Sub Club by RevenueCat · 2025-10-01
What Subscription Apps Can Learn About Monetization From Gaming — Mathias Gredal Nørvig, Subway Surfers
SYBO CEO Mathias Gredal Nørvig on how Subway Surfers (4.5B+ downloads, still top-5 downloaded every year) grows with a sub-10-person in-house content team and almost no ad spend, a truly free-to-play design with 80-85% of revenue from interstitial and rewarded ads, brand-safe ad serving for a young audience, traffic-swap collaborations with Brawl Stars, Crossy Road and 8 Ball Pool, and why apps should borrow season passes and rewarded ads from games.
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Numbers mentioned
| Subject | Metric | Value | Quote |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subway Surfers | downloads Lifetime downloads; roughly half are reinstalls | 4,500M downloads approximate | “So we can see that not only our 4.5 billion downloads and of course half of those are reinstalls approximately.” |
| Subway Surfers | share Share of downloads (lifetime and daily) that are reinstalls | 50% approximate | “And as I say, half of those are reinstalls” |
| Subway Surfers | downloads New installs per day, 13 years after launch (half reinstalls) | 1M downloads/day approximate | “And 13 years and we still have a million daily new installs.” |
| aggregateAll endless runner games using the Subway Surfers three-lane formula | downloads Combined downloads of games using the formula ('more than 15 billion') | 15,000M downloads estimate | “So I think combined more than 15 billion downloads on that formula.” |
| Subway Surfers | users Monthly players | 100M–150M users/month approximate | “Especially when you have a player base like us of between 100 and 150 million people every month” |
| Subway Surfers | share Share of revenue from advertising (interstitials and rewarded videos) | 80–85% approximate | “I read an interview you did that somewhere between 80% and 85% of revenues still to this day comes from advertising. Is that correct?” |
| Subway Surfers | count Ad impressions served per month | 1,000M ad impressions/month approximate | “when you're a show of a billion impressions a month as we are” |
| Subway Surfers | rank Top five most downloaded games every year since launch; some years #1; usually 3rd or 4th behind games that pay for traffic | 5 approximate | “seeing that we in the top downloads every year, we are in top five. We have been since launch.” |
| Subway Surfers | activity volume Marketing content assets produced by the in-house team per day | 5–10 assetsper team /day approximate | “And they produce what? 5, 10 assets a day.” |
| Subway Surfers | count Times the CEO has said no to the marketing team's content in 12 years | 2 vetoes | “I've said no to the marketing team twice.” |
| Subway Surfers | views A pure-fun viral video by the team that viewers did not connect to Subway Surfers | 100M viewsper video approximate | “Some of the viral videos we did in the past basically was just the team having fun, which generated 100 million views on a video” |
| Subway Surfers | views One of a new team member's first videos: dance in the guard mascot costume | 75M viewsper video approximate | “basically one of the first videos she produced had 75 million views” |
| Subway Surfers | team size Core content-production team, 'less than 10 people' (marketing overall also covers platform relations, growth, player support) | 10 people approximate | “The core part producing content is less than 10 people.” |
| Subway Surfers | ad spend Total paid boosting of organic content that is already going viral; otherwise marketing spend is salaries only | tens of thousands of dollars approximate | “So we do amplify it, but we're talking tens of thousands of dollars. We're not talking hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.” |
| Subway Surfers | ad spend Boost behind a piece of content that starts picking up | a few hundred dollars approximate | “when we see that some content picks up, then we might put a few hundred dollars behind it” |
| Subway Surfers | count World tour cadence: a new city/part of the world every three weeks | 3 weeks | “the world tour, which was a way of every three weeks going to a new part of the world” |
| Subway Surfers | time to milestone Lead time from first exploration to launch of a collaboration ('at least a year before') | 12 months approximate | “The initial exploration for deals like that usually start a year before, at least a year before.” |
| Crossy Road | downloads Download lift from the Crossy Road x Subway Surfers collab | bigger bump than Subway Surfers got estimate | “I know that they got a bigger bump in their downloads than we did in ours, but it didn't feel unfair” |
| Supercell | ltv Brawl Stars LTV per player vs Subway Surfers | higher than Subway Surfers estimate | “And with Brawl Stars specifically, I know that they make a higher LTV than we do.” |