Korea's #1 comes from outside: three different games in four weeks
Zeus, Pokémon GO and Eclipse each took the top grossing spot in Korea. None of them was on the chart the week before. Pokémon GO arrived from nowhere, held #1, and was gone a week later. Across the same four weeks the US #1 did not move at all.
Ranks are read directly from the Apple App Store grossing charts (games, top 15 per country), taken once a week on August 24th and 31st and September 7th and 14th — four readings, seven days apart. “outside 15” means the game was not in the top 15 that week; the chart is published to 15th place only, so we cannot say what rank it held.
The top of Korea's grossing chart has become a one-week address. It changed hands three times in four weeks, and each new occupant had been off the chart entirely the week before. Not one of them climbed there from inside the top 15.
All three arrived from outside
Normally a #1 is made by the game in second or third place moving up a step. That did not happen once in these four weeks.
| 🇰🇷 Korea | 08-24 | 08-31 | 09-07 | 09-14 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zeus: God of HubrisCom2uS | outside 15 | 1 | 5 | 10 |
| Pokémon GOScopely Explore | outside 15 | outside 15 | 1 | outside 15 |
| Eclipse: The AwakeningSmilegate | outside 15 | outside 15 | outside 15 | 1 |
The Pokémon GO row is the week in miniature. Off the chart, then first, then off the chart again. There is no middle step between the summit and invisibility.
No game reached #1 from inside the chart. Not once in four weeks.
The week they arrived was the peak
What happens after the climb is clearer still. Zeus debuted at #1, dropped to 5th the following week and 10th the week after — two steps down with no rebound in between. Pokémon GO skipped the descent altogether and simply left.
Eclipse has only just arrived at #1. If it follows the shape the other two drew, next week's reading will show it lower; if it does not, it is the first break in this pattern. Which of the two, we will know next week. The current data cannot say.
In the US, nothing happened
Lay the same four weeks over the American chart and a different picture appears.
| Game | 08-24 | 08-31 | 09-07 | 09-14 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🇺🇸 MONOPOLY GO!Scopely | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 🇯🇵 Puzzle & DragonsGungHo | 11 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
Monopoly Go was #1 all four times. Japan's Puzzle & Dragons has not moved off second place since the first reading. While Korea's chart turned over every week, the other two countries each had a game that would not give up its seat. Monopoly Go's revenue structure is covered in our Monopoly Go deep dive.
Japan changed three times too — but its games came back
Japan's #1 also changed hands three times over the same weeks. Same count as Korea; open the chart and the shape is different.
| 🇯🇵 Japan | 08-24 | 08-31 | 09-07 | 09-14 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dragon Ball Z Dokkan BattleBandai Namco | outside 15 | 1 | 6 | 1 |
| Pokémon GONiantic | 7 | 11 | 1 | 10 |
Dokkan Battle arrived at #1 on August 31st, slipped to 6th, and took the top back a week later. In Korea nothing that fell ever returned. Pokémon GO stayed on the Japanese chart in all four readings — 7th, 11th, 1st, 10th — while in Korea the same game is invisible apart from the single week it spent at #1.
How often the #1 changed
| Country | #1 changes | of those, arrivals from outside 15 |
|---|---|---|
| 🇰🇷 Korea | 3 | 3 |
| 🇯🇵 Japan | 3 | 1 |
| 🇺🇸 the US | 0 | 0 |
Korea and Japan changed the same number of times. What differs is where the new #1 came from.
- Source — Apple App Store official charts (games, top 15 per country), quoted as published.
- When — four readings, one a week: Aug 24, Aug 31, Sept 7 and Sept 14, seven days apart.
- “outside 15” — the game was not in the top 15 that week, and we cannot say what rank it held, because the chart is published to 15th place only. So “from outside to #1” states that a title was absent the week before, not how far it jumped.
- Rank is not revenue — nothing here tells you the gap between #1 and #2.
- We have not written why — a launch, an update, a marketing push: the chart cannot establish which.
- Weeks we did not publish — the Aug 24 and Sept 7 readings never ran as articles and are used here only as midpoints.
- Full method and limits are in our data methodology. We do not reproduce game art or review text.
Correction (2026-09-19) — two cells in the Japan table were wrong when this first ran. Dokkan Battle was #1 on August 31st, not outside 15, and Pokémon GO was 7th on August 24th, not outside 15. So the line saying Dokkan “entered at 6th and took another week to reach #1” had it backwards: it entered at #1, fell to 6th, and took the top back. Japan’s count of #1 changes is corrected from two to three. The source is the Japanese chart as read on August 31st, September 7th and September 14th.