From Game of War to Last Asylum: The evolution of 4x monetisation

• First-generation 4x titles like Game of War declined once user acquisition stopped despite its long-term monetisation systems.
• Last Asylum represents the next iteration of 4X onboarding using a loop inspired by My Perfect Hotel.

Jakub Remiar is a product and game design consultant.

As game genres are evolving, it is important to differentiate each generation otherwise you may end up with an already obsolete design in your game.

For example, a traditional level saga being replaced by a mansion restoration as a puzzle metagame, or a slot machine being transformed into a game board within the core gameplay of Coin Looters. The iteration described here is even more complex, as it effectively adds another small game in front of your main game.

The 4x (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate) subgenre has the highest IAP monetisation of any genre category in the market. It is the largest revenue-driving subgenre of strategy, as strategy itself makes 25% of total mobile game revenue. Strategy was the only genre growing across revenue, downloads, and time spent last year (Sensor Tower).

The biggest newly released game of 2025 was Kingshot, which is a 4x. This just means that 4x is not only big, but also the most monetisation-efficient design on mobile currently. And it is not only because of its heavy feature set powered by alliance systems, PvP competition or giant live ops. It is because the 3rd generation of 4x games cracked the UA challenge, which is the single biggest deciding factor if a mobile game is a long-term success or a shark-fin failure currently.

If we look briefly at previous generations, we see Machine Zone, with Game of War and Mobile Strike, dominating the charts from 2014 to 2017, when they literally stopped user acquisition, and the games instantly declined. This model was very clunky regarding its onboarding, even though it already had the full 4x high LTV engine.

Then comes the second generation, driven by companies like Lilith, with Rise of Kingdoms, dominating the covid era between 2019 and 2023. Here, the onboarding was much smoother, the UI looked like it was made by Supercell and Heroes with RPG elements and gacha systems were added into the engine. But until this point the games were more or less marketed as a 4x.

Then comes the current post-covid era driven by Century Games and River game. Whiteout Survival is the perfect example of this evolution. As Frozen City was launched, Century Games saw insane metrics and decided to put the Frozen City idle game as an additional game in front, which would serve only as onboarding in their next 4x onboarding funnel. Hence, Whiteout Survival was launched.

Soon after that, Rivergame launched Last War, which used a similar setup with the gates mechanic as its onboarding “minigame” as marketing creatives of both of these games shifted completely to these “onboarding games”. Now they were not fake anymore, as you would play immediately, what you saw in the creatives. 

And then comes 2025, where this model again evolved for Century games, as they found their new creative on Steam, in the form of a small, innocent indie game called ThroneFall.

They integrated it again into their onboarding and now half of the market uses this creative concept in their ads, even games outside of the 4x genre like Royal Match. This setup is so successful that we already saw the 2nd-generation companies using it, where FunPlus copied Dark War into Tiles Survive, and Lilith is doing a slightly more ambitious iteration with Palmon Survival, masking it as Palword, the big Steam Pokemon-like hit. 

So it's 2026 now, and we see 37 Interactive entering the game as another big 4x company from the covid era, with another new front-facing game in the 3rd-generation setup.

This time, they are using My Perfect Hotel, the hypercasual hit game from SayGames, which did more than 270 Mil. downloads in 4 years and has a similar easy to get loop with very wide appeal. So the beginning of the game is nearly 1:1, except for the theme change to fit the Last Asylum medieval doctor theme. A month after launch, the game has already scaled to more than $400K a day in revenue, and it's top 5 in daily downloads in the 4x category. Is this the new Kingshot of 2026?

And as we speak this model is already spreading into the second most efficient LTV engine category - coin looters. Games like Top Tycoon or Carnival Tycoon are already following the same playbook, putting the idle theme park core into the front and their creatives.

All this points to the simple fact that what happens in 4x currently has a direct effect on the whole market. The most cutting-edge trends, creative concepts and product strategies are being developed by 4x companies and everyone else cannot wait to integrate them into their product pipeline. 

The whole market is currently looking at the 4x genre as the main trendsetter. In IAP monetisation, live ops systems and mainly the onboarding funnel, are paired with its unique ad creatives approach. I expect many other genres to follow the 4x playbook soon in both Product and UA contexts, as it is currently the only solution to the CPI problem.

The current situation is strangling the mobile games market, except if you have a world-renowned IP to tackle this, but that can still fail and this playbook doesn't require paying royalties. So next time when you don’t know how to scale your game just make sure you check what is happening in 4x.