Free Fire: The Little-Known, Potential Metaverse Already Played by 1 in 10 People in the Entire World

Free Fire is a cross platform online battle royale game which on the surface, is largely dismissed by the Western game industry as yet another knockoff of PUBG and Fortnite. But AR/VR investor Julie Young has been looking much closer for well over a year (months before the current Metaverse buzz reached fever pitch), when she observed that the game, from Garena -- a game studio/publisher owned by massive Singapore-based conglomerate Sea Limited -- has the early makings of a metaverse:

In Brazil, they partnered with DJ Alok for a live set in Free Fire. In Colombia, they held an event where two of the country’s biggest soccer players hosted a live tournament for charity. These are perfect examples of Sea’s incredible agility and execution. But on a more philosophical level, they demonstrate that Garena could actually become more than just a very profitable gaming platform - perhaps Free Fire, down the road, will become a new type of platform altogether.

... and based on current user numbers, Free Fire is already well positioned to be The Metaverse, if it wants to become that. As she tweeted yesterday, reporting recent user numbers: "Free Fire has 700 million quarterly active users concentrated largely in some of the highest growth regions in the world (or as @nachkari pointed out today, 10% of the world plays the game quarterly."

Yes, nearly 1 in 10 of everyone across the entire earth already play Free Fire. And for purists who scoff at the idea of the Metaverse emerging from a casual combat game, it's worth remembering that Neal Stephenson's original Metaverse also had a heavy combat game component. 

I chatted with Julie a bit about Free Fire last night, and from that, my sense is that the platform is very much moving in the Fortnite Creative direction that Epic is taking, adding monetization mechanics for user creators. And the thing is, Free Fire has some considerable advantages against Epic -- namely eyeballs:

Free Fire, which is one of the highest-grossing mobile battle royales globally, has reached a new record. The game’s peak daily active users surpassed 150 million in the second quarter [of 2021]... Free Fire reached over 1 billion downloads on Google Play in July, ranking third by average MAU for mobile games on the platform globally. The battle royale continues to be the highest-grossing mobile title in Latin America, India, and Southeast Asia. Free Fire has also been the highest-grossing mobile battle royale in the US for two consecutive quarters.

Emphasis mine, because it bears emphasis compared to the most recent Fortnite daily active users I can find: Under 25 million DAU last year. And in August of this year, ROBLOX only (only!) had 48 million daily active users to Free Fire's 150M.

All that said, read Julie's tweet storm on the topic below:

$SE Q3 2021 here we go!!!! (Sorry this is a day late, I was out of the country + jet lagged and didn’t want to wake up at 4am lol)

Overall pretty impressive and boring quarter as usual! here are some of my thoughts -

— Julie Young (@juliey4) November 18, 2021

Hat tip: Matthew Ball, who sagely noted "This is not viral enough".

Top image via Ikoz Gaming.

Comments

[Ryan Schultz]

Oh, interesting! I did not know about this platform at all.

[lkosov]

I don't see why the multiverse couldn't "emerge" from a game, even a fighting one. A lot of MMOs, even mobile ones, are effectively virtual worlds with various specialized addons. If you look at something like, say, Toram Online, players/users spend a enormous amount of time socializing in the persistent, shared world; it'd work just fine as a platform for a lot of company/departmental meetings, just requires a quite modest smartphone and a minimal amount of bandwidth. It's got avatar customization, clothing, emotes... the dev were even talking about making the currency crypto/blockchain-backed at one point, but I'm not sure what ever came of that. Point being, if they wanted to they could have a nice head start on a viable and successful multiverse engine. So could Free Fire, from the sounds of it.

[Adeon]

I strongly doubt these claims

[Wagner James Au]

I was skeptical at first too but the publicly available info is pretty impressive. There's over 1 billion downloads of the main game on Google Play alone:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?hl=en&id=com.dts.freefireth