Behind Machine Zone's Game of War, the mobile game earning over $1M per day from in-app purchases
Robert Kolker / Bloomberg Business : Tweets: @chrisbrogan Tweets: Chris Brogan / @chrisbrogan : Game of War grosses $1mil a DAY and we still talk about the box office? - http://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
In March 2015 Machine Zone's Game of War was pulling over $1M per day purely from in-app purchases — a run rate that prompted commentary like Chris Brogan's that a mobile game out-grosses what the box office gets attention for. The same week's coverage of Crossy Road's freemium model, which hit $10M and 50M downloads in three months, shows two very different answers emerging to the same question: how do you monetize free games at scale.
The longer arc matters: Machine Zone was valued around $5B at its last 2016 funding round before AppLovin bought it for roughly $500M in 2020 — an order-of-magnitude haircut on the company behind this revenue story.
First-order effects
- Machine Zone's daily grossing validates heavy spending on live-service monetization, putting pressure on rival mid-core mobile studios to match its in-app purchase engine or cede top-grossing chart positions.
- Investors re-rate free-to-play studios on recurring purchase revenue rather than paid-download sales, which is the backdrop for Machine Zone's subsequent ~$5B private-market valuation.
Second-order effects
- Publishers chasing paying users accelerate toward markets like China, where industry revenue roughly doubled from $7.4B in 2015 to about $17.6B in 2017 and average monthly spend per paying user ran higher than the US.
- Platform-level measurement firms such as Sensor Tower become essential infrastructure as grossing figures — not download counts — become the scoreboard for competition.
Third-order effects
- Revenue concentrates in a small number of evergreen titles: by late 2021 eight games had each passed $1B in annual global revenue, led by PUBG Mobile and Honor of Kings at $2.8B apiece, leaving one-hit studios like Machine Zone exposed.
- The pattern points toward consolidation, where monetization platforms and acquirers absorb former chart-toppers — AppLovin's purchase of Machine Zone being the template case — while new entrants must clear billion-dollar bars to matter.
The trend: Mobile gaming shifted from paid downloads and launch-window hits to a handful of live-service titles compounding billions annually through in-app purchases, with studio valuations tracking that concentration up and down.