Game Theory: 97% Of You CAN'T Name The Most Popular Video Game In The World!

[Music] 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 is daily active users count as 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 so let's try again what has been the second most downloaded mobile game in 2021 it's also the most downloaded game of 2020 and 2019. in total over 1 billion downloads on google play alone fortnight candy crush clash of clans no none of these unfortunately no one can simply tell you the answers to these questions you have to see for yourself that what you know of as the gaming industry has been nothing but a lie is the world that's been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth this is your last chance theorist after this there is no going back you take the blue pill and the story ends you wake up in your bed and you believe whatever it is you want to believe you take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and i show you how deep this rabbit hole goes remember that i'm offering only the truth nothing more good let's begin hello internet welcome to game theory the show that today is pulling you out of the matrix by the way did you know that matrix 4 is supposed to come out this year yeah totally forgot they were making that one anyway it makes my dated reference in the cold open of this video feel a little bit more timely totally 100 planned so you know those iceberg explain style videos 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 like the youtube iceberg on the very top would be stuff like despacito jimmy fallon clips mainstream viral videos 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 mr beast react videos minecraft you know top creators and trending topics that pretty much everyone is at least vaguely aware of keep going down further and further into the iceberg and you pass things like don't hug me i'm scared and poppy before eventually go 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 iceberg we all thought that the iceberg looked like this when in reality it looks a whole lot more like this like 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 cause that's new or league league is always big the real list of biggest games in the world though minecraft and roblox and things are definitely up there but that list is also going to be rounded out with games that you've likely never heard of 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 videos that got the most likes in different categories like a fancier version of a watch mojo countdown except for gaming of course because the videos 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 just saying at this point feel like i have to go to twitch so that youtube can pay me to come back anyway true to form 2019's rewind didn't seem interested in the gamers or the individual videos 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 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 among us video last year and that's actually what happened because in 2020 guerna 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 video 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 you get literally zero mentions of it ditto for waypoint literally zero mentions do the same search on kotaku and you find exactly one article listing off that wouldn't you know it it 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 video 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 gonna call it right now it's gonna drastically change 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 look 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 video 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 video is entirely hashtag not spawn specifically because i wanted to be able to talk freely about the title you'll notice that throughout the video 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 it represents 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 that's actually me translating from an original portuguese review of the game in techtudo a brazilian publication and i bring that up for a reason brazil is a country where the minimum wage in 2020 was 1039 real the equivalent of just under 200 a month barely more than a dollar an hour obviously this means that you're gonna have a country with more than a few budget conscious gamers whose only gaming device might be a low end smartphone so it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that a game like free fire which aims to deliver a premium gameplay experience on non-premium hardware is going to be a huge hit there same story in thailand where free fire was the most popular game of 2019 and the minimum wage is 331 baht per day the equivalent of cents per day in u.s currency free fire also huge in india now if that was all there was to the story i wouldn't have bothered making the video but here's the thing while this might seem like a case of other parts of the world having their own separate video game ecosystems geared toward budget smartphones those worlds aren't gonna stay separate for much longer the us up to this point has functioned almost entirely within a bubble an island when it comes to gaming unaware of the wider trends happening in the world of gaming around us but that bubble is going to burst and soon this is admittedly a bit of a prediction on my part but i'm not the only one making it microsoft's xbox division is making the same prediction and they're betting a lot of money on it by targeting india as their most important gaming market over the past decade or so india has come online in a way that's quite frankly astounding back in 2007 when online games like modern warfare halo 3 and tf2 were all the rage only four percent of people living in india had internet access in 2020 that number ballooned to 50 in the span of two console generations the indian market for online games has gone from a single digit percentage to half of a country with over a billion people that's probably why earlier this year microsoft went on record to say quote the indian gaming audience is one of the world's biggest gaming markets and remains a key growth area for the xbox business considering that billions of dollars are at stake i don't blame them the upshot is while the video game marketing countries like india might seem separate more american companies want to target them and with indian gamers favoring mobile games coming out of asia like gorena free fire lords mobile and battlegrounds mobile it won't be long before big players in us gaming start copying those trends and design aesthetics and what's even cooler is that this cross-cultural exposure works both ways as we start to see more and more overlap between the traditional gaming audience here in the states and these new emerging gaming markets we're gonna have more chance to get exposed to new types of games consider this if you are an old school gamer who grew up in the 80s and 90s one thing you probably noticed is that most of the games came from either western developers or japanese developers this was embodied by the division between the jrpg and the western rpg japanese rpgs like final fantasy and dragon quest just approached storytelling differently from western rpgs like fallout balder's gate and elder scrolls like this is a japanese marlboro this is a u.s marlboro can you spot the difference at the time it seemed like games basically boiled down to two different cultural categories western and eastern but that oversimplified view got turned on its head as the gaming industry grew the growth of the korean gaming market in the early aughts brought us mmos like maplestory and ragnarok online games that were designed to be played hunched over a keyboard in a pc bang rather than with a controller in hand like most japanese games this influx of korean influence also pushed gaming into new territories like ragnarok online's art style of 2d sprites in 3d environments or maplestory being one of the earliest examples of the free-to-play model that's now omnipresent and continuing on into the 2010s we saw the mainstreaming of eastern european gaming companies exemplified by the witcher a game series from poland that's deeply influenced by slavic folklore another polish developer that deserves a shout out is 11bit studios creators of this war is mine and frostpunk two of the bleakest gaming experiences of the past decade when i say bleak i mean cold like these games are from the middle of europe it is cold there and their games reflect that and of course there's also china dension impact ended up being one of the biggest games of 2020 and honestly one of the coolest things about it was getting to explore an open world region that was inspired by real-life chinese architecture and geography with character designs that also reflected the culture so games are being designed with a more global audience in mind which means greater need for accessibility across all economic ranges this in turn makes gaming more accessible meaning more designers around the world with different cultures now starting to express their unique cultural viewpoints through their games and here's the thing through all of this what is defined as a gamer is looking really really different these days case in point in 2017 a market research company called quantic foundry did a survey to see which game genres were most popular with specific genders here in the us for example the most female genre was match 3 games with the total audience being 69 women and candy crush specifically having an audience of 83 women likewise farm games or family life simulators like the sims have an audience that is 69 women and according to the survey the most male genres are what you might expect the first person shooter at 93 mail survival roguelikes at 75 mail mobas like league of legends and dota at 90 it's always tempting to look at survey results like these and assume that there must be something inherent to the game genres that make them more attractive to certain genders or you know the data could be lying to you in this episode's cold open i asked you if you knew what the world's most popular 5v5 moba game is right now it's not league of legends it's actually a game called honor of kings 10 million daily active users for league hundred million for honor of kings if you're wondering why you've never heard of the game despite its popularity well it technically isn't available outside of china though there is an international version of the game titled arena of valor but what's really striking me about honor of kings isn't the popularity but who's playing it women this 5v5 moba game which involves just as much laning jungling and ganking as you'd expect from the genre as a playerbase that is 54 female over half the people playing this game are women but again remember the data that we just reviewed here in the us is that moba players are 90 male and by the way lest you think this is some sort of casual watered-down version of a moba experience yeah it's designed to run on phones but the game is a legit esport with teams at the world championship competing for a two and a half million dollar prize pool discovering that there's a 5v5 moba esport title that not only has hundreds of millions of players but also has a player base where over half of them are women is the kind of thing that should be making us drastically question the industry's assumptions about games and who is supposed to be playing them like what if the reason that popular moba games from western developers have an audience that's 90 male isn't due to anything inherent in the game's genre but rather other factors around the game like a need for a more welcoming more inclusive player community or the need for less gender discrimination happening at the corporate level look i don't have the answers to that one today but the international player numbers show that laning and jungling until two in the morning is not something that only male gamers are capable of enjoying what's becoming more and more clear through this episode is that we've been putting gaming into a box a box of who games are supposed to be targeting and how they're supposed to be made and played especially when it comes to western developed aaa titles but as more and more emerging markets come online that system is getting disrupted those assumptions are being proven to be wrong and it's up to the west to either adapt or die what we're seeing right now is indeed just the tip of the iceberg a lot of these international studios are just cutting their teeth which means that we have a lot to look forward to in the coming years as they're able to reach a global market with more refined versions of the games that they've been working on for years i mean the witcher might be the franchise that put cd projekt red on the map but it didn't really explode into the massive commercial success that it was until the witcher 3. by the same token mihoyo was cranking out games for nearly a decade before striking it big with gentian impact there is a ton of overseas game studios out there that are in their early phases bringing up new talent and finding commercial success by catering to their own domestic audiences and i'm eagerly awaiting what those same studios are going to be ready to debut when they come to the international stage i think we have a lot to look forward to in the coming years because lots of the biggest and best games in the world right now are ones that we've never heard of and now that we've all left the matrix we'll never see the industry the same way again but hey that's just a theory a game theory thanks for watching

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 1,984,350

Rating: 4.8813868 out of 5

Keywords: minecraft, roblox, fortnite, free fire, league of legends, minecraft 1.17, fortnite season 8, roblox tiktok, league of legends cinematic, league of legends music, minecraft theory, fortnite theory, roblox thoery, most popular game, most popular games 2021, top games 2021, mobile games, game theorists, game theory, matpat, game theory minecraft, game theory fortnite, game theory roblox, clash of clans, brawl stars, supercell, iceberg, iceberg explained, garena free fire

Id: X1CeC7m52Sg

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/CapitalPositive6937]

54% female!!???? Jesus Christ. I know it is HOK but holy shit. Where are the females in aov man. Sadge.

[u/ProperWait1]

BRB. I'm just gonna suit up.