Honor of Kings Retakes the Throne - The Highest Earning Games in the World

Ariel Ariel
Sep. 20

This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Remember Tumblr?. Check out the full article for more insights.


Honor of Kings Retakes the Throne - The Highest Earning Games in the World

We dove into the numbers and, as we expected when we looked at July’s results, global net revenue of the top 10 earning titles is hovering ever-so-close to $1B.

Let's take a look at what happened last month in more detail.

On both the iOS and combined ranking, we saw 王者荣耀 (Honor of Kings), the most lucrative mobile game of all time, returned to its throne atop the list. Just on iOS, the megahit amassed an estimated $142M, which was $20M greater than July’s total of $123M. That means players in China spent about 15% more in the game last month than the one before. This is happening as Tencent is once again attempting to take the game global.

After two months at the top on iOS and overall, 地下城与勇士 (DNF Mobile), or Dungeon Fight Mobile, dropped down a spot to #2 in terms of player spending. The $123M it brought in — again, solely from iOS in China — was approximately $20M below its July earnings of $143M net to its developer. So, it got bumped down a rung but only saw 14% less revenue month-over-month.

The rest of the top five earning games remained unchanged over July. #3 game Monopoly Go! added a few millions to its massive stack of very real money, while #4 Royal Match took in $5M more than the previous month. At #5, Roblox saw its revenue remain flat MoM at a net $94M.

All told, our App Intelligence shows the makers of the top 10 earning titles overall received approximately $900M in net revenue after Apple and Google’s fees. That's a small but positive increase from July and is yet another new record high for the global top earning games.

With August in the books, we’re about to see if Q4 2024 can top 2023, and continue to — for the top games — turn around from multiple consecutive quarters of decline.

App Intelligence for Everyone!

The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.

Are you a Journalist? You can get access to our app and market intelligence for free through the Appfigures for Journalists program. Contact us for more details.

All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.


Related Resources

It Finally Happened! The Highest-Earning Apps in the World in October
Insights
It Finally Happened! The Highest-Earning Apps in the World in October

I'm going to start this in reverse because the thing we've been waiting to happen has finally happened. If you've been f...

A Few New Faces! The Most Downloaded Apps in the World in October
Insights
A Few New Faces! The Most Downloaded Apps in the World in October

October is behind us so we crunched the numbers and ranked the most downloaded mobile apps in the world. While I don't h...