10 Most Successful Mobile Games of All-Time

Working on a mobile game can be an exciting prospect for small developers, since they can hope to achieve immense success and make a fortune with their creation, like those who made these 10 most successful mobile games of all-time did. While the reality is that the competition is stiff, if you’re a developer hoping to make it big, the hope is still there, since you never know what people will like next, and it doesn’t have to be something with a ton of technical wizardry. Creating a mostly-perfect game takes a lot of attention to detail, ingenuity and skill however.

Building a user base takes time, unless you’re a big company that can already push the new game along with another title that’s already successful. A bit of advertising can go a long way, but word of mouth is still the best way to get a game app to be successful. After all, Rovio was an unknown name before Angry Birds made it big. Other names have built themselves in a similar fashion, including Zynga Inc (NASDAQ:ZNGA), which was mostly famous for making Facebook games like Farmville before transitioning largely to mobile. Now with hit mobile games like Words With Friends and CSR2, Zynga Inc (NASDAQ:ZNGA) has 15 million daily active users on mobile devices and enjoyed second quarter bookings of $174.7 million, at the upper-end of its guidance range. It’s no wonder the hedge funds that we track had Zynga Inc (NASDAQ:ZNGA) pegged as one of the cheap tech stocks poised to gain; shares of the company are up by over 15% since June 30.

Nintendo Co., Ltd (ADR) (OTCMKTS:NTDOY) is a huge name by itself, but didn’t exactly hit it big in the mobile games world until Pokemon hit smartphones (not that they were really trying), while the likes of Activision Blizzard Inc. (NASDAQ:ATVI) were successful with hardcore gamers first before expanding their reach to mobile as well. We’re dig deeper into those companies’ mobile efforts later in the article.

Vdovichenko Denis / Shutterstock.com

In order to create today’s list we took a look at the list of the top grossing games for Android and the top grossing games list for iPhone and handed out points in accordance with the spot they occupied. Then, we also awarded the games extra points depending on if they made it onto the top-10 lists of both operating systems or not. Without further ado, here are the 10 most successful mobile games of all-time. Afterwards, be sure to check out the 10 best selling video games of all-time.