PUBG Takes Aim at the Clones
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #96 - New Year, New Battles.. Check out the full article for more insights.
Clones are a huge issue for games and apps alike, one that has been going on for ages. But PUBG is no longer okay with that!
Earlier this week, Krafton, the company behind battle game PUBG, sued the maker of a competing game Garena Free Fire, along with Apple and Google for enabling them.
Why is PUBG going through all that effort? Easy, Free Fire is making money!
According to our app intelligence, in the last year, PUBG's revenue declined by 8%, while Garena's grew by a whopping 63%! That'd anger me, too...
In absolute terms, we estimate that PUBG and all of its localized variations (one for China, another for India, and there's a lite version, too) earned $640M in net revenue from the App Store and Google play.
Garena Free Fire + Free Fire Max have earned $440M of net revenue in the same period, according to our estimates. It might sound smaller in comparison, but it's the difference in growth direction that's very different, and that's where the problem is.
According to a few comment threads I read about this, PUBG could have a case here. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know how true that is, but it'd be interesting to see where this goes and if suing clones will become a new trend.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
