“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.