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Fortnite Maintains Its Lead Over Other Online Games — But Sales Are Waning
Key Takeaways
• PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) sales dipped 2% since Q2 2018
• Free-to-play Apex Legends and Fortnite see the vast majority of spend on in-game currencies
• Apex Legends leads other games in loyalty of players (62%) who repeated in-game purchases month over month
Spending on online games over the last two years has shown peaks and valleys for even the most popular games. Spending on Fortnite, for example, had risen an average of 110% per month from November 2017 through May 2018, but has been in general decline ever since. However, they had their best month in December 2018, with 20% more revenue during the holiday season than their previous high in July 2018.
The peak of spending on PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) occurred in December 2017, also the holiday season, about nine months after their launch. Spending has continued to decline, but since early 2018 has remained more stable than that of Fortnite. Spending on Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 nearly equaled that of Fortnite after its release in October 2018 (there had been some build-up prior to that with pre-orders). In July 2019, players spent about twice as much on Black Ops 4 as on PUBG. As for Apex Legends, the game quickly moved past both Black Ops 4 and PUBG in spend after its release, and currently sits in a distant 2nd place after Fortnite.
Looking at Fortnite and PUBG, the two games that were around at the beginning of Q2 2018, we see a large difference in how they've weathered the last year. While Fortnite shot up into the cultural zeitgeist and saw sales increase alongside its popularity, the game has gradually seen spend drop 52% between Q2 2018 to Q2 2019. PUBG, while perhaps not reaching the same height of brand prominence that Fortnite received, has remained steadier in sales with a drop of only 2% between Q2 2018 to Q2 2019.
To measure the loyalty of players across online games, Edison Trends looked at how often players made repeat in-game transactions. Out of Apex Legends players who made a purchase in June 2019, 62% went on to make another in July. Apex Legends was the most recently released of all the games, and has been riding a plateau since their early peak. Fortnite, which has been around for over two years, showed its longevity in the industry by coming in next with 49% of players making repeat purchases month over month. Both Black Ops 4 and PUBG, which rely on purchases of the game itself and see a smaller amount of sales from in-game purchases, still saw 40% and 38% respectively of players making repeat purchases.
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