Mai Miyazaki
Global PR, Adways


Today, we’d like to focus on a popular Chinese mobile game 「刀塔传奇」 (English name; Dota Legend, hereinafter called Dota) that topped the charts in China throughout 2014. We found this interesting article from Chinese game website GameLook that wrote about Dota’s 2015Q1 revenue and here we summarized the points.



Before getting into Dota’s sales, here is the Top 10 Android apps in March 2015 provided by TalkingData.




Since Dota was released in 2014Q1, it has always been in high position in Chinese app charts. This is the move in the iOS and Android charts for the past six months.




See how they're doing well in Android ranking throughout years?
Now you may wonder- “how much revenue Dota is really making?” Here is an answer.




This is a sales report of 中清龙图 (English name: Longtu, hereinafter called Longtu), one of Dota’s publishers who marks 65% of the total sales. Longtu reported its sales for 2014 was RMB 1,288M (US$206M) and already reached RMB 445M (US$70M) for 2015 Q1. Surprising part that we highlight here is 200% growth of their international sales. Since August 2014, Dota has showed up in international markets including HongKong, Macau, Taiwan and SEA countries. The table below summarizes app and publisher names in international markets. We can see that Dota is well choosing right partners in those markets.








iOS and Android market share of Dota is 40% and 60% respectively- Android 3rd market store makes more than half of the total sales.

Besides sales report, here is some another remarkable information about Dota.
● After launched in February 2014, it had an average increase of 3 million users every month (oh my).
● As of March 2015, total number of users: 53 million, MOU: 5.8 million, number of paid users: 0.74 million and ARPPU: RMB 377.89 (US$60).
● User age distribution: 30’s: 51% / 20’s: 40%

Dota announced it will have an update this month with new characters!. It is expected that their dominance in app charts will go on for a while.


Adways is a leading mobile marketing solution provider headquartered in Tokyo. Adways is primarily known for Asia’s largest mobile CPI adnetwork “AppDriver” and third-party mobile tracking tool “PartyTrack” used by major app developers worldwide. Since 2004 when it opened the first overseas office in China, Adways has been aggressively expanding its mobile app distribution network throughout the Asian markets. Now with more than 1,000 employees in 11 countries (Asia and US), Adways supports app developers worldwide to maximize user acquisition and monetization and constantly thrives to provide new value to the market. press@adways.net

TalkingData is the largest 3rd party mobile data service provider that have been widely recognized and adopted by the whole mobile ecosystem in China. More than 80,000 apps that access over 1.2 billion unique mobile devices in China rely on this mobile analytics platform to track and analyze mobile users’ behaviors. The data collected from these products and also exchanged from the mobile distribution ecosystem enables TalkingData to build the largest behavioral data panel of the mobile population in China. Based on this, they are able to provide the most accurate estimations for the installation, activity and usage of any app in China, especially in the complex Android marketplace.