How a Mobile Game Reaches #1: Four Launch Playbooks

A mobile game reaches No. 1 on the free chart in one of three ways: it buys the installs, it borrows them from an IP, or it makes a game so cheap to advertise that the installs pay for themselves. Monopoly GO!, Pokémon TCG Pocket and Bridge Race each did one of those, and the shape of their top-10 run is different in every case.

The three playbooks

Monopoly GO!: buying the chart

Scopely launched Monopoly GO! worldwide on April 12, 2023 ¹. It did not go to No. 1 immediately. GamesIndustry.biz described the opening months as a false start, with the game only topping the US charts in August 2023, roughly four months in ². That lag is the signature of a UA-driven launch: the rank climbs with the budget, not with a launch spike.

Then it stayed. By mid-November 2023 Scopely said the game had passed $1 billion in gross revenue, was earning more than $200 million a month and had topped 100 million downloads; its chief revenue officer said it was consistently the No. 1 mobile game and app in the US ³. The spend behind that was reported at close to $500 million by March 2024 ⁴, and in March 2025 co-CEO Javier Ferreira told Bloomberg the cumulative marketing bill had passed $1 billion. Third-party estimates had gone as high as $1.5 billion with claims the game was not yet profitable; Scopely rejected those as speculative and said the game was among the most profitable on mobile ⁵.

In the year to August 2026, Monopoly GO! spent 304 of 350 days in the US top-10 grossing and was the only game to reach No. 1 overall, for two days, in a chart that ChatGPT held for 310 days ⁷. Scopely cited Sensor Tower estimates of $6 billion in lifetime in-app revenue by the end of 2025 ⁶.

Royal Match: the long soft launch

Dream Games ran Royal Match in Canada, Turkey and the UK from July 2020, collecting a million downloads and about 200,000 daily players before raising $50 million in February 2021 and going global ⁸. Soft launch was tuning, not a test: eight months to confirm an ad-free match-3 could pay back on paid installs.

The growth was then bought, deliberately and for years. Sensor Tower data cited by Udonis puts 61.5% of Royal Match installs on paid advertising, against 15–25% for Candy Crush ¹². The first TV commercial aired in January 2023 ¹³, celebrity spots with Simon Cowell followed, and by July 2023 the game was earning about $80 million a month, enough to debut in the global top 10 grossing for 2023 ⁹. In December 2023 the Financial Times reported it had dethroned Candy Crush at the top of the app store ¹⁰. Lifetime gross revenue hit $1 billion in April 2023, $2 billion in January 2024 and $3 billion in August 2024 on about 300 million downloads ¹¹.

Royal Match never needed to be No. 1 free. Installs fell 58% from their February 2024 peak by August ¹¹, yet the game spent 282 of 350 days in the US top-10 grossing in the year to August 2026 ⁷.

Pokémon TCG Pocket: borrowing the installs

Pokémon TCG Pocket soft-launched in New Zealand in September 2024 and went worldwide on October 30, 2024 with more than six million pre-registrations already banked ¹⁴. Pre-registration is the IP launch's substitute for a UA ramp: it turns brand demand into a day-one install spike.

The numbers were immediate. The Pokémon Company said the game passed 30 million downloads by November 7, eight days after launch ¹⁵; AppMagic estimated 10 million installs in the first two days and about $185 million in net in-app revenue by December 12, with Japan at 44% and the US at 25% of spend, making it the top-grossing card game of 2024 after six weeks on the market ¹⁶. Sensor Tower put lifetime downloads past 100 million in February 2026 and called it the top-grossing card battler of all time ¹⁷.

The free-chart run is the opposite of Monopoly GO!'s: No. 1 in launch week, then a slide as the pre-registered audience is exhausted and expansions become the lever for new spikes.

Bridge Race: the hyper-casual sprint

Bridge Race, built by Garawell Games and published by Supersonic, is the cheapest route to No. 1 and the shortest stay. Three test versions came in at CPIs of $0.41, $0.38 and $0.36 without clearing the publisher's 40–42% D1 bar. New creatives and a stacking mechanic brought CPI to $0.22, a 47% drop, with 45% D1 retention and about 730 seconds of day-zero playtime. Supersonic moved from soft launch to global in a single day, the game hit No. 1 on both US stores within its first month, stayed in the top 10 for over a month and passed 100 million installs in under three months ¹⁸. Forbes listed it as the most downloaded game of 2021 at 169 million installs ¹⁹.

The thresholds are the whole playbook. Voodoo's head of publishing described the hybrid-casual bar in 2023 as at least 45% D1, 15% D7 (20% for puzzle) and 10% D30 ²⁰; its older hyper-casual rules were 55% D1, 22% D7 and a CPI under $0.25, later relaxed to 45%, 13% and $0.20 as the company moved to projecting value instead of fixed cutoffs ²¹. Clear them and the game scales; miss them and it never launches globally.

Launch-week mechanics that all four shared

1. A soft-launch gate with numbers attached. Royal Match ran eight months in three countries; Bridge Race iterated until CPI and D1 cleared a threshold; Pokémon ran New Zealand for a month.
2. A single global launch day. All four flipped every market at once, so launch-week installs stack in one chart window.
3. Creative, not just budget. Bridge Race halved its CPI by changing the ad, not the game; Royal Match's fail-ads and celebrity spots are the same idea at scale.
4. A live-ops calendar from week one. Monopoly GO!'s sticker albums and events, and Pokémon's expansion cadence, are what turn a launch spike into a top-10 run.

How this shows up in the charts

Each playbook leaves a different trace on the iOS game charts. A UA ramp climbs 10–20 places a week for months in the free chart, then settles into a fixed grossing slot; Monopoly GO!'s 304 top-10 grossing days in a year is the end state ⁷. An IP launch appears out of nowhere at No. 1 on launch day and is visible in the US iOS movers as the biggest single-day jump of the week, with grossing catching up within days because the buyers are already fans. A hyper-casual sprint dominates the free chart for three or four weeks and barely registers on grossing, because the revenue is ad impressions that the store does not count.

Track free and grossing side by side on the top apps page. Top 5 free and outside the top 100 grossing means hyper-casual or burning money; top 10 grossing and outside the top 50 free is a Royal Match, buying just enough installs to feed an economy that works. Our guide to how App Store rankings work explains why the free chart reacts within hours while grossing moves over days.