Monthly global app downloads of PUBG Mobile amounted to 8.14 million in December 2024. Debuting as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, the game was first released for Windows in December 2017, with the mobile version being released worldwide in March 2018. PUBG Mobile is one of the top-grossing mobile apps worldwide with approximately 57 million U.S. dollars in global mobile player spending during the most recently measured month.

First released at the start of 2017, PUBG: Battlegrounds (previously known as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds) is one of the most popular games on Steam and had 861,598 peak concurrent players in the last recorded month, April 2025. The highest number of concurrent players was recorded in January 2018 at 3.24 million. One of the biggest games on Steam PUBG gained a devoted legion of fans in a short space of time after its release, and cumulative unit sales of the game hit 75 million in December 2021. The game has also been critically acclaimed — it won the Best Multiplayer Game at The Game Awards in 2017 and its free-to-play mobile version for Android and iOS, released in 2018, was nominated for Best Mobile Game at The 2018 Game Awards. This critical success has also translated into commercial success, as the game generated millions of U.S. dollars of revenue, most successfully in the United States. On January 12, 2022, the game has become free to play. Battle of the Battle Royale games PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is an online battle royale game in which up to 100 hundred players battle it out until there is only one player or one team left standing. This format of game has become very popular in recent years. While PUBG has a strong following, especially on Steam, it has come under pressure from rival battle royale game, Fortnite. First released just several months after PUBG, Fortnite has since become a cultural phenomenon, amassing 500 million registered users in just six years. As of 2025, both PUB and Fortnite are still going strong with their loyal audiences.

In 2025 to date, PUBG Mobile was Tencent's most popular app with approximately 67 million combined downloads across the Apple App Store and Google Play worldwide. The multiplayer battle royale game title is also the second highest-grossing mobile game of Tencent of all time.

Mobile games make up the majority of video games released each year, with thousands of new additions to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store every year. By the mid-2010s, mobile games had...

How many apps are there in the Play Store? The number of available apps in the Google Play Store was most recently placed at 1.68 million apps, after surpassing 1 million apps in July 2013. Google Play Store Google Play was originally launched in October 2008 under the name Android Market. As Google’s official app store, it offers its customers a wide range of applications and digital media including music, magazines, books, film, and TV. As of April 2021, the ranking of the top-grossing Android apps worldwide is dominated by mobile games with Coin Master, Garena Free Fire, and PUBG mobile leading the ranking. This hardly comes as a surprise as it is estimated that gaming apps will account for over 70 percent of Google Play app revenues in 2024. As most apps in the Google Play Store are available for free, the company needs to utilize effective business models to secure healthy revenue. How do apps make money? Despite the robust gaming app revenues, most gaming apps are free to download and rely on monetization via in-app advertising or in-game purchases of items such as boosters and accessories. A November 2021 survey of mobile app publishers found that video ads were the most popular mobile app monetization model, followed by display ads and in-app purchases. Additionally, monetizing via subscriptions has proven an effective model for several highly popular apps, with subscription revenues hitting 18.3 billion U.S. dollars in revenues in 2021.

Released on August 19, 2024, and selling 10 million copies within three days, Black Myth: Wukong is one of the fastest-selling video games of all time. Heralded as the Chinese video game industry's first AAA video game production, the title was released on PC and PS5 with an Xbox version following shortly. Black Myth: Wukong was published by Game Science, which is backed by Tencent Gaming, one of the biggest gaming companies in China and worldwide. Lifetime unit sales of Black Myth: Wukong are currently at 25 million units. A record-breaking game release After first teasing the game in 2020, the anticipation for Black Myth: Wukong was extremely high. The title made headlines when Game Science revealed that it would transition the game’s development to the newly released game engine Unreal 5, making it one of the first major titles to do so. This hype caused the game to top charts as soon as pre-orders became available in summer 2024. Apart from selling an unprecedented number of copies within just a few days, Black Myth: Wukong crushed the competition in terms of user engagement, setting records as the second-most played video games on Steam based on peak concurrent players. A week post release, Wukong claimed over 2.4 million peak concurrent users on PC, ranking only behind PUBG, which is even more impressive considering that PUBG is a free-to-play online multiplayer title. Most Black Myth: Wukong’s sales are domestic, based on the fact that the majority of the over half a million reviews on Steam are in Chinese. Additionally, Chinese gamers accounted for about a third of Steam audiences, with nearly 32 percent of Steam users having Simplified Chinese and another 1.2 percent using Traditional Chinese as the language for the PC gaming platform. China’s gaming industry is starting to take off internationally Despite being the biggest video gaming market worldwide based on revenue, the Chinese gaming industry has been hampered by a gaming console ban (which has now been lifted), as well as strict regulations regarding video game releases and gaming consumption among citizens. Some of these strict regulations have caused raised eyebrows during the release of Black Myth: Wukong, as gaming content creators and streamers revealed they had been sent a list of topics to avoid talking about while livestreaming the game. Despite these growing pains, the Chinese gaming industry has been gaining international traction in recent years. Limited to mobile or domestic releases for long, China is now known for leading the way in free-to-play action role-playing titles like Genshin Impact, which gave rise to an entire genre of anime-style open-world online games. There are several factors that play into the popularity of Black Myth: Wukong. One of the key factors of the action game’s success is the source material – the main character of Black Myth: Wukong is based on Sun Wukong, or the Monkey King, a key character in Journey to the West, a beloved piece of classic Chinese literature which has inspired hundreds of interpretations on TV shows, cartoons, movies, and other media adaptions. The cultural relevance of the topic can be regarded as a soft-power move to promote Chinese culture through media content, which is currently booming internationally as Chinese TV drama productions are also gaining more international popularity among Western audiences.

In 2024, PUBG Mobile was Tencent's most popular app with approximately 101 million combined downloads across the Apple App Store and Google Play worldwide. The multiplayer battle royale game title is also the second highest-grossing mobile game of Tencent of all time.

Published by Activision, Call of Duty (CoD) is a popular first person shooter video game series which first launched in 2003. The most successful game in the franchise is Call of Duty: Black Ops, which has sold over 30 million units worldwide since it was first released in 2010.

The continued success of CoD While the franchise was originally created exclusively for Windows, later versions were made available for numerous other platforms, including Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, and OS X. In 2020, Activision branched out even further and released Call of Duty: Warzone, a free-to-play online battle royale game which pits up to 150 players against each other at one time. Within two months of its release, Warzone had amassed 60 million players across the globe, rivaling some of the other battle royale giants on the market, including Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.

Call of Duty goes mobile Although Call of Duty is traditionally seen as a console game, the mobile edition has also been a great success. In the first few months after its release in October 2019, the game amassed 250 million downloads worldwide, far eclipsing the respective downloads of its shooter rivals, PUBG Mobile and Fortnite. The biggest regional market for the mobile game was the United States, where it was downloaded 28.5 million times in the first two months of its release. Indeed, players in the United States spent more than 36 million U.S. dollars combined on in-game purchases within the mobile app in the first two months after the game's release.