Whiteout Survival, Kingshot and Last War: How Survival Strategy Games Are Doing After August

Played a phone game in the last two years? Then you’ve met the survival strategy genre, whether you wanted to or not. Its ads followed you everywhere. So did the money, because these games camped at the very top of the mobile earnings charts for a long stretch.

August’s numbers hint at a change. MobileGamer.biz published AppMagic estimates on 9 September, and they show two of the genre’s three biggest titles shrinking. Only one holds its ground.

Century Games makes two of them, Whiteout Survival and Kingshot. FunFly makes the third, Last War: Survival. Let’s check on each.

Whiteout Survival: Still on Top, Still Falling

Whiteout Survival still earns more than any other game in the genre, and it finished sixth overall in August. The direction worries me more than the position. It has now dropped five months in a row, from nearly $115 million in March to about $97 million last month.

I wouldn’t call that a collapse. I would call it a trend.

Kingshot: The Steady One

Kingshot arrived last of the three, and right now it looks the calmest. It posted just under $80 million for the third month running and kept its seat in the top 10. MobileGamer.biz noted in its half-year review that Kingshot’s revenue peaked in May. The site also pointed out that the game hands Century Games two titles among 2026’s 10 top-grossing mobile games, and few publishers can claim that.

Last War: The Biggest Drop

Then we get to Last War, and nobody could miss this change. The game earned about $56.7 million in August and ranked 11th. MobileGamer.biz called it the worst month since February 2024. For scale, the same site says Last War made $130 million to $150 million every single month from September 2024 through this March.

So what happened? Nobody has given a confirmed answer. The site’s editor asked readers for theories back in July, when June’s total of roughly $71 million already marked the game’s lowest in a long while.

The players haven’t vanished. Marketing agency Udonis compiled AppMagic data that shows 192.5 million lifetime installs and about $3.5 billion in lifetime revenue. The game counted 16.2 million monthly active users in May, down from 27.7 million in January.

And yes, you know this game. It runs those ads where a soldier sprints through multiplying gates, and they look nothing like the actual base-building game. In late 2024 the publisher leaned into the joke. It hired Antony Starr, Homelander from The Boys, to front a campaign that poked fun at its own marketing.

What the Charts Do Not Capture

Treat all these figures with some caution. AppMagic estimates them, and it leaves things out. The firm excludes the app stores’ 30 percent cut, ad income, webshop purchases and China’s third-party Android stores. MobileGamer.biz notes that Monopoly Go, for one, keeps steering players toward webshops, which may make its chart position look weaker than its real business.

The charts also miss trade between players. Games in this genre run on years of base upgrades, and owners resell developed bases. On third-party marketplaces, sellers list a last war survival account for sale by its level and progression. Those deals happen independently of the publisher and never show up in store data.

Why These Games Earn So Much

It helps to know how the genre makes its money in the first place. Udonis breaks down Last War’s model like this. A permanent VIP track rewards cumulative spending. A seasonal Battle Pass and a Monthly Pass sit beside it. A rotation of packs lands around competitive events. Put it together and you get about $18 in revenue per download, while most strategy games sit in the low single digits.

The audience skews older than you might guess. Most players fall between 25 and 44, and the United States, South Korea and Japan spend the most.

The Bigger Picture

Strategy cooled, but other genres enjoyed a good month. Honor of Kings earned more than $150 million. Gossip Harbor, a merge puzzle game, climbed to second for the first time with over $112 million. Every game in the top five cleared $100 million.

Tencent’s shooter Delta Force reached 12th, one place behind Last War, in its first trip into the top 15. Pokémon Go headed the other way, and its revenue roughly halved after its anniversary month.

FunFly still updates Last War. An August patch added a Crystal Event, and the studio announced maintenance for another update on 16 September.