Eight mobile games passed $1B in global revenue on the App Store and Google Play so far in 2021; PUBG Mobile and Honor of Kings led with $2.8B each
Craig Chapple / Sensor Tower Blog :
Context & Ripple Effects
The two leaders arrive at this milestone from opposite directions but the same publisher: Honor of Kings became the first mobile game to clear $10B in lifetime revenue back in October, while PUBG Mobile had already banked $5.1B lifetime by March, including $2.7B in 2020 alone. Both are Tencent titles, and Sensor Tower's later data shows neither has slowed — they were still the world's top earners in Q1 2022.
What makes the 2021 snapshot notable is breadth, not just the top pair: eight games crossed $1B on the App Store and Google Play, extending a pattern where games dominate store economics — they accounted for 68% of App Store revenue back in 2019, per Sensor Tower's earlier breakdown.
First-order effects
- Tencent ends 2021 holding the top two revenue slots on both stores, with PUBG Mobile and Honor of Kings at $2.8B each — its live-service catalog, not any single release, is the franchise engine.
- The other six $1B-plus games now benchmark against a bar set by two titles that sustain billion-dollar annual runs years after launch, raising the cost of competing for top-grossing chart position.
Second-order effects
- Rival publishers face pressure to keep aging titles monetizing indefinitely rather than cycling through new launches, since the revenue is concentrating in evergreen games like Honor of Kings, which also topped Sensor Tower's Christmas 2020 spending tally.
- Apple and Google's commission base grows more dependent on a handful of long-running hits, giving those few publishers outsized leverage in any future fee or policy negotiation with the stores.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mobile gaming consolidates structurally around a small set of decade-scale service games operated by a few publishers, shrinking the payoff window for new entrants and making lifetime-revenue milestones — not launch charts — the industry's scoreboard.
The trend: Mobile game revenue is consolidating into a handful of long-lived Tencent-led service titles that compound year after year instead of being displaced by new releases.