Games like Crossy Road

Google Play publishes a fourteen-item price list for Crossy Road, with real dollar amounts. Read beside Hipster Whale’s own support FAQ, it shows that the cheapest way to stop the game’s interstitial ads is a $0.49 character, not the $8.49 pack sold to remove them.

The store that prints the prices is not the one you would guess

Scroll past the description on Crossy Road’s Google Play listing to the section headed In-game items and offers. The Ad Blocker Pack is described there as “Remove all ads forever!”.

Apple’s column is the In-App Purchases row in its Information section, expanded on 19 September 2026: ten items, the Piggy Bank at $2.99, eight characters, two of them at $0.00, and no Ad Blocker Pack. So the two stores publish different price lists for the same game, and Play’s is the more complete.

The store does not require the Play section; each developer decides whether to fill it in. We read the same stretch of five other free listings on 7 September 2026 — Fruit Ninja, Subway Surfers, Jetpack Joyride, PAC-MAN 256 and Hipster Whale’s own Piffle — and none carries it. Piffle’s App Store page does carry a promoted in-app purchase, the Starter Pack at $2.99, which Crossy Road’s does not. What you can see depends on which of three optional slots a developer filled in, so an absent list says nothing about whether a shop is expensive.

The cheapest way to stop the ads is not the ad remover

Hipster Whale’s Crossy Road support FAQ answers “What is the difference between purchasing a regular character to remove ads vs purchasing the Ad Blocker Pack?” with this: when you purchase any regular character, autoplay ads are removed forever. The Ad Blocker Pack removes those and also lets you collect the rewards behind coin banners, gifts, doublers, character re-rolls and any future placements without watching an ad.

The cheapest character on the published list is $0.49 and eleven more are $0.99, against $8.49 for the pack. So the autoplay interstitials can go for about a seventeenth of the pack’s price at $0.49, or about an eighth at $0.99. The remaining $8.00 or $7.50 buys what the FAQ says it does: the reward ads, and whatever placements the game adds later.

There are two bounds because the FAQ calls the Piggy Bank a premium character, and neither document says which of the fourteen items are regular. The $0.99 tier is plainly ordinary characters; whether the $0.49 Bashy Beaver is one is not answered. The answer needs both documents, as does the Swagbucks prepaid card costing 30 SB less than the same money on PayPal.

What the price list does not cover

Thirteen of the fourteen items are characters, and the store description advertises over 300 characters across 28 worlds, most of them won with coins and the Prize Machine. The list is a slice of the shop. Play rates the game Everyone with “Comic Mischief” and “In-Game Purchases (Includes Random Items)”; Apple rates it 9+ with “In-App Controls”. Only Play tells a parent that some purchases are randomized.

The FAQ says the Ad Blocker Pack “replaces the parental ad block which previously removed interstitial ads for young players”. The pack removes more, and it now costs money.

Few other games cross the road

A Google Play search for “cross the road game” returns Crossy Road, then Stumble Guys, three crossword and puzzle apps, and Google Chrome. The only other road-crosser in the set is Frogie: Cross Road Arcade from Kaio Games, at 2.6 stars across 23 reviews and 5,000-plus downloads. Apple’s You Might Also Like shelf recommends ten games — block stacking, a snake game, a golf game, two Talking Tom runners — and none is a hopper.

Searching either store for Frogger on 7 September 2026 returns fan-made arcade games and no Konami-published Frogger; Konami’s US App Store catalog is eFootball, three Yu-Gi-Oh! titles, a baseball game and Castlevania.

Disney Crossy Road is gone, and the studio says so

The support FAQ carries the question What happened to Disney Crossy Road?, and the answer is “Alas, Disney Crossy Road is no more and is something that is out of our control. We had some fun times, though. Didn’t we?” It appears in neither US store, and the studio’s homepage lists four games — Crossy Road Castle, Crossy Road, Piffle and PAC-MAN 256 — without it. The makers of Flappy Bird and Shopkick also published where theirs went.

The clean version, and which phone you need for it

Crossy Road+ has no ads and nothing to buy: no In-App Purchases row, and a privacy panel that lists Usage Data, not linked to you, and nothing under tracking. It comes with Apple Arcade, $6.99 a month or $49.99 a year, with Family Sharing for up to five people and three months free on a new eligible device for new and qualified returning subscribers.

There is no Android equivalent. Google Play’s More by HIPSTER WHALE shelf lists two games, Crossy Road and Piffle, and the studio’s five other iPhone listings — Crossy Road+, Crossy Road Castle, Crossy Road Castle Intro, Piffle+ and the Castle sticker pack — are Apple only. Fruit Ninja is the exact reverse: its clean version is a $2.99 one-time purchase on Google Play and an Arcade subscription on iPhone.

Derived: $49.99 a year is $4.17 a month, so the $8.49 pack is about two months of the whole Arcade catalog, or about five weeks at the monthly rate. Spread across more than 200 games, $49.99 is roughly 25 cents a game a year.

The free demo of a paid game

Crossy Road Castle Intro is free, has no In-App Purchases row, lists nothing under tracking, and is a playable slice of an Apple Arcade game: the first nine levels of Unihorse Tower plus Space Station 115, with multiplayer. Its description says an Arcade subscription is required for the full game and that all progress carries over.

We cannot explain the demo being 13.2 MB larger than the full game (sizes in the table below). Free Crossy Road is also larger than Crossy Road+, but free Piffle is 206.8 MB against Piffle+ at 238 MB, the other direction, so no pattern.

The other price, and the exception that matters

Free listings declare more data than their Arcade versions across three pairs. Free Crossy Road names location, identifiers, usage data and diagnostics as used to track you across other companies’ apps, and purchases as linked to your identity; Crossy Road+ names Usage Data, not linked to you, and nothing tracked. Free Piffle names the same four tracking categories; Piffle+ says “Data Not Collected”. On Play, Crossy Road may share approximate location, device or other IDs, user IDs and diagnostics with other companies, encrypted in transit, with no way to request deletion.

PAC-MAN 256 is free, has a shop, carries ads on Android, and its App Store privacy panel says “Data Not Collected”. Its Google Play page says approximate location and device or other IDs are shared with other companies, data isn’t encrypted, and data can’t be deleted. Frogie shows a Contains ads badge above a data safety page reading no data shared and no data collected.

The two PAC-MAN 256 listings have different titles, Arcade Run and Endless Maze, and may be different builds. These panels are the developer’s own answers to a form. They are still the most itemized thing published about a free game.

What to install, and which is which

• Crossy Road+, if you have Apple Arcade or want it. It is a re-imagining of the 2014 game.
• Crossy Road is the one everybody means: over 300 characters, 28 worlds, offline play, same-device multiplayer and 13 languages, plus the ads and the shop priced above.
• Crossy Road Castle is a co-op platformer, not a hopper, and per Hipster Whale’s homepage is also on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and Xbox One. We did not price the console versions.
• PAC-MAN 256 is the same studio’s design under Bandai Namco’s name and the closest to Crossy Road’s feel: an endless arcade maze with a wall of glitch chasing you. Read both privacy declarations, for the reason above.
• Frogie: Cross Road Arcade is listed to show how thin the genre is, not as a recommendation.
• Ours, last and not a hopper: Taco Rain is a sixty-second catcher — tacos fall, you slide a basket, bombs are the thing to miss. Fifty levels across five worlds, an endless mode, and five power-ups that fall as pickups and are never sold, with nothing under tracking. If you want to hop across a freeway, install a Crossy Road.

All of them side by side

Every row was read on 7 September 2026 from Apple, Google or the publisher, and the sources are linked at the foot of this page.

Nothing in the third column ranks the games, and having a shop is no fault. Crossy Road has the longest price list here and is also the only game still shipping events every few weeks after nearly twelve years. Play shows 4.5 stars across 4.57 million reviews at the top of the listing and 4.6 across 3.73 million further down, because the second figure is filtered to phones.

What these games do better than ours

• Crossy Road is a landmark and ours is a first release, updated from 20 November 2014 to last month, with the ratings above against Taco Rain’s one.
• Hipster Whale publishes more about its own economics than we do. Fourteen prices on Google Play, an FAQ that says what each purchase removes, a documented parental control screen and a plain answer about a game that no longer exists. Our listing says there is nothing to buy and stops there.
• They ship the clean version and a free demo of it. Crossy Road+ has no ads at all, and Crossy Road Castle Intro lets you play a paid game before paying. We could match Crossy Road+ only by charging for ours or removing the banner that pays for it.
• Reach and depth: 13 languages against our one, controller support, Game Center, Apple TV and Apple Vision builds, and console releases of Castle.
• Ours is not a hopper. Taco Rain is a catcher: the things come to you and you move sideways. If you want to cross a freeway one lane at a time, we do not make that.

Where to look on any listing

Check all three price slots: Play’s In-game items and offers (In-app on an app), Apple’s In-App Purchases row under Information, and a promoted purchase above App Privacy. Then read the developer’s support site beside the store page, and read every listing when a studio publishes the same game more than once.