Since the emergence of free battle royale games on smartphones, players worldwide have spent more than two billion dollars on them. That’s what analysts from Sensor Tower calculate. Such games have been around for less than two years.
According to the figures from Sensor Tower, the smartphone version of Fortnite is in second place, with sales of more than $630 million since its release. However, that is only the turnover of the iOS version and it is therefore likely that the total is much higher with the turnover from the Android version added to it.
Knives Out, a game aimed at the Chinese market and released in November 2017, has raised $643 million so far. PUBG Mobile is in third place with about 439 million dollars. That game was also popular in China, but Tencent was not allowed to make money with it. Therefore, in China, the game has now been replaced by an alternative called Game for Peace. In third and fourth place are Garena Free Fire and Rules of Survival, which are titles from NetEase and these games also rely mainly on the Asian market.
There is still growth in player numbers and spending of mobile battle royale games according to Sensor Tower. The five titles are said to have grossed $476 million in the first quarter of this year. Players spend the most in PUBG Mobile; $148 million in the past quarter.
The rise of battle royale games on smartphones started a few years ago after the success of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on PC. In all cases, these are games that can be downloaded for free, but in which players can buy cosmetic items or so-called battle passes with real money. The games have hundreds of millions of players. PUBG Mobile, for example, has one hundred million monthly active players; that’s just the players outside of China.