The Game That Got Big While No One Was Looking

There are currently six games in the top-grossing list of apps and games in the US App Store. Just six - 30%. Monopoly Go leads the charge, Candy Crush is still holding on, Supercell's Brawl Stars, which is a rather new addition, is also there.

And then there's Last War: Survival, a hyper casual (or midcore casual, depends who you ask).

In case you haven't seen the ads yet, Last War is a seemingly simple game possessing all the attributes of a hyper casual game like all the rest. It gets significantly harder according to players who stuck around for more than an hour.

Oh, and the game is also making many many millions.

Our App Intelligence shows the game, which launched back in June of last year, has earned $262M in net revenue in its first year on the App Store and Google Play (not including from China). And here's an interesting insight, the split between the App Store and Google Play is fairly close - 55% to 45%, leaning in the App Store's favor.

It didn't start out this way - Google Play was earning more early on, but the App Store got momentum and eventually overgrew Google Play.

Now, that's not common. For comparison, Supercell's Brawl Stars gets about 27% of its revenue from Google Play and the rest, 73%, from the App Store.

But we're not done yet with the numbers.

Our estimates show Last War's revenue has been growing very fast - from $29M to $63M in the last five months. And it got to that $29M in just a handful of months. All of those figures are net, which means what FirstFun, Last War's developer, gets to keep after store fees.

And where is all of that money coming from? The US, of course, but also Japan and South Korea. The US was responsible for 30% of the revenue, Japan for 17%, and South Korea for 10%. Together, the three earned the game $156M of net revenue.