Highest-Grossing Games of 2020: PUBG Dethrones Fortnite

Highest-Grossing Games of 2020

Sources:

SuperData Research

Sensor Tower

EDIT:

Added Animal Crossing

Not surprised to Roblox on that list. It the only game my daughter and ALL of her school friends talk about or play. It's insanely popular.

Not surprised either. My niece and nephew are obsessed with that game. I've always felt Robox is more popular than Minecraft among kids.

PUBG Mobile is very popular in Asian markets, particularly India and China. Despite Epic's general success, particularly in the West, Fortnite never really exploded in Asia.

The amount of money those games raked in in one year blows my mind. I totally understand why companies keep trying to have a recurring spending service in their games. We’re talking about billions of dollars here.

I was told by some loyalists that no-one cares about PUBG. 😎

Pretty much. Asia is where the big money is at nowadays. PUBG secured its place as the battle royale king in Asian markets like China, India, Japan, Korea, etc. As those Asian markets grow, PUBG's global revenue grows along with it, going from $1.79 billion in 2019 (when it came very close to Fortnite) to $2.62 billion in 2020 (leaving Fortnite in the dust). And that's despite PUBG Mobile being banned in India (its second largest market after China) during the latter half of the year, due to a China-India border conflict (PUBG Mobile is published by Chinese company Tencent).

As for Fortnite, that struggled to compete in Asia among a sea of Asian PUBG clones, but it secured its place as the biggest battle royale game in Western markets. Fortnite was the highest-grossing game for two years in a row, with $2.4B in 2018 and $1.8B in 2019, before it took a big tumble down to just over $1B in 2020. Still a lot of money, but that's big drop. It might have something to do with the Epic-Apple conflict, which led to Apple removing Fortnite from the iOS App Store. That must've had a bigger impact for Fortnite than the India ban did for PUBG Mobile.

TBH I'm genuinely surprised it made that much more than Fortnite, don't know why.

I thought PUBG was always the higher grossing game over Fortnite. PUBG could be even higher if they make it completely F2P on PC and consoles.

No idea what some of these games even existed.

Lot of shit on that list, looks like the kind d of shit that people who make money streaming games play. Looks like the kind of shit people spend more time watching live streams of than playing.

PUBG is still relevant? Now that's something i didn't knew. And its good to see Fornite dying. What a shithole game.

How so? Why do the numbers bother you personally?

With a few exceptions, many F2P and mobile games on this list are cheap, low quality, highly addictive, and exist only to fill your spare time.

These are similar to foods, where the best-selling foods in the world are junk foods like McDonald's and Coca-Cola. They don't provide real nutrition, but they do satisfy your appetite. Because they are cheap and addictive, people continue to consume them and eventually lose their sense of taste.

These consumption trends are most noticeable in the low-income group, but because they are so numerous, the overall total amount can be enormous, even with small charges for each.

PUBG grossed more in 2017, but then Fortnite became the highest-grossing game of 2018 and 2019. And now PUBG has become the highest-grossing game of 2020, pulling ahead by a wide margin.

But yeah, it's mainly PUBG Mobile that generates the vast majority of revenue, with the buy-to-play PC & console versions contributing very little. So Fortnite is bigger on PC and consoles, yet PUBG Mobile alone makes way more than all versions of Fortnite combined. Fortnite's weaker mobile presence might be what's holding it back, and Epic's spat with Apple has only made it worse.

@Jag85: Absolutely. Things will slowly revolve around that region across all different industries. Shift is happening now.

Have not played a single game on that list, go me 😎

My youngest, he loves Roblox, and as i've sat in the loungeroom while he's playing it, i don't get it.

Over 1 billion is the new "dying".

PUBG I thought fortnite killed that game?

Maybe because fortnite is off Apple ios cuz of tim sweeney its just getting destroyed now?

But i think tencent owns part of PUBG too so either there making a ton of money so don't even care.

Tim Sweeney was even advertising PUBG on iphones cuz it uses there unreal engine and pubg has to pay them for every sale.

These guys forgot the real biggest one.

@jasonofa36 said:

These guys forgot the real biggest one.

Dang why wasn't that on the list? Japan still #1 in gaming revenue Sony shouldn't have abandon'd Japan.

@ProtossRushX: Sony actually owns FGO.

ohhh shizzz nice

I must be old or out of touch because I don't play any of those. I'd rather play stuff like 7 days to die, Stationeers, Quake Champions, Streets of Rage 4, Hollow Knight, or some old school retro stuff.

You play hollow knight and sor 4 on a phone are you nuts? The only traditional game i played 200 hours of was Final Fantasy Tactics war of the lions and that was on larger samsung tablet. I can't game on phones.

@jasonofa36: FGO made $4 billion in lifetime revenue up until 2019, averaging over $1 billion per year. But FGO took a big tumble in 2020, down to just over $500 million in Japan. Sony's mobile cash cow is starting to lose steam in Japan.

While Fortnite did wreck PUBG in the West, PUBG destroyed Fortnite in the East. And that's a bigger deal, since Asia is where the big money is at nowadays.

The Epic-Apple controversy definitely contributed to Fortnite's dramatic drop, from $1.8B in 2019 (when it was #1) to just over $1B in 2020 (when it failed to even make the top 10).

Tencent is the publisher of PUBG Mobile, which generates the vast majority of revenue for PUBG. So most of the game's revenue is going to Tencent.

Ultimately, Tencent owns both Epic Games and PUBG Mobile. So that could be why he was advertising PUBG Mobile in behalf of his Tencent overlords. And Tencent won't need to pay anything for Unreal Engine either, though they might give Tim Sweeney a pay rise. The irony is that, whoever wins between PUBG and Fortnite, Tencent wins either way.

why does candy crush make so much damn money lol its a damn f2p puzzle game, whos buying all that candy crush micro transactions my god lol Tetris or pacman needs to have a phone game and monetize it like that or something. I don't know how candy crush rakes in that kind of cash.

I like how all of those games are complete shit.

Damn, just shows how much less single player games make. Kind of a shame as all the best games I have played in 2020 were single player.

Candy Crush has a ton of grind. A lot of players must be buying microtransactions to bypass the grind.

Pac-Man has grossed more than $12 billion in lifetime revenue, mostly from billions of coins (precursor to microtransactions) dropped into arcade machines back in the '80s.

My siblings and I contributed at least $25 dollars to that, probably even more. We loved Pac-Man, and that's the game we would always play. My dad was also a Pac-Man fanatic when he was kid. A funny story is that my dad and his brother used to always go to a convenience store to buy snacks, soda, and game on the Pac-Man machine that the owners had. One time, the store was getting robbed and he was just playing Pac-Man. The lady was hysterical and told him to leave because they had just been robbed, and he said "but I haven't lost yet." lol.

Where’s E.T. on that list? Doesn’t make sense?

I honestly didn't know PUBG was even a thing anymore, thought fortnite killed and buried it years ago.

Half those games I never heard of, the other half I would never touch. Sad that so many amazing games don't even get a small fraction of what those (mostly) trash games make.

Not even a penny came from me. :P

@luxuryheart: Pac-Man and Space Invaders were huge phenomena. They're still two of the highest-grossing games ever to this day. Arcade hits used to make a ton of money from coins/credits. The microtransaction trend is like a throwback to arcade credits, but they were nowhere near as predatory as microtranactions today. A well-designed arcade game could be beaten on a single credit with enough skill, and they didn't hide content behind paywalls.

I don't even recognize a lot of those names. Only mobile game I play is Clash Royale and I've never spent a penny on it.

*vomits*

@drummerdave9099:

Lol that's great!

The depth/complexity never really bothers me. It's that people are spending their/their parents' hard earned money in games just for cosmetic crap. I'd rather see that money go to helping people with real life issues.

That list is full of trash. Really shows you how stupid people are in this World.

And people wonder why companies like Ubisoft, EA and 2K salivate with having a world class success "Game as a Service" type of game... those numbers are ridiculous.

Nope, can't say I bought/played any of those games.

FYI, five of those games are owned by Tencent:

That's more than $9.35 billion just from those five games alone in 2020... Now you know why Tencent is the biggest video game company in the world.

I've just edited the list now and added Animal Crossing.

Not playing a single one of these luckily.