Its flagship title Tasty Travels: Merge Game has never fallen out of the top 20 of the U.S. iOS game grossing chart in the past six months, with monthly revenue exceeding $25 million (more than RMB 170 million) in each of the past three months. Three successor titles—Hotel Legacy: Merge Game ($4.53 million in September, approximately RMB 30.37 million), Just Desserts ($3.05 million, approximately RMB 20.5 million), and Family Farm Merge ($2.03 million, approximately RMB 14 million)—are also on a steady growth path.

In addition, a considerable number of new titles remain in continuous testing, including Family Tales: Merge & Design and Frozen Manor: Merge Mystery. This demonstrates the company’s determination and persistence in fully mastering the merge genre.

At the same time, it should not be overlooked that in the casual-SLG category—which brought Diandian Interactive back into the industry spotlight and made it a leading overseas publisher—the company has not let up either. It has been moving forward even more aggressively beneath the surface.

01

Two Leaders Defend the Core, While New Releases Accelerate the Handover

Top Force Surpasses $4.8 Million in Monthly Revenue, While Lordrush Overtakes It

Over the past year, Whiteout Survival and Kingshot have almost never fallen out of the top 10 of the U.S. iOS game grossing chart. The former has generated at least $110 million in monthly revenue (excluding domestic data, as below), while the latter has fluctuated between $57 million and $95 million per month.

Beyond these two flagship giants, Diandian Interactive is releasing new casual-SLG titles at a pace no slower than its merge products in order to continue dominating the category and protect its super-leader position. It is even more efficient at producing high-potential new titles.

In fact, Diandian Data’s observations suggest that Diandian Interactive may have already found the pillar products of the next generation of the casual-SLG category. One is Top General, which we discussed in the article “Diandian Interactive’s SLG New-Game Battle Royale: Multiple Kingshot-Like Titles Weaken, but Why Has Top General Emerged as a Dark Horse?”

The game uses a snow-and-ice theme and combines idle factory management, combat, on-screen progression, and a COK-like system. It first entered testing in March 2024 under the name Top Commander. After being renamed Top General in June this year, it began generating measurable market data. It was renamed Top Force: Commander again in August, when monthly downloads surged to 1.726 million from fewer than 10,000 in July. Monthly revenue also crossed $1 million for the first time, reaching $1.51 million (approximately RMB 10.12 million), up 978.9% month on month. After September began, monthly downloads reached 2.58 million and monthly revenue climbed to $4.811 million (approximately RMB 32.23 million).

The game is still growing. Daily downloads hover around 100,000, while daily revenue is above $250,000 (approximately RMB 1.7 million). It ranks in the top 100 of the iOS game grossing charts in 32 countries and regions, including No. 124 in the United States.

In the nearly four months since it first began generating measurable data, Top Force has accumulated approximately $7.8 million in revenue (about RMB 52.2 million). The United States, Germany, and South Korea are its top three markets, contributing 39.82%, 10.38%, and 7.77%, respectively. It has accumulated approximately 5.03 million downloads, with the United States, Brazil, and Germany accounting for 14.94%, 7.94%, and 6.55%. RPD (revenue per download) is approximately $1.65 (about RMB 11.06).

However, although Top Force has shown strong momentum and substantial potential among Diandian Interactive’s next-generation products, there is always a stronger player. The recent release Lordrush has begun to clearly outperform it in daily revenue and growth rate.

So what kind of testing experience has this medieval-realistic Kingshot-like title gone through? How has it performed in the market and in gameplay, and what has its publishing cadence looked like? We break it down below.

02

CBT in May, Global Testing in July, $7.5 Million in September

Lordrush Accelerates Its Climb and Becomes the Focus of New Releases

Public information shows that Lordrush began maintaining official accounts on major overseas social platforms in early May this year. In the middle of the same month, the game launched on Google Play in selected countries and regions and began a nearly two-week CBT.

After the CBT ended in late May, the game was quickly delisted in early June, but its official social-media accounts continued to update. Notably, some industry practitioners said the test results were very strong and that Diandian Interactive was quite satisfied internally.

On July 20, the game returned to both platforms and gradually expanded into more than 170 regional markets for large-scale testing. It began generating measurable market data at that point.

In terms of downloads, the game recorded approximately 32,000 on its first day and then began to grow slowly with fluctuations. In July, Lordrush gained 651,000 downloads in just 12 days. As user acquisition scaled in August, monthly downloads increased to 2.394 million. Growth continued in September, with daily downloads reaching a peak of 127,000 on September 7 and monthly downloads reaching 2.85 million. Daily downloads are currently around 90,000.

Compared with its gradual progress in downloads, the game has been exceptionally aggressive in revenue.

In July, daily revenue was generally below $35,000 (approximately RMB 240,000), and monthly revenue was only $196,000 (approximately RMB 1.315 million). Beginning in August, however, revenue growth accelerated significantly, with monthly revenue surging to $2.73 million (approximately RMB 18.38 million). After entering September, growth accelerated further, with monthly revenue reaching $7.5 million (approximately RMB 50.2 million), up 175% month on month.

The game has now generated more than $300,000 in daily revenue (over RMB 2 million) for 10 consecutive days. It ranks in the top 100 of the iOS game grossing charts in 35 regional markets, including No. 65 in the United States. Both its daily revenue and U.S. ranking are clearly ahead of Top Force, which began testing earlier.

As of now, Lordrush has been in formal global testing for two and a half months, with approximately 6.7 million cumulative downloads. The United States, Brazil, and the Philippines rank as its top three download markets, accounting for 15.31%, 7.61%, and 7.32%, respectively. By platform, Google Play has a clear advantage, accounting for 81.94%.

Total revenue is approximately $13.15 million (about RMB 89.21 million), with the United States, South Korea, and Germany contributing 46.49%, 8.78%, and 7.62%, respectively. By platform, the two platforms are almost evenly split.

Overall, Lordrush has had a shorter testing period, but its absolute market data and growth rate are both better than Top Force’s. In addition, a research report from Guolian Minsheng Securities noted that Lordrush took 25, 16, and 18 days from launch to enter the free chart, the grossing chart, and the top 100 of the grossing chart, respectively. It was slightly slower than Kingshot, but faster than Whiteout Survival, and significantly faster than the casual merge titles Tasty Travels and Hotel Legacy.

It has become Diandian Interactive’s most impressive new release after Whiteout Survival and Kingshot, and reaching $10 million in monthly revenue may not be far away.

03

Adopting the Mature Kingshot Framework

Lordrush Uses a Realistic Medieval Package to Find Incremental Growth

Let us now return to Lordrush itself, which is closely related to Kingshot.

The two games are highly similar in their gameplay structure. They begin with light controls, using a single joystick to control the lord, and combine tower defense with city building, with auto-battle supported throughout. The learning barrier is extremely low. In the mid-game, seamless transitions into city construction, resident management, hero development, expeditions, alliance battles, and territory competition bring players into a longer-term social and strategic loop.

But if we look only at theme and art, Lordrush and Kingshot are clearly differentiated. Kingshot uses a low-poly cartoon style and highly saturated colors, creating a lighter and brighter overall mood. Lordrush, by contrast, is set in a more traditional medieval war world, with tighter colors and forms. Its castles, lords, knights, villages, and battlefields are presented more realistically, and the palette is heavier.

This change is not merely a matter of swapping art assets. The cartoon Kingshot more easily communicates a lighthearted lord-progression fantasy to broad audiences. Lordrush attempts to attract users who are more familiar with traditional strategy games and prefer a more serious depiction of war through realistic castles and a warlike atmosphere. Their target audiences do not fully overlap, but at the foundation they still belong to the same lightweight strategy framework.

This also explains why Lordrush can retain independent acquisition value despite gameplay that is highly similar to Kingshot. It does not redesign a completely different SLG system; instead, it places already validated mission pacing, progression structures, and user-acquisition scripts into a visual framework more aligned with hardcore strategy aesthetics. For Diandian Interactive, the cost of validating gameplay has been greatly reduced, while the new variables are concentrated in art, theme, advertising expression, and user segmentation.

The operation of the official social accounts shows that around testing and launch, the product continuously updated content around its medieval worldview, castle building, hero showcases, defensive battles, and lord progression. Its promotional focus is distinct from Kingshot’s cartoon expression. Industry user-acquisition observations also show that Lordrush reuses advertising themes Diandian Interactive has already validated, such as defending routes, weaker-side counterattacks, and town expansion, while switching to more realistic characters and war scenes.

Therefore, Lordrush’s value does not lie in reinventing casual-strategy gameplay. It lies in Diandian Interactive once again demonstrating the extensibility of a mature product framework: the same city-building, progression, and alliance logic can reach different user groups and acquire genuine incremental users by changing the art style, thematic expression, and early-stage entry points.

04 Conclusion

Over the past few years, Whiteout Survival and Kingshot have proven that Diandian Interactive can combine low-barrier front-end gameplay, clear progression feedback, and the long-term systems of traditional SLG. Through sustained user acquisition and version operations, it has taken casualized products to global markets. These two leading titles continue to generate stable revenue through collaborations, seasons, alliance events, and long-term content updates.

At the same time, the outline of Diandian Interactive’s next-generation dual-engine casual-SLG portfolio is beginning to emerge.

Products represented by Top Force are experimenting more with combinations of soldier factories, idle management, combat, and COK-like systems. Lordrush follows the Kingshot route, repackaging light tower defense, town management, hero development, and alliance competition as a realistic medieval version. The two products have different front-end entry points, target users, and visual expressions, but they share the same task: finding new incremental growth on top of a mature framework.

Among them, Lordrush has become the one to watch most closely, thanks to faster revenue growth and higher rankings in Tier-1 markets. Whether it can stabilize revenue while scaling user acquisition will determine whether Diandian Interactive’s casual-SLG portfolio can move beyond support from two leading titles toward a relay of multiple products. It is still too early to declare a third super-hit, but a new growth pillar is gradually becoming clear.