Battle Royales in Q2 2019

Among 25 highest-grossing mobile games in the second quarter of 2019, there are five battle royale titles. Sensor Tower breaks down how they fare in terms revenue and downlads.

Knives Out

Downloads

The most downloadable battle royale game is Garena Free Fire from Singapore’s Garena. In April-June, the game was downloaded about 75 million times.

Lately, PUBG Mobile has been seeing a drop in the number of downloads. This should come as no surprise as Tencent no longer supports the game in China. The reason for that is that the local regulators have made it impossible to monetize the game. Since April, the publisher has been trying to migrate all PUBG Mobile users to another battle royale title Game for Peace, which was approved by the authorities. The fact that Sensor Tower has included Game for Peace downloads in the PUBG Mobile stats means that the process had not been without difficulties.

Equally interesting is the distribution of game downloads by country. The chart below shows that the popularity of each game strongly depends on the region. In China, the biggest game is PUBG Mobile, in Southeast Asia – Garena Free Fire, and in the Japanese archipelago – Knives Out from NetEase.

Revenue

The highest-grossing mobile battle royale game is PUBG Mobile (along with Game for Peace). In the second quarter of 2019, it generated about $350 million. As for Fortnite, which is popular in the West, it is not even among the top three by revenue. Garena Free Fire, whose main market is Brazil (it brought in $55 million in the game’s quarterly earnings), and Knives Out are ahead of it.

However, we get a different picture if we look at the totals of all battle royale games since January 2018. It turns out that the highest-grossing mobile game in this genre is Knives Out, which earned $711 million for the period. Fortnite nominally ranks second with its $679 million revenue on iOS. There is no information on the game’s total revenue on mobile because its Android copies were released outside of official stores.

Again, each country has its own leader in the genre. In Japan, Knives Out earns the most, in the US, Fortnite is the top grossing game, in China the main player is PUBG Mobile, and in the Southeast Asia it is Garena Free Fire.