According to the results of the second quarter of 2019, the top 25 highest-grossing mobile games in the world include five projects in the “battle royale” genre. How much they earn and how they behave, — we tell in the material based on the latest Sensor Tower study.
The situation with downloads
The most downloaded battle royale is Garena Free Fire from Singapore’s Garena. In April-June, the game was downloaded about 75 million times.
PUBG Mobile installations have sunk recently. This is due to the following story: in the Middle Kingdom, Tencent no longer supports the game. The reason is that the local regulator has banned its monetization. Since April, the publisher has been trying to transfer all PUBG Mobile traffic to the Game for Peace, which has arranged a royal battle for the regulator. Judging by the fact that Sensor Tower included Game for Peace downloads in the PUBG Mobile indicators, it is clear that it could not be done without losses.
Equally interesting is the distribution of game downloads by country. The graph below shows that the popularity of each game strongly depends on the region. In China, the main game is PUBG Mobile, in Southeast Asia — Garena Free Fire, and in the Japanese archipelago – Knives Out from NetEase.
Revenue situation
The highest-grossing mobile “battle royale” is PUBG Mobile (along with Game for Peace). In the second quarter of 2019, she earned about $350 million. As for Fortnite, which is popular in the West, it is not even among the top three in terms of money. It is also ahead of Garena Free Fire, whose main market is Brazil (it brought $ 55 million to the piggy bank of the game for the quarter), and Knives Out.
The situation appears in a different form if we estimate the total income of all royal battles since January 2018. It turns out that the highest-grossing game in this genre on mobile is Knives Out, which has earned $711 million for all time. Formally, Fortnite is in second place, whose earnings with iOS amounted to $ 679 million— There is no information on how much the game earned in total on mobile, since it went out of stores on Android.
As in the case of downloads, each country has its own box office leader in the genre. Knives Out earns the most in Japan, Fortnite leaves the main box office in the USA, PUBG Mobile is the main player in China, and Garena Free Fire is in the Southeastern countries.
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