Revolving Games said War of Nova was on a $30 million run rate, and set a target of $60 million

In July 2025 Revolving Games said its mobile strategy game War of Nova was on course for $30 million of annualised revenue, and that the studio expected to reach $60 million by the end of the year. The studio is run by the Zaeem brothers from San Francisco and Lahore and has raised $25.2 million. That target is the last revenue number the company has given that this magazine could find, and a workforce data firm now estimates the studio employs about a third fewer people than it did at the end of 2024.

A studio split across two cities

Ammar and Shayan Zaeem built Revolving Games after running Caramel Tech Studios with their brother Saad. Sarmayacar, the Dutch venture firm that backs Pakistani companies, says it partnered with the studio in July 2019 and describes Ammar as the former chief executive of Caramel Tech, which merged with the San Francisco based Cloudcade Studio. Dawn reported in February 2020 that Sarmayacar had led a seed investment and that an unnamed global publisher had also put money in. Design and development sat in San Francisco, with Kyle Bricker as executive producer, and operations mainly in Lahore, which the company said carried cost advantages.

“We have spent almost a decade training talent in Pakistan.”

The split matters for the economics. A live service game spends most of its money after launch, on events, balance patches, customer support and new content every few weeks. Sarmayacar's page says the studio runs live operations from Pakistan because it lowers cost and raises each game's profit potential. Design decisions stay near the publishers and platform holders who decide whether a game is featured.

The Web3 round

In September 2022 Revolving Games announced a $13.2 million seed round backed by Pantera Capital, Animoca Brands, Polygon, Dapper Labs and Dan Houser, the Rockstar Games cofounder, who joined as an adviser and investor. Together with an earlier $12 million pre seed round, that took the total raised to $25.2 million, according to The Block. The studio said it would spend about $25 million over two years on original games built to be fully decentralised.

The pitch to players was careful. The Zaeems told Decrypt that games would be free to play, with an opt in economy, no upfront payment and no scholar system, the arrangement in which players rent assets to others. They added that not every game would or should use NFTs.

A rough budget shows the scale of the commitment. Spread evenly over two years, $25.2 million is about $1.05 million a month. Revelio Labs, a workforce data firm, estimates the studio had 143 employees in the second quarter of 2023, which would put the plan at about $7,300 per employee per month, to cover salaries, servers, marketing and the chain the studio planned to build. Revelio's figures are modelled estimates, not company statements, but they show how quickly the money had to turn into a product that earned.

From early access to launch

Early access for Project Nova, a space strategy game, ran from 17 to 31 October 2024. The studio's press release of 22 April 2025 said it drew more than 20,000 registrations, with a $25,000 prize pool, and reported retention of 63 percent on day one, 54 percent on day three and 43 percent on day seven.

The genre explains the choice. Nova is a 4X game, in which players explore, expand, exploit and exterminate on a shared map. These games earn money by selling time: speedups for construction and troop training, and boosts to the production of resources. The pre registration rewards for the launch, which included one hour speedups and three hour production boosts, were samples of exactly the items that are sold later.

War of Nova, as the game was renamed, launched on 8 May 2025 on Android and iOS as a free download. The studio said it generated nearly $500,000 in player spending in its first 60 hours, which is about $8,300 an hour, or $200,000 a day.

The July 2025 numbers

On 7 July 2025 the company issued a fuller set of claims. It said the studio had passed 700,000 installs and 40,000 paying customers across its titles, that War of Nova was tracking toward $30 million in annualised revenue with about 40 percent of it coming from players on the App Store and Google Play, and that retention after launch was 45 percent on day one, 38 percent on day three and 26 percent on day seven, with sessions averaging 30 minutes. It also said a social slots game, HatchKings, had earned $1.4 million in 10 days on chain, and that Revolving Games was positioned to reach $60 million in annualised revenue by the end of 2025.

Three sums can be made from these claims. First, day seven retention fell from 43 percent in early access to 26 percent after launch, a drop of 17 points, or about 40 percent fewer players still active a week in. Early access players chose to take part, so the comparison flatters the test, but it is the same measure for the same game.

Second, $30 million a year is about $82,000 a day, against the $200,000 a day of the first 60 hours, so the claimed run rate is about 41 percent of the launch pace. Launch spikes fade in every game of this kind, and the two figures may not count revenue the same way, but the trend was already downward when the studio set a target of doubling.

Third, if 40 percent of $30 million passes through the app stores, that is $12 million a year, and at the standard 30 percent commission Apple and Google would take about $3.6 million of it. The release does not say where the other 60 percent comes from.

The token and its delays

The business has a second layer. Players who captured ships, acquired tiles and harvested resources during a limited window qualified for an airdrop from a pool of 250 million RCADE tokens, with each player's share set by in game performance. The token is meant for in game transactions, governance, staking and rewards on a gaming blockchain the studio built with Starlings Network, whose nodes are run by community members who stake RCADE.

The token launch slipped. It had been set for 22 May 2025, and on 19 May Ammar Zaeem announced a delay of about three weeks, to mid June. The studio added $250,000 of liquidity on the Blur marketplace to steady the market, and Zaeem acknowledged that the delay carried costs tied to team vesting. For a game studio, a token adds income that moves with market sentiment rather than with how many people play.

A smaller studio and no update

Revelio estimates the studio's headcount at a peak of 160 in the second quarter of 2024 and 147 at the end of that year. It puts the count at 97 at the end of 2025 and 95 in March 2026, with no open job listings. From the end of 2024 to the end of 2025 that is 50 fewer people, a fall of 34 percent. Studios across the games industry have cut staff in the same period, so the fall is not proof of a failing product, but it is the opposite of the growth that a $60 million target implies.

The winners so far are the people trained in Lahore, who learned live operations on an international product, and Sarmayacar, whose 2019 bet on a Pakistani studio gave it a place in a larger round. The losers, if the model fails, are token holders and airdrop recipients who hold a currency tied to a single game. What decides the outcome is whether player spending after the launch window supports the payroll.

Using the company's own July 2025 run rate and Revelio's March 2026 headcount, $30 million over 95 people is about $316,000 of annualised revenue per head, a rough ratio built from two dates eight months apart. The figure that would replace it is revenue for 2025, the year the studio said it would reach $60 million, which the company has not published.