Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
10 tactics from Mathias Gredal Nørvig
What Subscription Apps Can Learn: Monetization From Gaming
Watch the full episode“The short answer is that we spend nothing. We spend salaries. It's all organic. The core part producing content is less than 10 people. They are super nimble and very efficient at producing — and therefore the flywheel runs by itself.”
Subway Surfers spends nothing on paid ads — 10 people produce 5-10 assets a day and the flywheel runs itself
Subway Surfers' entire content marketing engine is fewer than 10 people. No paid amplification budget beyond small boosts of content that is already going viral. The team produces 5-10 assets a day, balancing in-game-relevant material with trend-jacking content that rides cultural moments. The result is near-daily viral posts and an evergreen top-3 chart position without spending millions on user acquisition.
“Not only do we allow them to do it, we also share it afterwards if they do something cool. The team is also very autonomous — we've had a very proactive team for many years that have managed to make several viral waves where we could see that the audience really is picking up.”
Amplify UGC by sharing the best user content yourself — social proof for creators costs nothing and generates more content
Subway Surfers' UGC flywheel is reinforced by the brand's own accounts resharing exceptional user content. This costs nothing but signals to creators that making Subway Surfers content gets recognition — organic incentive to keep producing. Combined with a permissive IP policy (no takedowns for fan videos) and an open content team that says 'yes' by default, the result is a self-sustaining creator economy around the brand that no ad budget can replicate.
“We still have a million daily new installs and as I say half of those are reinstalls. It's worth for us to keep the content furnace and the virality going and not jeopardize it by trying to extract too much value.”
Protecting the core game from hard monetization preserves word-of-mouth that sustains 1 million daily installs 13 years in
Subway Surfers founders set a non-negotiable rule: the core run is always free, players can always progress, and aggressive monetization walls are off the table. Thirteen years later, 1 million new installs arrive daily — half of them reinstalls from people who still think of it as their go-to game. The refusal to squeeze every dollar protects the viral word-of-mouth and TikTok-shareability that makes it discoverable to a new generation of players every year at zero paid acquisition cost.
“What felt really fair about the season pass is that I don't forget about it and then I'm charged forever. The season pass gives you a very clear overview of these are the things you can get in this period of time if you spent this amount of money.”
Season passes feel fair because they are time-bounded and require engagement — subscriptions feel unfair when users forget and keep paying
Nørvig identifies the psychological reason season passes outperform subscriptions for engagement-dependent products: they are inherently transparent. Users know exactly what they get, for how long, and the charge stops automatically. Subscriptions accumulate guilt when users stop engaging but keep paying — a feeling that accelerates churn and brand damage. For apps where usage is periodic or goal-oriented, the season pass model may fit better than perpetual subscription.
“Somewhere between 80 and 85% of revenue still to this day comes from advertising. What the ads allow us to do is to also be available and support markets that would not traditionally have subscription apps or use in-app purchases — Tier 2, Tier 3 — where most other big brands would not advertise.”
80-85% of Subway Surfers revenue comes from ads — rewarded video lets users pay with attention, opening Tier 2/3 markets subscriptions can't reach
Subway Surfers' massive global download share in lower-GDP markets is enabled by ad monetization — markets where $10/month subscriptions represent real economic friction but watching an ad costs nothing. For subscription apps looking to grow internationally, rewarded video and interstitial ads offer a genuine monetization path in markets where subscription conversion is structurally low, allowing reach without sacrificing the premium tier in high-income markets.
“The initial exploration for deals like that usually start a year before, at least. It starts with high-level concepting. I carry a lot of the outward BD — I attend conferences, I speak from stage. The mobile space is a relatively small industry so we also know each other.”
Gaming cross-brand collabs start a year before launch — concepting is CEO-to-CEO, not agency-to-agency
The Brawl Stars x Subway Surfers collaboration was the result of a year of exploration, starting with Nørvig personally pitching high-level concepts at industry conferences. The gaming industry runs on CEO-to-CEO relationships at conferences — creative agencies and middlemen are not in the loop at the concepting stage. This also suggests that for app developers, conference attendance is not networking overhead — it is product development.
“Creative agencies can't take risks with the brand. There's no incentive for them to do it. We had a new person joining the team — she did a dance with the mascot costume and one of her first videos had 75 million views.”
In-house content creation cannot be outsourced — agencies won't take brand risks and the best ideas come from people who live the brand
Subway Surfers has never used an external agency for content. The reason is structural: agencies are incentivised to avoid brand risk and therefore avoid the creative territory where viral moments live. Internal creators who love the brand try things an agency would never propose. The 75-million-view dance video from a new hire's first week is a concrete data point — no brief, no approval chain, just an employee with access and belief in the product.
“It's much better to be in position three not spending to be there than to be in position one or two and having to spend a lot to be there. In most years there are a couple of positions taken by companies paying — and we're still third or fourth.”
Being evergreen at position 3 with no spend beats position 1 with a massive UA budget — the margin difference is enormous
Roblox and Garena Free Fire pay heavily for top chart positions. Subway Surfers sits at 3-4 with no paid acquisition spend. When the year's hit game fades from position 1-2, Subway Surfers remains — consistent and profitable. The compound advantage of organic position is that every player acquired is a high-quality referral-driven or intent-driven install, not a marginal install bought at the edge of payback.
“Apps in general I think have left the premium user out in a lot of cases. Either have some very heavily ad-monetized thing which often doesn't work very well or the subscription apps just don't generate as much from ads. Gaming is at the forefront of monetization and I joined the industry in 2013 — it's an amazing industry to follow.”
Subscription apps can adopt season passes, rewarded ads, and one-time IAPs — gaming is a decade ahead on hybrid monetization
Nørvig and Jacob Eiting agree that subscription apps are roughly a decade behind mobile gaming in monetization sophistication. Gaming has normalized season passes, rewarded video, consumable IAPs, and subscription tiers coexisting in a single product. Subscription apps overwhelmingly choose one model and leave users who want to pay less or more stranded. Developers who explore hybrid monetization now are building the playbook others will follow.
“Early on the guys came up with the World Tour which was a way of every 3 weeks going to a new part of the world and inspiring people either to see their own hometown or a nearby town or a part of the world they hadn't traveled to.”
World Tour — refreshing with a new city every 3 weeks — is the evergreen content engine that kept a 2012 game relevant in 2025
Subway Surfers' World Tour mechanic — a fresh city-themed season every 21 days — provides a structured content cadence that keeps the product feeling new without redesigning the core game. Each city creates a natural social moment (local players share the home-city edition), a cultural discovery hook for international players, and a marketing asset for the content team to build around. This periodic refresh architecture has direct parallels for subscription apps: seasonal content, rotating challenges, or location-based themes.