Microsoft Gaming’s new CEO Asha Sharma is now in charge of a mobile gaming empire that generated over $1.7bn in in-app purchases last year, according to Appmagic estimates.
As with our regular top-grossing games analyses, that big headline number comes with some caveats: these are third-party estimates that do not include ad or webshop revenue.
And several titles, like Call of Duty: Mobile, Diablo Immortal and Age of Empires Mobile, are developed in partnership with Tencent or NetEase, meaning Microsoft is effectively a licensor and likely receives a smaller percentage of the in-app purchase spend from players.
Nonetheless, these estimates give us the broad size and shape of the Microsoft Gaming empire on mobile. And, of course, the biggest chunk of the revenue is generated by mobile specialist King.
According to Appmagic, King’s games generated around $1.3bn in IAPs in 2025, making it the ninth-biggest mobile game publisher last year, narrowly behind Playrix ($1.4bn earned in 2025) and ahead of Supercell ($1.1bn).
Candy Crush Saga is the biggest IAP earner by far. King also serves non-paying players ads in many of its games, but that revenue is very difficult to estimate using third-party tools, so the total size of the business will be considerably larger overall.
King’s top earners in 2025
Candy Crush Saga: $1bn
Candy Crush Soda Saga: $161.1m
Farm Heroes Saga: $57.7m
Pet Rescue Saga: $15.1m
Candy Crush Solitaire: $12.6m
Candy Crush Jelly Saga: $10m
Bubble Witch 3 Saga: $9.4m
Candy Crush Friends Saga: $7.1m
Pyramid Solitaire Saga: $3.7m
Farm Heroes Super Saga: $3.7m
Bubble Witch 2 Saga: $2.9m
Blossom Blast Saga: $1.4m
Diamond Diaries Saga: $610k
That puts King’s total estimated IAP earnings for 2025 at ~$1.3bn. The next-biggest earner by label is Activision, which continues to see huge success from Call of Duty: Mobile with ~$250m earned in 2025 – though Tencent runs the game day to day and likely takes most of the IAP revenue.
US players are the biggest spenders by far, accounting for $126m of that $250m total in 2025. Japan was COD: Mobile’s second-biggest market last year, with $25.1m spent, followed by Mexico ($10.1m), Germany ($6.7m) and Brazil ($6.5m).
COD Mobile also has a SKU for selected Asian markets which performs pretty well, earning $25.5m in 2025. Top markets for this version are the Philippines ($12m), Taiwan ($8.2m) and Thailand ($2.4m).
2025 IAP earnings for Microsoft’s other mobile games
Activision
Call of Duty: Mobile: $250m
Call of Duty: Mobile (Garena): $25.5m
Mojang
Minecraft: $101.9m
Blizzard
Diablo Immortal: $58.9m
Diablo Immortal China (暗黑破坏神): $8.3m
Hearthstone: $59.6m
Warcraft Rumble: $4.4m
Tencent
Age of Empires Mobile: $56.4m
Bethesda
Fallout Shelter: $6.3m
The Elder Scrolls: Castles: $533k
The Elder Scrolls: Blades: $354k
Doom: $115k
Doom II: $65k
The Elder Scrolls: Legends CCG: $44k
Microsoft
Microsoft Solitaire Collection: $1.2m
Wordament: $155k
Mahjong by Microsoft: $58k
Microsoft Sudoku: $38k
Mojang’s Minecraft is still quietly generating over $100m a year for Microsoft on mobile at a $6.99 premium price, though there is an in-game store.
Hearthstone is another low-key cash cow, earning an estimated $59.6m last year on mobile, putting it narrowly behind the combined earnings of the two editions of Diablo Immortal: $67.2m. Those latter game(s) arrived in 2022 and are co-developed by NetEase, meaning that Blizzard will likely see a smaller percentage of that game’s earnings.
Warcraft Rumble still earned a respectable $4.4m last year, though it is in the process of being wound down, with no new content being added to the game.
Most of Age of Empires Mobile’s estimated $56.4m in 2025 earnings will likely be going to developer Tencent, which continues to run the game pretty successfully. $17.8m of that $56.4m total came from US players last year, with China its second-biggest market at $5.7m, followed by South Korea ($3.6m), Germany ($3m) and the UK ($2.3m).
Despite owning and operating games based on huge brands like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, it’s fair to say that Bethesda’s mobile catalogue is underperforming.
Fallout Shelter earned an estimated $6.3m in 2025, which would rank it near the bottom of King’s portfolio in terms of IAP spend. Very low IAP earnings for Elder Scrolls games Blades and Castles suggest these titles could be sunset fairly soon.
Doom and Doom II are premium games earning very little, while The Elder Scrolls: Legends CCG also seems destined for the chop sooner rather than later.
Finally, there’s Microsoft’s casual card games, of which its Solitaire Collection was the top earner in 2025 with $1.2m. Its other games Wordament, Mahjong and Sudoku are rounding errors in terms of IAP earnings, so it’s unlikely these will last much longer if there’s a tightening of the Microsoft Gaming portfolio across mobile.
So what’s next for mobile gaming at Microsoft?
King has thus far operated relatively independently within Microsoft, though its owner’s predilection for all things AI has, according to our sources, played a role in the 200 jobs cut at the Candy Crush maker last year.
Given Sharma’s prior role working in AI and the wider company’s push into this new(ish) frontier, one might expect further AI tools to be introduced into King staffers’ daily work, which could spark further fears of job cuts. And if AI is going to force its way into game development and marketing anywhere within the wider Microsoft gaming empire, it’ll likely be mobile first.
In terms of the games, Minecraft plus Activision and Blizzard’s titles will no doubt continue to generate plentiful revenue, though Minecraft could soon expand into the puzzle space. As we reported late last year, Mojang briefly had a game called Minecraft Blast in soft launch, though it now appears to have been removed.
A mobile-native version of World of Warcraft has long been rumoured, but it was reportedly cancelled in 2022. And yet this still feels like a no-brainer given the success of fellow legacy MMO RuneScape on mobile – perhaps Sharma and Blizzard will give this another shot.
Similarly, new mobile editions of Overwatch and StarCraft were rumoured to be in development at Nexon back in spring 2025, but nothing has emerged on these titles since.
Over at Activision, it seems very unlikely there will be any further attempts to launch new COD games on mobile after it failed to gain traction with Warzone Mobile, which was killed a little over a year after it launched. The existing arrangement between Tencent and Activision for COD Mobile appears to be pretty lucrative anyway.
Other big Microsoft-owned game brands have struggled to translate properly to mobile. Hutch and Microsoft once partnered to launch a match-3 based on the Forza franchise, which didn’t work out; the CSR-like Forza Street made around $2m before it was closed down; Gears Pop, a strange mash-up of toy and shooter brands, made about $3.5m before being shuttered.
A ‘proper’ mobile Halo game has never really been attempted, though two RTS spin-off Halo Wars games were briefly available on mobile platforms in the mid-2010s.
And now Xbox is under new management, perhaps the idea of creating separate, mobile-native games is a non-starter anyway. If Sharma’s introductory blog is anything to go by, Microsoft Gaming wants to get all of its games working seamlessly across platforms through canny use of its streaming and AI tech:
“Gaming now lives across devices, not within the limits of any single piece of hardware,” she wrote on Friday. “As we expand across PC, mobile and cloud, Xbox should feel seamless, instant and worthy of the communities we serve. We will break down barriers so developers can build once and reach players everywhere without compromise.”
Elsewhere in the same blog, Sharma promised to “relentlessly question everything, revisit processes, protect what works, and be brave enough to change what does not.”
That latter part sounds messy – it’s now up to Sharma and new chief creative officer Matt Booty to decide whether King and a raft of mobile-specific offshoots of Microsoft’s biggest gaming brands fall under the “what works” bracket, or more ominously, “what does not”.
Whatever plays out next, we can be sure that change is coming to Microsoft’s $1.7bn mobile game portfolio – we just don’t know where. Yet.
