The Score: Was Justin Bieber's first in-game concert a success?

By: Mat Ombler

Published: 2022-09-12

The Score is a new, collaborative editorial vertical exploring the intersection of music and video games.

In our Season 2 research on music and the metaverse, we identified gaming as one of the hottest entry points for today’s artists to create and monetize visually immersive, interactive experiences around their music. Yet, the gaming industry also remains as misunderstood as it is overhyped, and carries a much richer diversity in experiences, perspectives, and formats than might make it into the mainstream media.

This column will seek to break down these gaps in understanding for a music-industry audience — highlighting of-the-moment opportunities for artists and their teams to collaborate with gaming companies of all shapes and sizes, across mobile, PC, and console games. Every two weeks, Water & Music member Mat Ombler will break down an underrated music/gaming case study — outlining specific insights around monetization models, marketing strategies, and creative tooling, while contextualizing the case study against higher-level business and technology trends. Our aim is for each issue to leave readers not only more informed, but also inspired to experiment and push the boundaries of what’s possible with music and gaming partnerships.

As a community benefit, we have also set up a brand-new, dedicated forum channel in our members-only Discord server for The Score, where members can discuss our findings and share music and gaming resources in between issues. We encourage you to pop into the forum, say hi, and even make a new post of your own!

Was Justin Bieber’s first in-game concert a success?

Tl;dr —

I don’t have to introduce Justin Bieber. With estimated sales of over 150 million records and countless accolades for musical achievements under his belt, Bieber is one of the most successful musicians and recognizable humans alive today.

This global profile makes Bieber’s recent concert and collaboration with Garena Free Fire — a mobile-only battle-royale game where 50 players compete to be the last one standing — quite unusual. Imagine a scenario where it’s possible to parachute from a plane onto an island, find a weapon, and aim at anyone around you dressed as Justin Bieber. It must have been a complex sign-off process.

For some, the concept of a household name performing a virtual concert on a mobile game might sound pretty wild on the surface — even more so if you’ve never heard of Garena Free Fire, whose top markets are Brazil, Vietnam, and Mexico. For context, if Justin Bieber is the Prince of Pop, Garena Free Fire is the Guardian of Mobile Gaming. It was the most downloaded mobile game globally in 2019, 2020, and 2021, according to data.ai, and set a world record in August 2021 when it reached 150 million daily active players. For perspective, Roblox, widely regarded as the leading platform for virtual concerts, has an estimated 50 million daily active players spread across mobile phones, PCs, and consoles. So, Garena’s audience is certainly large enough to turn heads in the Bieber camp.

In the last issue of The Score, we explored Blackpink’s concert in PUBG: Mobile, another battle-royale game in the vein of Fortnite. Although the timing may be coincidental, similar to Justin Bieber’s performance in Garena, the event marked the first in-game concert for both Blackpink and PUBG: Mobile. It may be too early to tell, but with mobile gaming leading the way in growth for the video game sector (projected to produce $136 billion in gaming revenue in 2022), we may be witnessing a new, mobile era for in-game concerts.

For more context on video games and the mobile market, we recommend revisiting the first issue of The Score.

Garena Free Fire gets more out of its music collaborations than most video games

Garena Free Fire is a free-to-play, live service game, which describes a base game that’s regularly updated with new features and content after launch. This easy-to-monetize business model is becoming increasingly popular with video game developers, thanks to the massive selection of IAPs, usually in the form of cosmetic items, that accompany these updates.

Due to the competitive nature of the video game market, many live service games license IP from major franchises or entertainment figures to boost their revenue and download figures, which is why we now have a fully playable multiverse in Fortnite, featuring brands including Marvel, Disney, NFL, DC Comics and many more. This intersection of recognizable characters extends the value of the base-level game, attracting and melding otherwise disparate fandoms.

(source: NickEh30)

Like Fortnite, Garena Free Fire has hosted its fair share of franchise collaborations, from tearing up walls as Marvel’s Venom to dodging bullets as Chun-Li from Capcom’s Street Fighter. While this recent Justin Bieber collaboration is Garena Free Fire’s in-game concert debut, this isn’t the first time that Garena has partied with big names from the world of music. K-pop group BTS, American DJ KSHMR, and Brazilian artists Alok and Anitta have all gotten groovy in Garena, with collaborations ranging from the debut of new music as in-game title themes to even branded talent and variety shows.

If all of that wasn’t as equally impressive and hilarious enough, Garena Free Fire also announces its celebrity collaborators as “global ambassadors of Garena Free Fire.” Let’s stop and think about that for a moment. Take the Ariana Grande show in Fortnite, for example; while it was super impressive from a production perspective, it wasn’t like Ari was flying the flag for Fortnite and promoting it in a series of YouTube videos like BTS did for Free Fire. As you can see from the BTS Free Fire videos, the band looks like they’re genuinely having a lot of fun taking part in this collaboration too, demonstrating this is an authentic collaboration and boosting the appeal of Free Fire.

In this way, Free Fire is a pertinent case study demonstrating how video games can collaborate with bands and musicians by creating branded content on external platforms. Between its track record of cutting through any amount of red tape typically associated with video game and music collaborations and providing experiences that ring genuine rather than a cheap cash-grab, Garena lives in a class of its own. For these reasons, beyond its impressive player count, Garena Free Fire had much to show for its music creds when it entered negotiations with Bieber’s team.

Massive content overhauls and heavy monetization

Usually, Garena Free Fire does something special to celebrate its anniversary. This year was no different, with the Bieber collaboration coinciding with the game’s fifth-anniversary celebrations. News of the Bieber collaboration went live on July 6, 2022, eventually followed by more information on what to expect from the concert and other content updates for Free Fire later in the month and throughout August.

Garena made two significant announcements ahead of the concert. First, the addition of a new character named J.Biebs (who looks like Justin Bieber but also definitely isn’t Justin Bieber, according to the licensing folks); second, an exclusive new track, written by Bieber, called “Beautiful Love (Free Fire).” Yes, the Garena team managed to get one of the biggest pop stars in the world to name-drop their video game in a song title, and there’s an official music video coming later in the month.

Before we dive into the specifics of the concert experience itself, it’s notable that the latest update for Garena Free Fire was itself crammed full of new content, including:

While Garena Free Fire’s decision to pair major game-wide updates with one-off marketable moments isn’t unusual, an anniversary update as significant engages a variety of player demographics; Bieber fans checking out Free Fire for the first time might be encouraged to stick around and play, while lapsed players may redownload the game for the content update, but end up checking out the Bieber concert too. It’s likely in both scenarios that spending will occur.

Garena Free Fire uses an in-game currency called Diamonds, which are purchased using real money and then spent on in-game items such as cosmetic items (character skins, dancing emotes, weapon designs, etc.). One hundred diamonds will set you back $0.99. In monetized game marketplaces, in-game item purchases typically cost more than the standard currency packages — i.e. you cannot choose how many diamonds you’d like to purchase to the exact amount — and Garena is no different. The system inherently forces players to buy more in-game currency, perpetuating a mismatched price point cycle that keeps the player coming back for more (otherwise they would have insufficient funds to make another purchase).

During the Bieber celebration, Garena Free Fire advertised that many of the in-game items associated with the collaboration were on sale. The game used a prize wheel presentation in the Justin Bieber “Mystery Shop” to reward players with a randomized discount percentage. However, it’s challenging to imagine the system is completely randomized. Garena presents the shop in a way that gives players a feeling of already getting a deal on whatever they purchase. Beyond that, Garena incentivized players to “spend more to unlock the grand prize,” rewarding them with Bieber-themed emotes if they topped up their Diamond totals to 100 or 500.

Are these in-game “sale” tactics fundamentally predatory? Maybe. However, the practice is considered standard in mobile game monetization. That said, players aren’t required to spend anything to play the game or unlock the Bieber concert experience; all in-game purchases are optional. When you consider the vast number of players gathering in Garena Free Fire daily, even the lowest conversation rates can deliver vast amounts of revenue — excellent news for Bieber, as he’ll likely be taking a slice of those from in-game purchases of his items.

Did the in-game concert live up to the marketing hype?

Ironically, the most underwhelming part of the Justin Bieber X Garena Free Fire experience was… the actual in-game concert experience.

In most other in-game concerts, artists will play a handful of tracks across a ten-minute-or-so set while players jump and float around them in a virtual environment. While the Justin Bieber concert involved the debut of an exclusive track, it wasn’t released globally on streaming platforms until three days later. It was clearly a missed opportunity, given that it was the only song Bieber performed.

The collaboration, in the works for months, culminated on Aug 27, clocking in at just over three minutes. In contrast, many in-game concerts take place across several dates to boost attendance rates. The experience hadn’t even warmed up before it came to a close, leaving players floating mid-air and chasing Bieber before landing on a virtual stage to “dance” in a rhythm-based mini-game. On the bright side, players who attended the concert received a rare in-game item, the “Marquis Sports Car.”

What can we learn from this collaboration?

In the absence of any official figures from Garena Free Fire on attendance or in-game merch sales for the Bieber collaboration (which would never be shared publicly anyway), it’s hard to pinpoint just how successful the collaboration actually was. That said, iOS figures from GameRefinery show a sharp fall in revenue after the partnership closed at the end of August into early September, suggesting that players were spending more during the collaboration period. We also ran various searches on Chartmetric to see if we could find a spike in streaming or social media figures around the date of Bieber’s in-game concert, and while there were no significant spikes, numbers were rising throughout the period of the collaboration. More than half of the most popular hashtags for Justin Bieber on socials also reference the collaboration (see below).

The event didn’t attract significant media coverage for the collaboration, either, at least from major outlets. Still, most media outlets underreport mobile games, and Garena Free Fire isn’t particularly popular in the West and doesn’t command the same attention as Fortnite or Roblox. Also worth mentioning is that the last year, in particular, has been rough for Bieber as he battles ongoing health issues. These factors could have stretched his management and PR teams, resulting in him not being able to give the collaboration as much attention as he would have liked.

Finally, the fact that this in-game concert only took place on one date impacted the amount of content that players could have created. Not only is Garena Free Fire the third most-viewed video game on YouTube, according to figures from LetsPlayIndex, but it also generates more YouTube videos from everyday players and fans than any other video game. There was a missed opportunity to get influencers on board with the collaboration, which could have helped raise awareness outside its main markets.

It’s worth bearing in mind that this may not end Justin Bieber’s time in Garena Free Fire. It’s not unusual for additional collaboration content to be posted on the Garena Free Fire YouTube channel after a major collab has ended, and with an official music video for “Beautiful Love (Free Fire)”  expected to go live in September, we’ll have to wait and see if there’s more to show.

Gauging the overall success of the collaboration in isolation is difficult. as it tied in to the game’s fifth-anniversary celebrations. Beyond that, it’s hard to pinpoint just how many players downloaded Free Fire specifically because of Bieber given his worldwide appeal. As one of the most successful musicians in the world, it’s challenging to assign a notable increase in streams or social followers to any singular event.

That said, we can partly attribute Garena Free Fire’s ascent to the fourth position in the US top-grossing mobile chart to the collaboration given the large number of Bieber-themed items available to purchase. So, even if this collaboration didn’t do much to widen Bieber’s appeal, it certainly made a lot of money for both Bieber and Garena Free Fire. While we may never know how much Garena Free Fire needed to make to recoup the costs of Bieber’s endorsement, the residual benefits for the branding in the song title alone could provide long-tail upside to both parties in the long run.

Community discussions

As a reminder, we’ve set up a dedicated forum channel for The Score in our Discord server, where members can discuss and share music and gaming resources in between issues. Thanks so much to everyone who has contributed so far — we’ve been super impressed by our community’s enthusiasm and range of knowledge on this topic!

We encourage you to pop into the forum, say hi, and even make a new post of your own. As a reminder, you can suggest topics for future issues directly in the forum by clicking here. If it gets enough upvotes and our editors find it compelling, we’ll feature it as the main topic in an upcoming issue and credit you for seeding the idea.

Here’s our round-up of the latest music & gaming stories being discussed in the Score forum: