Chart watch, February: a $6.1B month with no new entrants

Mobile games generated about $6.1 billion in February, according to Sensor Tower. That's down 1.6% year on year and down 9.1% from January. The month-on-month drop is the number to sit with, because a near double-digit fall in the shortest month of the year is partly a calendar effect but lands on top of a market that Sensor Tower's own State of Gaming report, published the same month, had already described as installs-down and revenue-flat.

The top of the revenue chart didn't move. Last War: Survival and Honor of Kings held their January positions; so did Royal Match and Whiteout Survival, with PUBG Mobile still behind them, and no title broke into the upper tier of either chart. With GDC still two weeks away and no major platform launch in the month, that stability is unremarkable on its own. What makes it worth recording is the run it extends, since the same handful of strategy and MOBA titles, plus match-3, has anchored the top of the revenue chart for at least two consecutive months.

The chart watch UA read

A market where the incumbents don't move and overall spend contracts month on month is a hard one to break into with a new launch. Hard, but not closed. A studio planning a quiet-window soft launch should read the flat chart as an argument for it rather than against it, because less competitive noise at the top makes mid-table visibility slightly cheaper to buy even when the overall spend pool has shrunk. The bigger caution falls on teams benchmarking their own CPMs against "the market". With mobile games down 9.1% month on month, a flat or improving CPM in February says more about buyer caution than it does about an account's relative strength.

Sensor Tower's State of Gaming 2026 report, published later in the month on February 25, put a fuller-year frame around the same story: mobile IAP revenue around $82 billion for 2025, up about 1%, while installs fell roughly 7%. Strategy led growth in that report, as did puzzle, which lines up with strategy and match-3 titles holding the top of February's own chart. The report's broader claim is that the industry is shifting from chasing download volume toward retention and monetisation, and that is a reasonable lens for a month like this one. A flat top ten and a shrinking install base aren't two separate problems; they're the same reallocation showing up in two different datasets.

Related archive reading

• Chart Watch, April: A Quiet Top Ten, No New Entrants
• Chart Watch, February: Mobile Game Revenue Rankings Hold