Chart Watch, October: Mobile Game Ad Spend Charts

The mobile game ad spend charts for October read like a rerun of September, and it is better to say that plainly than to dress it up as a finding.

Ad-intelligence trackers still put Whiteout Survival and Last War: Survival near the top of global spend, with Kingshot from Century Games holding roughly the position it has occupied most of the year. None of that is new. A genre that has held its spending pattern since the start of 2025 is simply holding it into Q4.

Downloads versus spend, still the same split

Puzzle titles kept the download lead this month. Same pattern this desk has flagged in prior editions of Chart Watch. The more interesting data point sits below it. Monopoly GO! remains a fixture near the top of spend rankings despite being well into its third year live, and that stays a more interesting fact than anything happening at the very top of the chart. A title that old sustaining that spend level is not typical, so any team benchmarking its own retention curve against a live comparable should treat Monopoly GO! as an outlier rather than a target.

The genre observation behind October's mobile game ad spend charts

Survival and kingdom-builder titles are not simply spending the most.

They are spending the most while showing no sign of ceding chart position to a newer entrant, which suggests the format's UA economics still work at scale rather than propped up by a launch window that has since closed. Hybrid-casual puzzle converts spend into downloads more efficiently, which is a different kind of success and worth not conflating with the survival genre's spend dominance.

What it means for buyers

Holiday planning built on October's mobile game ad spend charts can lean on the same competitive assumptions used for Q3. Nothing in this month's data argues for reweighting a Q4 budget away from genres that have already proven they can sustain spend through three consecutive quarters.

The more useful exercise this month is checking your own creative refresh cadence against a leaderboard that has stopped moving, since a static chart makes fatigue in your own account easier to spot, not harder.

Related archive reading

• Chart Watch, January: Mobile Game Ad Spend Rankings Hold
• Chart Watch, September: Mobile Game Download Charts