The developer Sybo Games has been facing the same challenge, both due to the natural limitations of the category and the strong vitality of Subway Parkour!

When it comes to parkour games, one cannot ignore "Subway Parkour". The developer behind it, Sybo Games, was fully acquired by British game company Miniclip in 2022, and Miniclip was acquired by Tencent as early as 2015. Therefore, this classic IP can be said to belong to the Tencent series.

Just recently, after 14 years of development, the "Subway Surfers" IP "old branches are sprouting again", officially launching the sequel "Subway Surfers City" in over 170 countries and regions around the world, and achieving a series of impressive results in a short period of time.

So what is the specific market performance that should be done? What kind of testing cycle has it gone through? How has the gameplay changed compared to the previous installment? Is there a long-term issue of 'weakness'? If it exists, why can't the sequel reproduce the glory of the previous installment? As a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tencent, what are the products under the development company Sybo Games in recent years, and how have they performed? In the following text, Dian Dian Hai will be analyzed one by one.

01

The preliminary testing lasted for a year and a half

Open beta for 16 days, with a download volume of 11.91 million

Although Subway Surfers City only officially went public for nearly a month, according to DianDian data, the game was first released in Canada, the UK, Denmark, Indonesia, and the Philippines in July 2024 and began small-scale testing. The game was also launched at the same time, and its daily downloads did not exceed 3000 until the first half of 2025 (with monthly downloads fluctuating between 30000 and 75000), and its daily revenue did not exceed 5000 yuan.

Starting from around July 2025, the game will expand its testing scale in the regions where it has already been launched, with daily downloads gradually increasing from 5000 to 20000 to 30000, but the corresponding flow rate will not change significantly.

After about a year and a half of testing, Subway Surfers City was officially launched globally on February 26, 2026. On the same day, it reached the top 20 free to play iOS games in 161 countries and regions (including 125 regional markets such as the United States, France, and Germany), and the top 50 best-selling games in 9 regional markets.

As of March 16th, it still ranks in the top 50 free to play games in 72 regional markets and the top 50 best-selling games in 6 regional markets (concentrated in Africa).

As for specific market data, in terms of download volume, the daily download volume surged to 100000 on the day before the public beta, and directly increased tenfold to 1.007 million on the first day. This daily download value continued to decline slowly until the fourth day of the public beta, and the current estimated daily download volume is around 500000.

In terms of daily revenue (IAP, the same below), it was about 310000 yuan on the first day (only 11000 yuan the previous day), and then continued to slowly increase until reaching a peak of 513000 yuan on the eighth day of public testing. However, since then, the daily revenue has entered a downward trend, currently around 210000 yuan.

As of March 13th, the game has been in public beta for 16 days, with a cumulative download volume of 11.91 million (15.3 million downloads since testing). Brazil, India, and the United States rank in the top 3 with 14.58%, 11.66%, and 9.82% respectively. In terms of platforms, Google Play has contributed as much as 76.77%;

The total revenue is estimated to be around 6.2 million yuan (tested to date, the revenue is 7.15 million yuan), with the United States ranking first with 33.94%, followed closely by France (15.18%) and Germany (8.47%). As for the platform, it is almost in a 50-50 position.

It is worth noting that the 3D jailbreak themed parkour game "Prison Escape: 3D Obby Parkour" developed by Metagame, which was launched on Google Play at the end of January, had a total download volume of only 1.7 million in 16 days, demonstrating the former's strength.

02

The powerful continuous operation capability of the previous game+natural limitations of parkour gameplay

Or the reason for the long-term obstruction of Subway Surfers City

Based on the current performance of Subway Surfers City, the game has shown strong explosive power in terms of short-term download volume and corresponding free ranking. However, it seems to be less optimistic in terms of flow and download trends, and there may be obvious challenges in the long term.

Compared to most new games, where short-term data, especially the surge in download volume, relies on advertising, this game has invested very little in purchase volume. In the past 30 days, its de duplication advertising creativity on Google was only 111, and on Apple it was as low as 8.

Correspondingly, as mentioned earlier, 'Prison Escape: 3D Obby Parkour', which has a huge difference in download data, has had over 300 Google ad creatives in the past 30 days.

In fact, Subway Surfers City focuses more on product promotion on official social media platforms. In terms of operation, it launched an "early bird activity" at the beginning of its public beta, providing a limited time version of the "Subway Parkour Classic Skateboarding" to stimulate players. In addition, it is also extremely important to use various game promotions under the "Subway Parkour" IP.

And the most important suction operation mentioned above is definitely the traffic pool that comes with the IP, which is "Subway Parkour".

In fact, on the parkour track, "Temple Run", which was launched in August 2011, became popular earlier, but "Subway Parkour" has a clear advantage as a latecomer. Since 2021, the monthly download volume of the latter far exceeds that of the former. The merger of monthly downloads for "Temple Run" and "Temple Run 2" will bring it on par with the latter.

At present, the cumulative download volume of "Subway Parkour" has exceeded 4.5 billion times, of which about half come from the return of old users. The MAU has remained stable between 110 million and 150 million for a long time. Regarding how it achieves ultra long line operation, Sybo's CEO and game core person in charge have clearly shared:

Firstly, it has stepped on the wave of smartphone popularity, and there are many truly mature parkour products. Based on this, it has intuitive and simple operations, and adopts a more fair commercial model of "completely free core experience+incentive video advertising as a supplement+personalized expression oriented internal purchase", which has helped it have a huge user base;

Secondly, the team believes that retention is more important than novelty, so they attach great importance to the continuous updates of the game. For example, the game has been upgraded from a single player to a PVP tournament system, divided into prop competitions, score competitions, and friend competitions. In addition, since 2013, with the theme of "World Tour", a new city scene has been updated every three weeks on average. This strategy creates sustained and predictable expectations for players, reduces planning costs for the R&D team, produces rich content with applicable product ideas, and provides natural topics for all marketing actions. All of these factors contribute to a long-term stable retention rate of around 65% for the following month, while the average level in the parkour gaming industry is usually between 30-40%;

Finally, just as Subway Surfers City did or inherited the concept, Subway Parkour does not rely on large-scale advertising, but invests in creativity and the brand itself. For example, linking with popular IPs, using settings, animations, and other forms to enhance game characters and worldviews, creating entertaining and interactive videos, UGC incentives, and so on.

It should be noted that although the above series of operations ensure the long-term development of Subway Surfers, they may not be entirely beneficial for Subway Surfers City.

From the perspective of gaming experience, the essential differences between the two games are not significant. The most obvious feature of the new work is the optimization of visual effects, followed by setting the background in a modern city. Initially, four distinctive urban areas with different styles were opened, each corresponding to a rich level structure. At the same time, designs such as two-stage jumping, bouncing mechanism, and bubble gum bouncing were added. Although the gameplay has added city roaming mode and trial mode, introduced character skill system and main storyline tasks to enrich the gameplay matrix, endless parkour is still the core.

Overall, the difference in core experience is small, and coupled with the basic consistency in promotion and operation ideas, it is difficult for Subway Surfers City to attract new parkour players. The strong vitality and sustained operation ability of Subway Surfers City, especially its ability to recall lost players, make it difficult for Subway Surfers City to achieve healthy streaming of the former. Therefore, although Subway Surfers City is currently showing signs of improvement, its future is still somewhat worrying.

03 Summary

Looking back at the product experience of developer SYBO, it can be found that the dilemma encountered by Subway Surfers City is not the first time.

In fact, shortly after the popularity of "Subway Parkour" in 2015, SYBO launched a new parkour game called "Blades of Brim". The game is set in a magical world and incorporates RPG development elements. However, this attempt was not successful, and the monthly revenue of the game is currently less than 20000 yuan.

But SYBO was not discouraged and began to focus on derivative games of "Subway Surfers IP", launching "Subway Surfers Match" (2022) and "Subway Surfers Blast" (2023) consecutively. The former is a substitution elimination gameplay with a monthly download peak of 420000, while the latter is a click elimination gameplay with a monthly download peak of 1.85 million. However, their peak monthly revenue did not exceed 100000 yuan, and both games were taken down in October 2025.

In the same period of 2022, SYBO also released an Apple Arcade exclusive game called "Subway Surfers Tag", which added stunt skateboarding elements to parkour gameplay. However, due to its single channel release and inclusion of Apple's subscription service, it did not receive widespread attention.

Overall, although SYBO has the support of major companies and its own popular products, "Continuation of Life," the natural limitations of the parkour category (simple gameplay, difficult to expand, and obvious head monopoly effect) make it difficult to produce new popular products. When the company began to use the "Subway Parkour" IP to expand other leisure gameplay in 2022, it encountered a red sea of competition in the leisure category, which can be said to be a slow and slow process.

But in the future, SYBO wants to go further. In addition to continuing the orthodox sequel of "Subway Surfers City" IP, it also needs to find new template gameplay in the leisure market and improve agility.