Mobile Legends Revenue 2023: MLBB's Growth and Peak

If you are a gamers, there is a chance that you might have heard of the Mobile Legends. Especially if you are from East Asia or Southeast Asia. This is proved by the Mobile Legends revenue that grows to this day.
The game unfortunately is not really doing well in Western players. However, these mobile games still attract a lot of revenue since the day it's launched. Hence, you should not underestimate this mobile game. To understand more about the revenue of Mobile Legends Bang Bang and its player statistics, check out this article.

Introduction of Mobile Legends Bang Bang

Mobile Legends Bang Bang also called MLBB was launched in 2016 by Chinese Studio Moonton, part of a subsidiary of ByteDance. It is a competitive game in the form of a free-to-play 5v5 multiplayer online battle or MOBA. These mobile games were heavily influenced by League of Legends by Riot Games. We can see it from the battle form and the team player. MLBB has its peak popularity in Asia, particularly in the Southeast Asia region. The MOBA game genre is usually not really well-received in the West. However, it dominated the top position in many countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, and Singapore. The game drew a lot of attention with similarity to other games such as League of Legends. However, its gameplay and graphics still accumulated a lot of attention from MOBA players. This game has distinct features that differentiate it from other MOBA games which is its heroes pool. In this mobile game, there are dozens of heroes for each role that could offer players a lot of options. Similarities in the position of heroes in League of Legends can be found in this game, such as assassin, support, fighter, and also shooter. The game is a 5 against-5 battle with real opponents. In this game, you can team up with friends and then fight other teams together.

Overview of Mobile Legends Gross Revenue 2016 to 2019

Based on Sensor Tower, MLBB has experienced great growth over the years since the day it was launched. In 2019 itself, the MOBA game passed $502.5 million in revenue. Probably not right after, however, the growth of MLBB in the game industry is really a menacing one. This mobile game user increases spending every year and keeps on climbing in the next year. In 2019, the revenue was at its peak as it reached $214.1 million. This number apparently rose 36% year over year. In December 2019, Mobile Legends had its best revenue result as it reached $24.4 million. The game revenue has the best performance in Asia. Especially in Southeast Asia like Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. This conclusion can be understood by the generated revenue of $307 million, which is 61% of the total revenue since the launch date. While the game is not available in China, it still topped the Honor of Kings game from Tencent which got $251.4 million outside the Chinese Market.

• Player Spending

Southeast Asia has Malaysia which became the most lucrative market for Mobile Legends Bang Bang. From 2016 to 2019, Malaysian players spent around $87.5 million on the game. Which could count as 17% of the total revenue. The next country is Malaysia's neighboring country, Indonesia. Indonesian players are placed as number two for player spending. Indonesian players generated $69.2 million or 14% of the total revenue. United States is placed as number three generating Mobile Legends revenue of around $64.1 million or around 12% of total revenue. The revenue for the years 2016 to 2019 is accounted for by the Google Play Store version for the majority. This version made up more than $340 million or 68% of the user spending. Meanwhile, the App Store from Apple users spent $162.4 million the 32% total revenue. This shows that the MLBB game is well-received by the Android user.

• Game Download

The Mobile Legends revenue has accumulated around 281.3 million downloads throughout the year 2016 to 2019. The total download, around 200 million is from Asia which made up to 75% of the total download. The ranking in terms of downloads in Indonesia. This country has a total of 100.1 million or more than 30% of total unique installs. In number two, we can find the Philippines, and then there is Vietnam as number three. Google Play has the biggest share of downloads, which made 250.7 million installs or 89% of total downloads at that time. While the App Store accumulated around 30.5 million installs or 11% in total.

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Mobile Legends Revenue 2023 After reaching high revenue from 2016 to 2019, Mobile Legends still marked its best in the year 2020. This could be seen as the mobile game reached 1 billion downloads in October 2020. This accomplishment made MLBB become one of the first games to become well-known in the MOBA genre. In the year 2022, Mobile Legends revenue has generated around $215 million from across Google Play Store and App Store. In June 2022, the game generated more than $300 million over the past year. This number accounts for approximately 32% of player spending in Bytedance. However, in the year of 2023, the number seems to decrease to only around $180 million based on data from Statista. This is the total opposite of the League of Legends game that hit $1 billion gross revenue this year based on data.ai.

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Facts on Mobile Legends You Should Know

There is a fact that many people do not know. It is the news that Moonton as the developer of MLBB was sued by Tencent in July 2018 on behalf of Riot Games. After its release in 2016, Riot Games suspects that it was imitating the intellectual property from their game, which is League of Legends. Riot Games then contacted Google to remove MLBB from the Google Play Store. However, before Google could remove the game from their platform, Moonton had removed it first and then released it again using the Name Mobile Legends Bang Bang in November 2016. Later in July 2017, Riot Games filed a lawsuit of copyright infringement against MLBB developers. However, this case was dismissed. The parent company of Riot Games, Tencent, filed a new separate lawsuit targeting the CEO of Moonton, Watson Xu Zhenhua. For the information, Zhenhua was a senior employee of Tencent. This lawsuit was in favor of Tencent, and in July 2018, awarding a settlement of $2.9 million to Tencent.

Conclusion

After reading the information, it is understandable that you will not be able to underestimate the game anymore. Mobile Legends is one of many games that have been able to attract a lot of fans as well as revenue over the years. The Mobile Legends revenue is high and still counting even these days.