Usually, when a product garners over a billion dollars, a whole lot of people are aware that it exists. However, mobile title Garena Free Fire has done just that without being exactly widely known.
The battle royale happens to be one of the biggest and most profitable games on the market right now, and not just in the realms of non-console handheld gaming.
According to analyst Daniel Ahmad, the game recently became the latest of its kind to reach $1 billion in revenue and was the highest-grossing game in Southeast Asia and Latin America for Q3 2019.
The game was released for Android and iOS in December of 2017 by Garena Studios and was developed by 111dots Studio. It's similar to other mobile battle royales like PUBG Mobile and Clash Royale and starts off by parachuting as many as 50 players onto an island where they find weapons and eliminate each other.
Free Fire was actually was one of the most downloaded games last year and was awarded the "Best Popular Vote Game" by the Google Play Store in 2018.
Competing with a giant like PUBG was probably supposed to be more of a challenge but Garena's title has an edge as it is able to run on lower-spec mobile devices and only hosts 50 players at a time. The latter feature makes it so that games are much faster, lasting around 10 minutes on average.
The game is pretty popular on the esports scene as well, drawing over 100 million cumulative views during the Free Fire World Series. The final match attracted over a million viewers in just Brazil.
This is quite a feat, given that plenty of gamers and battle royale fans have never even heard of Free Fire.
In cooler news, Brazilian musician Alok has been announced as the game's DJ and has been added as a playable character boasting his own Area of Effect healing skills.
Garena Free Fire is currently available for download via Google Play and the App Store for free.