Mobile Game Monetisation: IAP, Ads, Subs and Hybrid Models

Every game on the App Store and Google Play charts is running one of four business models, or a blend of them, and that choice decides which chart it can realistically win. This guide explains how in-app purchases, advertising, subscriptions and hybrid designs make money, what the published benchmarks say about each, and why the Top Free and Top Grossing lists reward such different games.

The four models at a glance

Mobile games earned about $81.75 billion through store in-app purchases in 2025, up 1.3% on the year, while downloads fell 7.2% to 50.41 billion ^1,8. That gap between flat spending and shrinking installs is the backdrop for every monetisation decision: there are fewer new players to sell to, so studios are squeezing more value from each one.

In-app purchases

IAP is the model that fills the Top Grossing chart, and in some genres it is almost the only revenue line. AppsFlyer's monetisation data covering January 2025 to March 2026 puts IAP at 90% of midcore revenue and 83% of social casino revenue ⁵. Midcore alone generated roughly $44.7 billion of store IAP in 2025, flat on the previous year, which is more than half of all mobile game IAP ⁸.

The economics are driven by a long tail of spenders. Sensor Tower found that games earning over $1 billion numbered only nine in 2025, while 828 games cleared $10 million ⁸. The 2025 revenue leaders, Last War: Survival, Whiteout Survival, Royal Match and MONOPOLY GO!, are all IAP-first designs built around live events that create short, intense spending windows ^8,12.

In-app advertising

Advertising monetises the players who never spend, which is most of them. TopOn's H1 2025 report, drawn from its mediation traffic, ranks ad formats by eCPM in a consistent order: rewarded video first, then interstitial, splash, native and banner ³. Appodeal's 2025 eCPM report reaches the same ordering, with iOS paying more than Android and North America and Europe out-earning every other region ⁴.

Source: TopOn, H1 2025 ³.

Two things stand out. Rewarded video earns the highest price per thousand impressions because the player chooses to watch, which advertisers pay for. Interstitials earn the most in total because they can be shown far more often. Banners fill a third of impressions but deliver only 6.5% of revenue ³. Rewarded placements are also growing fast as an acquisition channel: Sensor Tower counted rewarded ads at 17.7% of game ad impressions in 2025, up 53.9% year on year ⁷.

Ad revenue is also front-loaded. AppsFlyer measured that hyper-casual games collect 63% of their first-60-day ad revenue on day one, and by day seven the average game has banked 89% of its D60 ad income ⁵. That is why ad-driven titles must keep buying installs to keep earning.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions remain a minor line in games, but they are growing where they are used. Among apps that run all three models (most of them games), AppsFlyer saw the subscription share of revenue rise from 4% to 7% between January 2025 and early 2026, while the ad share slipped from 63% to 56% and IAP held near 35% ⁵. In practice this takes the form of weekly or monthly "VIP" or "remove ads plus daily bonus" bundles rather than full-access passes. No major data provider publishes a subscription-only revenue figure for mobile games unconfirmed.

Battle passes and live-ops

Battle passes are a seasonal IAP wrapper rather than a separate model, but they have become one of the most reliable spenders' products. The ESA's 2026 Essential Facts survey of 13,545 US respondents found 26% had bought a season or battle pass, level with expansion packs, behind in-game currency at 34% and skins at 27% (figures taken from a secondary summary; unverified against the original PDF) ⁹. Sensor Tower's analysis of live-ops events found that 83.4% of event launches produced a revenue spike ⁷. Royal Match's Winter Pass was explicitly credited for its December 2025 revenue performance ¹².

Hybrid models

Hybrid monetisation, running IAP and ads side by side, is the direction the whole market is moving in, though adoption is lower than the conference talk suggests. AppsFlyer found fewer than 30% of games ran both IAP and ads in 2025: 33% of casual, 32% of hyper-casual, 20% of casino and 15% of midcore titles ⁶. TopOn, measuring a more ad-heavy developer base, reported that over 72% of its developers used an IAP-plus-ads mix in H1 2025 ³. The payoff is clear in the hybrid-casual segment, which grew IAP revenue 20% to $4.2 billion in 2025 while every other segment stayed flat ⁸.

Typical ARPDAU by model

ARPDAU, revenue per daily active user, is the cleanest way to compare models, but no audited source publishes it by genre. The ranges below are compiled from vendor benchmarks for 2024 to 2025 and should be read as rough, unverified order-of-magnitude guides.

Sources: Game Growth Advisor and AppFollow benchmark compilations unconfirmed ^10,11. A more measurable figure is AppsFlyer's day-90 ad revenue per user: casual $0.55, casino $0.47, midcore $0.40 and hyper-casual $0.22 ⁵.

How this shows up in the charts

The store charts are not neutral scoreboards; each one measures a different thing, which is why the same monetisation model behaves so differently on them.

Top Grossing counts only money that passes through the store, meaning IAP and store-billed subscriptions. Ad revenue is invisible to it because advertisers pay the developer directly ². Apptopia's worked example makes the point: a game selling 1,000 purchases at $100 outranks one selling 50,000 at $1, even though the second has far more paying users ². That is why the 2025 Grossing top ten is wall-to-wall IAP: Last War, Whiteout Survival, Royal Match, MONOPOLY GO!, Honor of Kings, Candy Crush Saga, Coin Master, Roblox, Game for Peace and Pokémon TCG Pocket ⁸.

Top Free rewards install volume and velocity over a short window, which Apptopia estimates at a four-to-seven-day moving average ². Ad-funded games win here because they can price installs cheaply and recycle ad income into more installs. The 2025 download leader, Block Blast!, drew about 368 million installs with near-zero IAP revenue, which keeps it off Grossing entirely ¹³.

Hybrid titles are the only ones that can sit on both. A merge or hybrid-casual game with a cheap install funnel and a real IAP layer can appear high on Free during a launch push and settle into the Grossing top 100 afterwards. When you see a game on both lists at once on AppWinners, it is a strong signal that the hybrid model is working.

Subscriptions and battle passes, finally, show up as smoother Grossing lines. A game that sells a monthly pass has a floor under its daily store revenue, so it holds rank between events rather than spiking and falling. Watching how far a game drops between live-ops peaks is a useful way to spot which titles have built that floor.