Ever since its launch, PUBG Mobile has been a smash-hit for PUBG Corporation and publisher Tencent. As with any game featuring the world of microtransactions, it’s gotten quite a sum of money over the years. According to a report by Sensor Tower, the game has surpassed $3.5 billion in lifetime revenue since its launch in 2018. It should be noted, this revenue also lumps in PUBG Mobile’s Chinese sister game – Game For Peace.
It broke the $3 billion mark back in July thanks to COVID-19 shutting nearly everyone indoors for a lengthy period of time. This led to more of a player base and – predictably – more players throwing in their real-world money. Actually, this boosts the mobile app as the top-grossing battle royales, this year, even beating the likes of Epic Games’ Fortnite.
Just this year alone, PUBG Mobile breached around $1.8 billion thus far. As for its players, the game has been downloaded over 770 million times across all its platforms. Currently, the major spenders are those on iOS devices, which account for about 80 percent of microtransactions sales.
While PUBG certainly hasn’t faced the same qualms Epic Games’ Fortnite has, they’ve hit their own issues as of late, having been banned in India due to a wide-spread ban on several Chinese apps. The developer is seeking ways to bring it back to the market without the backing of the Chinese media conglomerate Tencent.
This news comes at the heels of PUBG Corporation actually taking its title seriously and enforcing bans on cheaters. In a meager week, over two million users were deleted and/or over a million devices were perma-suspended.
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