Record quarter for Garena Free Fire with $90m revenue

Mobile battle royale game Garena Free Fire broke its previous quarterly revenue record to generate $90 million in Q1 2019.

Released in 2017 by developer 111dot Studios, Garena Free Fire is one of the top five grossing games in the genre, according to Sensor Tower Store Intelligence.

In the last quarter alone it also added 73 million new users across Google Play and the App Store, and saw quarterly revenue increase from $73 million.

Overall, new installs of Garena Free Fire grew 81% year-on-year. Brazil remained the largest source of growth, accounting for 20% or 14.6 million new players.

Brazil was also the highest grossing region for the game, accounting for 31% of revenue, or $27.9 million.

However, the revenue share of Brazil was actually down from 44% in Q4 2018, thanks to increases from regions like Thailand and the US.

Thailand accounted for the second largest portion of revenue at 11% or about $9.9 million.

Meanwhile, the US was the fourth largest region for revenue, grossing $8.5 million for the period, or about 9.4 percent. The share of revenue more than doubled from around 4% in Q4 2018.

"While rival PUBG Mobile saw flat growth in new players [quarter-on-quarter] during Q1, Garena Free Fire grew its first-time player base by 23% over the fourth quarter of 2018," said Sensor Tower founder Oliver Yeh.

"In fact, it was the only title among the top five in the battle royale genre to grow its new player count over the previous quarter."