League of Legends - Game Theory: 97% Of You Can't Name The Most Popular Video Game In The World
Intro
here's a pop quiz: what's the most popular 5v5 moba game right now? If you answered League of Legends, you're wrong. League of Legends's daily active user count is around 10 million, which is impressive to be sure, but small potatoes compared to the real answer, which has sometimes had over a hundred million daily active users.
Let's try again what has been the second most downloaded mobile game in 2021. It's also the most downloaded game in 2020 and 2019. 000001, Good Let's begin ).
The iceberg
Hello internet, Welcome to game theory. In the show that is pulling you out of the matrix, by the way, did you know that matrix 4 is supposed to come out this year? Yeah, I totally forgot they were making that one. Anyway, it makes my dated reference in the cold open of this article feel a little bit more timely.
You know, so you know those iceberg explain style articles that have been popular this year where the host takes a topic and then goes through layer by layer the different levels of insider knowledge about said topic. In case you're not familiar, let's say you have the YouTube iceberg. At the very top would be stuff like Despacito.
Jimmy Fallon: Clips: mainstream, viral articles This is the stuff that anyone visiting YouTube would know about because it's on the surface. It's right there on the homepage. You don't have to be logged in. It's just served up to you. Then a layer under that would be stuff like Pewdiepie. I'm scared and Poppy before eventually going all the way down to the bottom depths of the iceberg where you find the pet scopes of the world, your youtube poops, and some of those nightmare fuel international channels.
Well, the reason I bring it up today is that recently I became aware that we all, without even realizing it, have been existing on the tip of one of these icebergs, the gaming industry. We all thought that the iceberg looked like this. When in reality, it looks a whole lot more like this. For example, if I asked you what the biggest game in the world is right now, what would you say?
Fortnite among us was huge for a while last year. Maybe Call of Duty War Zone because that's new or league is always big. For the real list of the biggest games in the world, though Minecraft. Roblox, and other things are definitely up there, that list is also going to be rounded out with games that you've likely never heard of.
Youtube rewind
You see, this topic first caught my attention back during the 2019 YouTube Rewind Gaming Section. For those of you who don't remember, 2019's Rewind recapped the articles that got the most likes in different categories, like a fancier version of a Watch Mojo countdown, except for gaming, of course, because the articles that the creators make are less important than the games that they're playing, unless they happen to be streamers that were stolen over from twitch.
No offense to Tim the Tatman and Dr. Lupo i'm so happy for them that they got their bags. I'm just saying, at this point, I feel like I have to go to Twitch so that YouTube can pay me to come back anyway. True to form in 2019, rewind didn't seem interested in the gamers or the individual articles that were made, but rather they focused on the top games that were played, and it was a list that consisted of largely what you'd expect.
Roblox fortnite GTA: Minecraft, at number one, but one of these things was not like the other guerena free fire. I'd never heard of it, but apparently it was the fourth most watched game of the year. Think about how crazy that is. It'd be the equivalent of us not seeing a single article last year.
And that's actually what happened, because in 2020. Guerin Free Fire grew and surpassed both Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto to become the third most viewed game on the platform, behind only Minecraft and Roblox, and yet again, for the second year in a row. I never saw a single article talking about it.
No one seems to be talking about it. That's not an exaggeration. Do a Google search for mentions of Garena Free Fire on polygon.com and you'll get literally zero mentions of it. Ditto for Waypoint. Literally zero mentions. Do the same search on Kotaku and you will find exactly one article listed off that, wouldn't you know, was in the YouTube rewind 2019.
How is this even possible? I'm not super into games like Roblox, but at least I know what it is and when I find that it's one of YouTube's biggest games, it's not that big of a surprise, but Garena Free Fire is not only a billion dollar franchise that has for the last two years been one of the world's most downloaded mobile games, it is now bigger than fortnight.
On youtube, and yet not once have I or anyone else on the team ever seen it talked about what is going on. I had to dig in and research the topic, and spoiler alert, this isn't just a article about a single game. This is the story of a much larger trend that many gamers have been blind to for years.
As someone whose literal job it is to stay on top of what's happening in the gaming world, it's honestly a little humbling, but it's also exciting, because there's an entire undiscovered world of gaming that's been lurking under our noses for years, and I'm going to call it right now, it's going to drastically.
Garena free fire
It is changing the way that we play games in years to come, and when I say years to come, I'm not talking about 10 or even five years into the future. It is happening. As we speak, so since I've already teased it, what is Garena Free Fire? Well, to the people who actually play it, it's usually just free fire.
Gorena is the name of the company in Singapore that created it. It's a mobile game that, in terms of gameplay, is a lot like Pubg and Fortnite. It's a battle royale game where you and dozens of other players parachute onto an island looking for weapons. Look You don't need me to explain what a battle royale is at this point now.
For you loyal theorists who watched to the end of every article, you may already know that I was sponsored by them a few weeks ago. They even invited me to attend their fourth anniversary event in Las Vegas, which was very cool and gave me a great chance to do some research on the community around this game, but what I want to make crystal clear is that this article is entirely hashtag.
I did not spawn specifically because I wanted to be able to talk freely about the title. You'll notice that throughout the article I'm not stating any opinions about the game, just quantitative facts about it, because to me, the most interesting thing about it is the phenomenon. The game is built to prioritize performance on low-powered devices with weak internet connections, and that's not coming from me or a series of talking points.
