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Report: Titles with battle royale modes to earn 12 per cent of 2018's games revenue

Report: Titles with battle royale modes to earn 12 per cent of 2018's games revenue

With questions emerging about the future of the genre, SuperData claims that battle royale titles will be behind 12 per cent of total games spending in 2018.

The research firm has published a report in the sector - with some free bits available - in which it claims that revenue will rise 625 per cent in 2018 versus 2017.

This, the company claims, is down to triple-A companies like Activision Blizzard and EA entering the fray with battle royale modes being included in Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII and Battlefield V.

While the genre started on PC with projects like Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, Fortnite and H1Z1, SuperData says that the battle royale sector's future is firmly platform-agnostic, with 29 per cent of revenue from the genre set to come from mobile this year.

In fact, moving forwards, free-to-play and premium PC will be behind $4.7bn in revenue, 37.3 per cent of the sector's predicted total of $12.6bn. In 2019, SuperData predicts that the sector will bring in a total of $20.1bn, with 31.3 per cent of that coming from the PC market.

Mobile will be behind $2.8bn and $3.3bn in 2018 and 2019 respectively.

The firm also goes into some detail about the impact this new genre has had on the streaming market. SuperData says that younger viewers who previously watched Minecraft now watch 57 per cent less of Mojang's blockbuster after first experiencing battle royale. That figure rises to 66 per cent when looking at the 13-to-17 age bracket.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.