In 2025, the revenue of the mobile gaming market grew, but only slightly — analysis

The analytics company Sensor Tower has released an extensive report discussing the state of the mobile app market in 2025. We’ve selected key findings related to games.

Last War: Survival

In total, mobile games generated $81.75 billion from in-app purchases (IAP) in 2025, which is only a 1.3% increase compared to 2024.
For the second consecutive year, mobile game downloads continued to decline. This time, they decreased by 7.2% to 50.4 billion.
Last year, mobile gamers played a combined total of 444.63 billion hours, an increase of 0.9% 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, while Tencent, Scopely, and Century Games led in gaming IAP revenue.
Over the course of 2025, 828 mobile games managed to earn more than $10 million in IAP revenue, with 134 projects earning over $100 million and nine projects exceeding $1 billion.

In terms of game categories, mid-core games collected the most money over the year — $44.68 billion. This is almost the same as in 2024. At the same time, hybrid-casual projects showed significant growth, with total IAP revenue increasing by 20% to $4.2 billion.
Hyper-casual remained the leader in downloads, with 22.05 billion downloads.

For the most profitable casual games, the seventh-day retention rate (D7) has been steadily declining for four years. Specifically, in December 2025, games in the top 25 saw their D7 drop to 14.9%. The best results that month were achieved 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.

Source:

Sensor Tower