A new year brings another chance to check in what mobile gamers are downloading worldwide. After poring over the figures, the rankings were populated with a lot of familiar names, but big moves were made by titles based on or delivering team-ups with properties that got their start outside of games.
Anyone who follows our rankings (or has looked at the app stores' games sections) knows Subway Surfers. The title has been at or near the top of the global download charts for years on end; last month it managed to return to #1 once again.
We're doing something a little different and look at a game on the iOS ranking only. That's because the real talk of the charts last month was Squid Game from Netflix, a rare title for the company in that it was made playable by all users of the app stores and not just subscribers to its SVOD service. It proved to be a smart move for A) raising Netflix's profile in games, B) showing its ability to make successful titles based on its TV and movie properties, and C) getting the word out about season two of Squid Game, which premiered around the same time. It rose from #7 in December to #2 last month as marketing increased, as did word of mouth.
Back to the overall top five, the other standout for the month was Free Fire at #4, up from #5 in December, which doesn't seem like much until you realize how it moved up — by a collaboration with the incredibly popular anime/manga property Naruto. In fact, some versions of the game had their names updated to Free Fire x Naruto Shippuden and Naruto himself on the app icon.
All told, January drove an estimated 140M new game downloads worldwide for the top 10 games, not including Android in China. That was up by just about 2% from December's top 10 tally of approximately 137M.
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