Free Fire Shows Strong Momentum, with Its Revenue Overtaking PUBG Mobile in a Single Market for Q1 2021

Free Fire overtakes PUBG Mobile in U.S. revenue.

PUBG Mobile continues to be the top grossing game in Saudi Arabia and Turkey. However, it has lost Q1 revenue to Free Fire in the most important US market. According to Sensor Tower, Free Fire grossed about $100 million in the US in Q1, up nearly 4.5 times from the same period last year. PUBG Mobile made $68 million, up 9% from the previous year. Call of Duty: Mobile accumulated $62 million, an increase of approximately 80 percent year on year.

Since the removal of Fortnite from Epic Games from the App Store and Google Play, Free Fire and Call of Duty: Mobile appear to be the main beneficiaries. The good news is that Epic and Garena are Tencent’s allies, and the fact that PUBG Mobile is surpassed in single market revenue should be acceptable to Tencent.

Game of Sultans, developed by Meng Plus in collaboration with Dianchu, has been a steady performer in the Turkish market, ranking in the Top 50 for a long time. The annual report of Dianchu showed that the game revenue was 399 million yuan, up by 7.78% year on year. In April and May, the game revenue exceeded 100 million yuan for two consecutive months.

Game of Sultans is a game of palace intrigue for the Middle East market. Dianchu, good at such a genre, created the marker before the demand had not been met. Game of Khans, the newest game in the genre, is currently doing well in the former Soviet Union.

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The new SLG The Walking Dead: Survivors, with high hopes from ELEX, was launched overseas last week. However, the performance of the game is relatively modest, with only a few countries in the Top 100 best-selling list, which might result from ELEX’s inadequate promotion. The art style of the game is the same as that of the standalone version of The Walking Dead, which is an American comic style. In theory, it is easy to appeal to the franchise’s old players.

ELEX’s IP adaption of Call of Duty was not a smooth progress, which was abandoned after the test. And they hope they can make better achievements with the IP of The Walking Dead.

UNO Topped the List of March Downloads in Turkey

According to App Annie’s Turkey Mobile game Market Index for March, NetEase’s subsidiary UNO and Tencent’s PUBG Mobile were the top downloads and revenues in Turkey respectively.

In Turkey, UNO, Batak and PUBG Mobile were the top three most downloaded games in March. UNO is a game made by Mattel163, a joint venture between NetEase and UNO’s copyright holder Mattel, which initially ran the H5 version on Facebook and later the mobile game version. UNO is currently in the top 50 download charts in major overseas markets such as the United States, France and Germany.

In terms of revenue, PUBG Mobile, Sword of Wonder, and 101 Okey Plus were the top three grossing games in March. Rounding out the top 10 are games such as Age of Kingdom, Call of Duty: Mobile, Mobile Legends, State of Survival, and Pocket Raiders.

An Overview of the Middle East Games Market

There are more than 100 million Internet users in 22 countries in the Middle East, but most of the paying users are in the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and other wealthy countries. Saudi Arabia has 25 million Internet users, and Turkey has more than 62 million.

With a game market of about $900 million, Turkey is currently the largest one in the Middle East. According to the DotC, Turkey accounts for about 40 percent of the game market in the Middle East, with more than 40 million mobile players. With a larger population than any other country in Europe, Turkey should be the most demographic game market in the Middle East.

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Gamers in the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, are generally willing to pay for games (ARPU is expected to reach $38 this year) and have a lot of spending power and leisure time (though not as much). With 70% of players in the Middle East under 25, there is a huge potential in the future. 

The UAE is the third largest market in the Middle East, with a game market of around $300 million, much smaller than Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

On the other hand, the mobile game market is basically dominated by Chinese and European games due to the weak R&D strength and weak competition of local manufacturers in the Middle East. But there are barriers to entry in the Middle East because of religion, payments, traffic and language.

In terms of game types, players in the Middle East generally accept European and American realistic style games and like strategy games, while gambling games also occupy a certain market share.