Land of Lineage: Korea's #1 grossing is now idle and survival
Half the top 15 is Western merge and survival. Only two homegrown MMORPGs remain — and gacha isn't there at all.
Korea's #1 grossing game isn't Lineage. It's CookieRun: Tower — an idle game. The domestic MMORPGs that once defined the chart are down to just two: Lineage M (#4) and Yulgang (#15).
Two things filled the gap. One is idle (CookieRun, MapleStory Idle); the other is Western merge and survival.
Western casual and survival took half the top 15. Led by Whiteout Survival (#2) and Gossip Harbor (#3), that's seven titles in all — Royal Match, Kingshot, Gardenscapes, Seaside Escape, Tasty Travels. On top of those come three sports games from NEXON and Com2uS (FC Mobile, FC Online M, Com2uS Pro Baseball).
The chart, in order
Idle (gold) and Western survival · merge (red) trade off at the top, while the domestic MMORPGs (green) sit far apart at #4 and #15.
- 1CookieRun: Tower · DevsistersIdle
- 2Whiteout Survival · Century GamesSurvival
- 3Gossip Harbor · MicrofunMerge
- 4Lineage M · NCSOFTMMORPG
- 5MapleStory Idle · NEXONIdle
- 6Royal Match · Dream GamesMatch
- 7Kingshot · Century GamesSurvival
- 8Lucky Defense · 111%Idle
- 9FC Mobile · NEXONSports
- 10EA SPORTS FC Online M · NEXONSports
- 11Gardenscapes · PlayrixMatch
- 12Seaside Escape · MicrofunMerge
- 13Tasty Travels · Century GamesMerge
- 14Com2uS Pro Baseball V26 · Com2uSSports
- 15Yulgang: NextMMORPG
Idle and survival took the throne Lineage held.
Here too, gacha is absent
Genshin, Arknights, Star Rail — gacha isn't in Korea's top 15 grossing either. Same pattern as the US: reviews and communities run hot on gacha, but wallets open for idle, MMORPG and Western casual. Read the three countries together and the conclusion is one: gacha holds top grossing only in Japan.
What happened next — twelve of fifteen cells held
This report captured Korea's top 15 in one week of August 2026. Since then we have taken the Apple grossing charts once a week, five times. Here it is beside the September 14th reading.
| The twelve still there | W32 | 09-14 |
|---|---|---|
| MapleStory Idle | 5 | 3 |
| Gossip Harbor | 3 | 4 |
| Lineage M | 4 | 5 |
| Lucky Defense | 8 | 2 |
| Royal Match | 6 | 7 |
| Com2uS Pro Baseball | 14 | 8 |
| Whiteout Survival | 2 | 9 |
| FC Mobile | 9 | 11 |
| EA SPORTS FC Online M | 10 | 12 |
| CookieRun: Tower | 1 | 13 |
| Kingshot | 7 | 14 |
| Tasty Travels | 13 | 15 |
The ranks moved a great deal. CookieRun: Tower fell from 1st to 13th; Lucky Defense climbed from 8th to 2nd. Yet twelve of the fifteen cells hold the same games. The faces changed; the roster barely did.
Three left, three arrived
| Left | W32 | Arrived | 09-14 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gardenscapes | 11 | Eclipse: The Awakening | 1 |
| Seaside Escape | 12 | Roblox | 6 |
| Yulgang: Next | 15 | Zeus: God of Hubris | 10 |
Three cells emptied and three filled. The “7 western merge and survival titles” this report counted became 5 once Gardenscapes and Seaside Escape dropped out.
Meanwhile “zero gacha in the top 15” is still zero five weeks on. Neither Genshin nor Arknights is there. On a chart that turns over weekly, that one line did not move.
Twelve cells unchanged. And gacha still at zero.
Two cells in the September 14th reading could not be resolved to a name in the raw file, so we confirmed them from the same file's change log of new entries — Eclipse at 1st, Roblox at 6th. Apple publishes only to 15th place, so “left” means absent from that week's top 15, not a known lower rank.