How a hit game helped make Singapore’s latest billionaire

With its first self-developed mobile game Free Fire – a battle royale-style game similar to Fortnite – reaching 350 million registered users and 40 million peak daily active users (DAU), Garena is off to a good start as it transitions from PC game publishing to mobile game development.

Free Fire also helped made Forrest Li, the founder and CEO of Sea Group – Garena’s parent firm – a billionaire.

Photo credit: Sea Group

“According to App Annie, for the full year of 2018, Free Fire was the fourth most downloaded game across the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store combined. It has also hit the milestone of recording more than 100 million monthly active users,” said Li during the company’s fourth quarter earnings call.

A report by Sensor Tower says Free Fire was the second most downloaded battle royale game on the App Store and Google Play in 2018, generating 182 million installs. Close competitors PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds (PUBG) Mobile and Fortnite recorded 282 million and 82 million downloads, respectively. Fortnite’s total, however, only covers iOS downloads as the game was only available for Android in October 2018.

The achievement also beats the five-year timeline that Li had set in 2015 for the games studio to come up with a hit title.

From games publishing to development

Southeast Asia’s gamers will always associate Garena with League of Legends, the hit MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) game that the company introduced to the region in 2010. However, Garena’s ambitions have expanded beyond that.

“Being based in Southeast Asia, where the mobile-first internet economy has grown incredibly quickly, we saw early on that our gamers were spending more and more time on their phones,” says Jason Ng, Garena’s vice president of strategic partnerships. Given this scenario, they asked themselves: Can they build a game that will have the same great experience across all smartphones?

In 2016, the studio launched Arena of Valor (AOV) – a title co-developed with Chinese tech giant Tencent – in parts of Southeast Asia. According to Ng, AOV recorded a new peak DAU record of 14 million users in mid-2018, driven in part by AOV esports events in Southeast Asia. It became the top revenue-generating game on mobile in 2018, according to Sensor Tower.

The company then shifted gears to Free Fire. Garena’s primary challenge was figuring out how to optimize an immersive gaming experience for mobile where the screens are smaller, devices have different specs in terms of processing power and RAM, and users have less time to play and want faster matches.

Data consumption and limited phone storage, for example, were common concerns among mobile gamers. With its 2.4GB install size on iOS, PUBG Mobile and other games with similar download packages are less accessible to gamers in emerging markets.

In contrast, Ng says Free Fire’s install size is well under 1GB, as it was specifically designed to be leaner. Trade-offs, however, had to be made to accommodate this smaller footprint.

What’s next for Garena?