Games publisher and platform Bilibili has announced a big milestone for the mobile version of Dead Cells, revealing that the game has sold over five million copies in China.
As a pay-per-install game, this means over five million Chinese players have downloaded Dead Cells on mobile, showing sustained popularity for the title since its launch two years ago.
Quite the catalogue
When Dead Cells first launched as a mobile game in China in 2021, its mass appeal brought it to over two million installs within five months. Sales doubled to four million in 2022, and a resurgence this summer took the game to the top of the Chinese App Store’s paid games list in August. It stayed on top for 19 days.
Through this latest push, the game has now reached five million paid installs in China and increased monthly active users on the Bilibili games platform to 324 million.
Other titles from the publisher include action game F.I.S.T.: Forged In Shadow Torch, and more recently the roguelite Warm Snow. Following two million sales on PC, the game has finally come to mobile this month, DLC included. There’s also Higan: Eruthyll, an RPG self-developed and published by Bilibili, that launched overseas this year and topped the Apple App Store’s free games category in the US, Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia.
Bilibili even has ties to Fall Guys having partnered with Mediatonic to ensure the game’s Chinese release on mobile back in 2020.
Of course, Bilibili is best known for Fate/Grand Order, which is still going strong in China since its launch in 2016. However, the highly anticipated Uma Musume Pretty Derby was yanked from Chinese app stores last month, mere weeks after launch. This is theorised to be the result of the game’s supposed encouragement to gamble – an illegal activity in the region.
