Knives Out Made More Money Than The Official PUBG And Fortnite Mobile Games

The mobile game Knives Out, a Battle Royale similar to PUBG published by Chinese company NetEase, has exceeded the worldwide revenue of the official mobile versions of its competitors, PUBG and Fortnite. The game, which is widely considered to be a PUBG clone, made an estimated $465 million in 2018, managing to dethrone Fortnite’s $455 million, according to Sensor Tower.

One of the contributing factors to their success is the ability to accept in-game purchases, which both PUBG and Fortnite are apparently unable to do in the Chinese and Japanese regions due to local regulations. According to the report by Sensor Tower, nearly 80% of the game’s revenue came from Japan, where players spent an estimated $370 in the game across the App Store and Google Play.

China’s mobile games market continues to pull in huge numbers, due to the large population and easy access of smartphones, meaning that companies that are unable to monetize the region are potentially missing out on huge amounts of potential income.

There is one factor that could potentially redeem the situation for Fortnite creators Epic Games however, because the company bypassed the Google Play store on Android devices in order to directly release the game, those statistics are obviously unavailable. However, it’s also possible that Epic Games does not release the data from their Android sales because they may not be as stellar as hoped. Either way, Fortnite reportedly made a profit of $3 billion in 2018 according to TechCrunch, so Epic Games is probably not too worried either way.