In 2025, the revenue of the mobile gaming market increased, but only slightly — analytics
The analytics company Sensor Tower released a comprehensive report detailing the state of the mobile app market in 2025. We have highlighted the key findings related to games.
Last War: Survival
- In 2025, mobile games generated a total of $81.75 billion from in-app purchases (IAP). This marks only a 1.3% increase compared to 2024.
- Mobile game downloads have continued to decline for the second consecutive year. This time, they decreased by 7.2% to 50.4 billion.
- Last year, mobile gamers logged a total of 444.63 billion hours of gameplay, a 0.9% increase compared to 2024.
- 92.5% of IAP revenue and 79.8% of downloads were attributed to games from the top 1% of publishers.
- Azur Games, Miniclip, and Onesoft were the most successful publishers in terms of downloads. Meanwhile, Tencent, Scopely, and Century Games led in game IAP revenue.
- In 2025, 828 mobile games managed to earn more than $10 million in IAP revenue. Among these, 134 projects generated over $100 million, while nine projects surpassed $1 billion.
- When it comes to game categories, mid-core games collected the most revenue over the year, totaling $44.68 billion. This was nearly the same as in 2024. At the same time, hybrid-casual projects saw significant growth, with total IAP revenue increasing by 20% to $4.2 billion.
- Hyper-casual games remained the leader in downloads with 22.05 billion downloads.
- For the most profitable casual games, the seven-day retention rate (D7) has steadily declined over the past four years. In December 2025, the D7 of games in the top 25 dropped to 14.9%. The best results that month were demonstrated by top mid-core games, with a D7 of 20.9%.
The Top 10 Highest-Grossing Mobile Games in the World in 2025
1. Last War: Survival;
2. Whiteout Survival;
3. Royal Match;
4. MONOPOLY GO!;
5. Honor of Kings;
6. Candy Crush Saga;
7. Coin Master;
8. Roblox;
9. Game for Peace;
10. Pokémon TCG Pocket.
The Top 10 Most Downloaded Mobile Games in the World in 2025
1. Block Blast!;
2. Roblox;
3. Free Fire;
4. Subway Surfers;
5. Pizza Ready;
6. Ludo King;
7. Hole.io;
8. Vita Mahjong;
9. EA SPORTS FC Mobile Soccer;
10. My Talking Tom 2.