
The idea came together around August 2011. A team of six developers built the game in about six months, using the Unity engine. GungHo, then best known in Japan for publishing the PC online game Ragnarok Online, had been steering toward mobile under founder and CEO Kazuki Morishita.
Puzzle & Dragons was a hybrid. On the bottom half of the screen is a 6-by-5 grid of coloured orbs. On the top half, your team of monsters faces enemies. Match orbs of a colour, and the monsters of that colour attack. Pink heart orbs heal you.
Monsters, eggs and the gacha machine
Players build teams from hundreds, later thousands, of monsters, which they level up, evolve and combine. New monsters come from the Rare Egg Machine, a paid random draw using the game's Magic Stones, and from dungeons.
Puzzle & Dragons was one of the games that made this model, gacha, the dominant way to run a mobile game in Japan. It also kept players coming back with a constant schedule of special dungeons and collaborations with famous anime, manga and game series, so there was always a reason to open the app today rather than tomorrow.
Numbers that rewrote the charts
- Players in Japan passed 18 million by mid-2013 and 38 million by October 2015.
- Worldwide downloads passed 50 million in 2015 and 62 million in October 2017.
- Revenue was about $1.5 billion a year in both 2013 and 2014.
- Its run as the world's highest-grossing app ended only in October 2018, when Monster Strike overtook it.
Pazudora grew far beyond phones. Puzzle & Dragons Z came to the Nintendo 3DS in December 2013 in Japan, and in 2015 Nintendo and GungHo released Puzzle & Dragons: Super Mario Bros. Edition, in which Mario's world was rebuilt as orb puzzles. An arcade game, a trading card game, an anime and Switch versions followed, and Puzzle & Dragons Story arrived on Apple Arcade in December 2023.
Why it matters
Puzzle & Dragons proved that a mobile game could earn like the biggest console franchises, and it showed Japanese publishers that their future was on phones. Almost every Japanese mobile RPG that followed, from Monster Strike to Fate/Grand Order, built on the model it popularised: a deep collection of characters, constant limited-time events and gacha draws.
It also remains a cautionary tale. GungHo has relied on Pazudora for well over a decade, and by 2025 shareholders were openly pressing the company about its dependence on a single game.
Where to play
Puzzle & Dragons is free to play on iOS and Android, with the English version separate from the Japanese one. Note that it uses paid random draws; if you prefer games without them, see our no-gacha guide.