Understanding Gamers' Psychology: What Free Fire's Google Play Reviews Revealed

About this analysis: we first published it on the Pivony blog in 2022. The findings below come from one month of Google Play reviews at that time; Free Fire has changed a lot since. Pivony has no partnership with Garena, and this is an independent reading of public reviews. Free Fire is a trademark of Garena.

Why game teams should read their reviews

Mobile games break revenue records every year, and players move fast: what kept them playing two years ago may not keep them now. When we wrote this analysis, we had spoken with more than 10 mobile game studios. Most of them put their effort into advertising: the bigger the budget, the more new players they got.

The problem is that new players leave for the same reasons earlier players left. If you don't know those reasons, paid growth is a leaky bucket. The reasons are usually written down already, in app store reviews and social comments. The hard part is reading them at scale.

The data: one month of Free Fire reviews

Free Fire by Garena is a battle royale game released in 2017. It was the most downloaded mobile game of 2019 and, at the time of our analysis, had more than 500 million players.

Android players share their reactions on Google Play constantly. In one month we found almost 1 million reviews written by about 780,000 players. Nobody can read that by hand, so we grouped the reviews by topic, sentiment and intent (complaint, suggestion, praise) and looked at each topic separately.

Averages hide the real story

Looking only at totals, the game seemed to be doing well: players who complained were about a third as many as players who praised it. But averages hide what goes wrong inside the game. When we broke the reviews down by topic, clear pain points appeared.

Finding 1: monetary expectations

Many players made suggestions about the in-game economy. When we kept only suggestions written in a positive tone, 224 players politely asked for more events, mainly as a way to earn more diamonds (the in-game currency). They missed the days when there were more events.

These are not angry players. They are engaged players telling the team what would keep them playing.

Finding 2: unbalanced characters

The second topic was balance, especially the abilities of the Chrono and Wukong characters. Players felt these characters were overpowered and made matches unfair. The average rating of reviews on this topic was only 2.7 out of 5.

We can't know whether this was a deliberate choice for the game's economy; we don't work at Garena. The point is how quickly a topic-level view shows which design decisions are hurting the experience.

A related topic was skins and guns: players were unhappy with the limits they faced as free users. This is the same game-economy question seen from another side.

Finding 3: modes, collaborations and bugs

• Zombie Invasion mode: players wanted it back. Some said they had deleted the game or lowered their rating because it was removed.
• Anime collaborations: Free Fire ran events with Attack on Titan and One Punch Man. Not everyone liked them, but about half of the players who wrote about them were satisfied, and many said they wanted more news like this.
• Bugs: 9,295 players wrote about bugs, and these negative reviews pulled the game's Google Play rating down.

What game teams can take from this

1. Read topics, not averages. A healthy overall score can hide a topic rated 2.7 out of 5.
2. Separate intent. Suggestions from loyal players ("more events, please") need a different response from complaints.
3. Track the economy in players' words. Currency, events, skins and free-user limits come up again and again in reviews.
4. Watch what players ask you to bring back. Removed modes are a churn reason players state openly.
5. Read your competitors' reviews too. Their players' pain points show you what to do better.

Do this for your own app

You don't need a data team to get a first view:

• Free review report: paste your Google Play or App Store page into our free review root-cause report. You get the top complaint themes, their likely root causes and example reviews by email within one business day.
• Competitor reviews: Pivony Market Intelligence tracks competitor reviews and category trends from app stores, social and public data.
• Method: our guide to root cause analysis in customer feedback explains how to go from review topics to the causes behind them.

If you'd like to see it on your own reviews, book a demo.