Three Years After Launch, Last War Passes 190 Million Installs

Last War: Survival has crossed 190 million lifetime installs. AppMagic estimates published by mobile marketing agency Udonis on 21 July put the running total at 192.5 million. FunFly pushed the game live worldwide on 2 August 2023, which means it covered that distance in a shade under three years.

The number is enormous. It also arrives at an uncomfortable moment, because the install counter is close to the only line on the chart still pointing up.

Where Those Installs Came From

Two calendar years did nearly all the work. Udonis’s breakdown of the AppMagic figures gives the game 6.6 million downloads in 2023, and it only had five months on sale that year. Then 2024 landed 78.7 million. 2025 followed with 75.8 million. By the time the report went out, 2026 had added another 30.7 million.

The monthly view is less flattering. Installs peaked at 11.9 million in an early 2026 month, lifted by a holiday marketing push. The most recent full month in the same report shows roughly 2 million. That is an 83 percent fall in half a year.

The player count slid too, but far more gently, and the gap between those two curves is the whole story. Monthly actives peaked at 27.7 million in January. February dropped to 23 million, March to 20.6 million, and May sat at 16.2 million. Daily actives went from 4.4 million to 3.3 million over the same stretch. Installs fell 83 percent. Active players fell roughly 41 percent. Acquisition collapsed. The people already inside mostly stayed put.

Ads Did The Work, Not Word Of Mouth

The game came out of First Fun, the studio behind Top War, and now reaches players through Singapore-registered FUNFLY. Nobody stumbled onto it. FunFly bought attention at a scale very few publishers attempt, and the creative it bought became famous for the wrong reason.

You have seen the ad. A small soldier runs down a lane and picks between gates that multiply or shrink his squad. It is a hypercasual clip bolted to the front of a 4X base builder, and the two share almost nothing. A PocketGamer.biz analysis of the game’s user acquisition strategy argues the mismatch is engineered rather than accidental: onboarding keeps the 4X layer out of sight for as long as it can, so the player who came for the gates is already invested by the time the city building arrives.

Regulators have taken an interest in that pattern generally. The UK’s advertising watchdog keeps dedicated guidance on how mobile games may be advertised and has upheld complaints where the minigame in the ad turned out to be a sliver of the real product. Last War holds a partial defence. The lane-running mode does exist in the game. It is simply not where the hours go.

FunFly Turned The Complaint Into The Campaign

Most publishers would quietly retire a creative that draws that much mockery. FunFly amplified it. In late 2024, the company hired Antony Starr, best known as Homelander in The Boys, to front a campaign built entirely on the joke that the developers had gone and made a real game out of the fake game in the ads. Forbes unpicked the strategy while the spots were still circulating. The criticism became the hook, and the campaign is credited with the download surge that carried Last War to the top of the US charts.

Eighteen Dollars An Install

Here is what separates Last War from most games sitting on nine-figure install counts. Almost none of them convert like this one. The same AppMagic data puts lifetime revenue at roughly $3.5 billion after platform fees, which works out at $18.05 for every download the game has ever taken. Udonis notes that most strategy titles measure the same figure in low single digits.

The economy is built for it. A permanent VIP track rewards cumulative spending rather than any single purchase, with a seasonal Battle Pass and a Monthly Pass stacked on top. Naavik’s analysis of how Last War competes in the 4X category goes through the design layer by layer. The short version is that the game gives a committed player somewhere to put money every single week.

The audience fits the model. Most players are adults between 25 and 44. Spending concentrates in the United States first, then Japan and South Korea.

Years of that investment leave players sitting on bases that cost real time and real money to build, and a secondary market has grown around them. On third-party trading platforms, a developed Last War account for sale gets listed much like any other digital asset, with FunFly taking no part in the transaction.

Revenue Line Points The Other Way

The spending picture has turned sharply. MobileGamer.biz published AppMagic’s August estimates on 9 September, and they put Last War at about $56.7 million in in-app purchases for the month. That is 11th place, outside the top ten, and the site reckons you would have to go back to February 2024 to find a weaker month. In March, the game was still banking $130 million to $150 million. June had already fallen to roughly $71 million, which the same outlet called its worst month since shortly after launch.

The decline is not unique to FunFly. Whiteout Survival has now posted five consecutive monthly drops, and Century’s Kingshot has parked itself just under $80 million for three months running. These store estimates also miss the resale layer entirely, where marketplaces such as Buyacc, an independent platform for buying and selling game accounts, list Last War beside Mobile Legends and PUBG Mobile.

The top of the chart has reshuffled in the meantime. Honor of Kings is back above $150 million a month, and Gossip Harbor finished second for the first time, which puts a merge puzzler ahead of the entire 4X field.

Updates Have Not Slowed

Whatever the charts say, the release cadence has held. An August update brought in the Crystal Event, which lets anyone with a level 20 base put up a Crystal Factory, and the patch notes on the game’s App Store listing keep arriving on schedule. The studio’s channels flagged maintenance for another update on 16 September.

So the install counter keeps climbing. It just takes a lot longer now to move the same distance.