It is reported that a Chinese NetEase’s mobile game, namely Knives Out, surprisingly overpassed the global revenue of Battlegrounds and Fornite mobile games of Playerunknown in 2018.
Knives Out that is considered as a PUBG’s clone brought incredible revenue of US$465 million while Fortnite only gained US$455 million in revenue in 2018. Furthermore, it is known that Japan is the main contributor to this game’s profit. In particular, US$370 is the average amount that players in Japan spent on this game last year, reported by Sensor Tower.
The success of this game is due to the fact that it accepts in-game purchases. Because of local regulation, not only PUBG but also Fortnite cannot do this in the Japanese and Chinese regions.
China is considered to have the largest mobile game market in this sector and is expected to develop significantly in the coming time thanks to the ease to access to cellphone and the vast population.
However, it is worth mentioning that this report did not mention the figure in Android devices. Therefore, Fortnite is likely to overcome Knives Out. By the way, this clone still makes many people surprised when gaining such high sales last year. There is not any Fortnite’s statistics in Android devices because Epic Games bypassed the Google Play Store and did not reveal its profit. But people said that maybe this act came from its failure so it did not want to make its profit public.
Last year, TechCruch reported that Epic Games gained totally US$3 billion in profit. Therefore, Knives Out’s success does not harm anything at all.