Garena Free Fire Battle royale
Mobile apps are a difficult business to succeed in. The competition in mobile gaming is even tougher. Where can you grow your game? Where can you even just be competitive? If you look toward emerging markets and nail it, the payoff is huge, as these regions often have massive growth potential. But these markets do present their own unique challenges.
While putting together 2018’s worldwide download leaders, I easily saw the rise of emerging markets through apps that had not been on the list in the past. Then again, while working on my most recent piece for VentureBeat, looking at the top mobile games by active users, I noticed the No. 3 game on the list (Free Fire) had a significant portion of its player base in Brazil. This is what got me thinking about the challenges of making a successful mobile game in less developed/emerging markets, and so I reached out to Garena, the maker of Free Fire, to ask them how they do it.
I was put in touch with Producer Harold Teo, and he told me that the South American market was among the team’s areas of focus from the get-goLet’s start with some basics: Free Fire boasts more than 350 million registered players and more than 100 million of those were counted as active in Q4 2018. The game accounted for 44.5 percent of the $231.4 million in adjusted revenue Garena recorded in the fourth quarter. The company couldn’t tell me which market brings in the most revenue for Free Fire, but Apptopia’s app intelligence indicates Brazil generated 29 percent of the game’s fourth quarter revenue, the most of any market. Keep in mind that Apptopia does not track Android revenue outside of Google Play.Click here
Diving deeper, and based data from GameRefinery, the biggest differentiator between Free Fire and PUBG Mobile in terms of features is the use of characters with specific skills. Players buy/earn characters and develop them by earning fragments. Even though skills don’t have a significant effect on gameplay, it adds a nice additional layer for players to think about and variety to monetization on top of cosmetics.Detail
While putting together 2018’s worldwide download leaders, I easily saw the rise of emerging markets through apps that had not been on the list in the past. Then again, while working on my most recent piece for VentureBeat, looking at the top mobile games by active users, I noticed the No. 3 game on the list (Free Fire) had a significant portion of its player base in Brazil. This is what got me thinking about the challenges of making a successful mobile game in less developed/emerging markets, and so I reached out to Garena, the maker of Free Fire, to ask them how they do it.
I was put in touch with Producer Harold Teo, and he told me that the South American market was among the team’s areas of focus from the get-goLet’s start with some basics: Free Fire boasts more than 350 million registered players and more than 100 million of those were counted as active in Q4 2018. The game accounted for 44.5 percent of the $231.4 million in adjusted revenue Garena recorded in the fourth quarter. The company couldn’t tell me which market brings in the most revenue for Free Fire, but Apptopia’s app intelligence indicates Brazil generated 29 percent of the game’s fourth quarter revenue, the most of any market. Keep in mind that Apptopia does not track Android revenue outside of Google Play.Click here
Diving deeper, and based data from GameRefinery, the biggest differentiator between Free Fire and PUBG Mobile in terms of features is the use of characters with specific skills. Players buy/earn characters and develop them by earning fragments. Even though skills don’t have a significant effect on gameplay, it adds a nice additional layer for players to think about and variety to monetization on top of cosmetics.Detail
No comments