Free Fire, the mobile Battle Royale game phenomenon, was the most popular and lucrative mobile game app of 2019 worldwide, according to mobile market data and analytics App Annie. Free Fire is developed by the Singapore company, Sea and published by Garena. PUBG Mobile, from Tencent features in the second position, while Subway Surfers, from Kiloo and Sybo Games, features at the third position.
According to Garena, for the full quarter, Free Fire had 402.1 million quarterly active users, up 48% for year. It also had 35.7 million quarterly paying users.
In the big wave of Battle Royale games, Free Fire is a shooting and survival game available on mobile for both Android and iOS devices. Each match lasts about 10 minutes and puts the player on a remote island where you face 50 other players, all fighting to be the last one standing.
How Does Free Fire Work?
Players freely choose their starting point by jumping of the plane. While in land, the players need to loot for gear as long as they try to stay inside the safe zone. The map is very large and it offers various types of vehicles and actions. The player can shoot, gather equipment, loot enemies, drive vehicles… with only one goal: survive. In 10 minutes, a new winner will emerge. Will that be you? A 4-man squad with in-game voice chat is also allowed.
So far everything in the pattern of Battle Royale, but what really made Free Fire so popular was that it can be played in low-specs phones, while the pioneers of the genre, Fortnite and PUBG, require advanced and expensive cell phones to run, Free Fire works well on any intermediate device and does not consume lots of data when connecting to the internet.
The mobile Battle Royale game Free Fire has hit a record peak of 80 million daily active users, said Garena in May. Overall, Garena’s adjusted revenue for digital entertainment during the first quarter was $512.4 million, up 30.3% year-on-year from $393.3 million.
According to Sensor Tower data published in August 2019, Garena’s Free Fire, in addition to being the most downloaded mobile Battle Royale in Brazil, was also the only one in the world to achieved huge growth in the second half of 2019.
Downloads growth was 83% bigger when compared to the same period last year. The report took in consideration account downloads made between January 2018 and June 2019 on Android and iPhone (iOS) phones.
In 2019, the game was voted by Google as the “Most Innovative Game” of Android and has recorded more than 100 million downloads at Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store. The last Free Fire Pro League made it very clear that the audience of Battle Royale is passionate: there were more than 800,000 simultaneous viewers, setting an absolute record for mobile games and beating head-on with big names like CS:GO and League of Legends. CBLoL finals in 2017 had 1.4 million viewers on online broadcast channels.
Who Developed Free Fire
Free Fire is published by Singapure giant Garena, and is the work of a small game producer, 111dots Studio, which released it in beta on November 3, 2017. In Brazil, it arrived on December 4, 2017, for Android and iOS. Garena has an office in Brazil.
Free Fire Events in Brazil
Rio de Janeiro hosted the Free Fire World Series in 2019, with a total prize pool of US$400,000. A week earlier, Rio de Janeiro hosted the grand final of the third season of Free Fire Pro League, which grants a seed for the World Series.
By Fernanda Domingues
Pictures: Presskit
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