Battle Royale games caught on and literally never fell out of trend. The past few years saw the rise of mobile gamers. It has been a good time for gaming on the go with the release of PUBG and we went from console nerds, PC peasants to mobile noobs in barely 2 years. When PUBG dropped, it had everyone with Android 5.1.1 or above hooked to their phones. And then came the promise of Call of Duty, the most popular first-person shooter video game's mobile debut. When the game was made available earlier this month, we bet on it taking over PUBG's popularity. Here's evidence:
Apart from the constant prompts to buy battle passes at the beginning of every game, the game was an instant hit with battle royale fans, no surprises there. What is surprising though is how quickly it trumped PUBG. Looks like more people downloaded CoD than they did PUBG (and by a huge margin). As per reports in Business Insider (Sensor Tower), Call of Duty mobile has surpassed PUBG with its first-week download numbers. The mobile game officially broke a record with a whopping 100 million downloads! Yup, that's how many downloads it got in the first seven days of its release.
In case you're wondering, it's 5 times the amount of downloads PUBG and even Fortnite got in their debut week. The hotly popular PC game has officially claimed dominance. This is a huge win for TiMi Studios and Tencent considering the massive margin between Call of Duty and its competitors. More importantly, do you know who did it?
PUBG was banned in India after the tensions between India and China. On September 2nd, 2020, The MSIET banned PUBG, is it back from the dead? PUBG has added several maps over the years it's been out, but nothing has quite sounded as cool as this does. Paramo will have an active volcano on it that sends lava flowing across the map. PUBG: Exhilarating Battlefield and PUBG: Army Attack were the very first two versions that released on February 9, 2018, for Android and iOS devices. Later, an English version of PUBG: Exhilarating Battlefield ' PUBG Mobile ' was released worldwide March 19, 2018. See full list on digitaltrends.com. PUBG Mobile has come up with a new list of players that have been given a 10-year ban. The creator comes out with such lists from time to time and publishes the IDs of confirmed cheaters on a public domain.
Call of Duty's downloads come from Android users who make up for 44.3% of the user base with iOS contributing for more than half of the players. Indians formed the second-largest users after the US. To be fair, Fortnite's user base was only iOS users. The margin falls into perspective when you compare it to PUBG's download numbers which were 28 million in the first week. Moreover, the recently launched Mario Kart Tour came in close to Call of Duty with 90 million downloads.
Call of Duty's revenue is piling up at a crazy pace with $17.7 million in earnings so far and it's no surprise. Meanwhile, here's some more on our obsession with battle royale games.
Cover artwork by Dhawal Bhanushali/Mashable India