Game industry made billions again from free games and that continues to grow

Game publishers are making more and more from ‘recurring releases’. Free games with microtransactions have been the biggest source of income for the games industry for years and the phenomenon continues to grow. This is apparent from the financial reports and developments of the past year.

The largest game company in the world is Tencent. The name of that Chinese tech giant is not known to everyone, but with smartphone games such as Honor of Kings, Clash of Clans, PUBG Mobile and Call of Duty: Mobile, the company rakes in billions annually. The company also owns League of Legends and numerous other free-to-play games for PC. In the past financial year took out the company a turnover of 24.6 billion euros from games. This makes Tencent’s gaming branch almost three times the size of Activision-Blizzard, the largest ‘traditional’ game publisher.