Sensor Tower: Tencent's Honour of Kings and PUBG Mobile are the world's most lucrative mobile games, respectively making $735.4M and $643M in Q1 2022 revenue
Xinmei Shen / South China Morning Post :
Context & Ripple Effects
Sensor Tower's Q1 2022 tally extends a run the firm has been documenting for years: Honor of Kings became the first mobile game to clear $10B in lifetime revenue in late 2021, and by December it and PUBG Mobile were each pacing toward $2.8B for the full year among the eight games to pass $1B globally. The new quarter keeps both at the top, with Honour of Kings at $735.4M and PUBG Mobile at $643M — a run-rate consistent with that 2021 pace rather than an acceleration.
First-order effects
- Tencent enters mid-2022 with the world's two highest-grossing mobile games still on its own balance sheet, a concentration later confirmed when Sensor Tower put its total app revenue at $4.4B for H1 2022, the highest of any publisher globally.
Second-order effects
- Every rival publisher is effectively competing for third place: with Tencent's duo locked into the top two slots, the contest shifts to which games can join the billion-dollar club they already dominate, making Sensor Tower's rankings the de facto scoreboard publishers are measured against.
Third-order effects
- If one publisher keeps holding both top slots across quarters, mobile gaming's revenue pool stays concentrated in a pair of Chinese-developed titles, reinforcing the China-market leverage Sensor Tower's publisher data has been quantifying since at least 2021.
The trend: Global mobile-game revenue is consolidating around a small set of long-lived Tencent titles whose multi-year monetization curves keep them ahead of newer entrants.