For mobile UA leads, growth strategists, and creative ops directors building or scaling production systems that can sustain volume without collapsing on quality.
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On the call you'll receive:
Most mobile teams treat creative production as a department. FirstFun treats it as a moat.
When Last War: Survival went global on August 30, 2023, it did not enter the market with a champion creative and a backlog of variants. It entered with a saturated, segmented, multi-format library — by directional sourcing from creative-intelligence platforms (Sensor Tower, AppMagic, Gamigion, Naavik), the live engine ran thousands of active creatives across global markets, with daily output scaled aggressively across hyper-casual hook variants. Sensor Tower attributes the dominant ad concept — the math-based shooter minigame — to over 50% of the game's total UA impression volume across channels. Those volume figures come from third-party trackers, not from FirstFun directly, so treat them as directional rather than primary-data confirmed. The shape of the system, though, is visible in every ad library you can audit.
The result is now in the public record. Per MAF and AppMagic data, Last War: Survival reached approximately 160M lifetime downloads and $2.6B in lifetime player spending by December 2025 — ranking #49 for downloads and #2 for revenue globally among mobile games. PocketGamer.biz documented the $2B milestone on February 15, 2025, after a record January 2025 of $212M and a single-day spend peak of $11.6M on February 14. Monthly revenue scaled from approximately $30M in January 2024 to $138M in December 2024 (+360% in twelve months), with September 2025 hitting $180M. The US contributed roughly 33% of lifetime spend ($664.9M), followed by South Korea (~$364.7M) and Japan (~$361.9M). At peak, the game generated approximately $2M+ in daily revenue against approximately 200K daily downloads.
None of that happens with a hero creative and three variants. It happens with a creative engine that was engineered over years on the prior product.
Top War: Battle Game — the predecessor title from the same operator network (RiverGame, which FirstFun took a 42% stake in in 2021) — accumulated approximately $1.1B in lifetime user spending and largely defined the modern hybrid-casual 4X playbook: an ad-like minigame at the top of the funnel that transitions into a hero-collector base-builder. Top War taught the team how to operate at extreme paid acquisition share without burning ROAS. That capability is not a marketing tactic. It is an industrialized creative supply chain that Last War inherited day one.
The lesson for any mobile team reading this: the volume you can produce at launch is downstream of the production system you built before launch. Last War did not get to thousands of active creatives because FirstFun spun up a war room in July 2023. It got there because the same operator network had been running an industrialized creative engine on Top War since 2020 — refining briefing protocols, templatizing playable scaffolding, building external production partnerships, and standardizing platform-specific hook strategies (faithful gameplay on AppLovin, hyper-casual fake-gameplay minigames on Meta and Snapchat, native UGC and celebrity formats on TikTok).
This playbook reverse-engineers that engine into four operator chapters: where to source hook ideas at the scale FirstFun operates, how to pick a hook that lasts 100 variations instead of dying at variation 15, how to brief external producers (creators, agencies, or internal teams) so scripts ship without endless revision cycles, and how to read your own ad library to separate compounding winners from quiet bleeders.
The underlying claim is simple: the discipline behind FirstFun's creative production is not unique to FirstFun. It is reproducible. Most mobile teams underinvest in it because the ROI is invisible until the moment when launch volume — or a global campaign window — exposes the gap.
Step back from the four chapters and the operating model becomes visible.
Last War launched with thousands of active creatives spanning hyper-casual minigames, faithful 4X gameplay, and UGC / celebrity formats across all major UA channels (directional figures from Sensor Tower, AppMagic, Gamigion creative-intelligence sourcing — not FirstFun confirmed, but visible in the shape of any ad library audit) because Top War had been building that capacity for three and a half years. The hook archetypes were validated. The variation axes were documented. The production templates were templatized. The platform-specific strategies were live and instrumented. The briefing protocols were running. The ad library reading dashboards were operational.