PUBG's India return: Can it recreate magic if the ban is revoked?

The creator of the super-popular Korean gaming app has readjusted its organisational structure to return to India

Last week, PUBG Corporation, creator of the super-popular eponymous game, announced its return to India in a mobile avatar after a ban of over two months. Since then, the announcement on its official India Instagram handle has seen over 1.4 million likes. 
 

TapTap, a mobile game-sharing community that recommends high quality mobile games to users, has begun pre-registration of the new game and data shows that it has seen over 200,000 user registrations already. While there is no official notification from PUBG Corp on any such pre-registration, the numbers underline the popularity of the game in India, notwithstanding the anti-China sentiment mobilised by the government following an encounter with Chinese troops in Ladakh.

Experts say the game has a strong brand and recall value and is likely to recover most of its user base, which was over 50 million daily active users just before the ban. This could dent the prospects of the game’s alternatives such as Call of Duty (COD), Fortnite, Garena Free Fire and the upcoming Indian multiplayer game FAU-G (see chart). 

According to data from research agency CMR, 67 per cent of gamers switched to COD after the ban on PUBG in September.

“If cricket didn’t have IPL it wouldn’t be that interesting. Similarly, PUBG brings the same offering to e-sports. We are already figuring out what our schedule is going to be like for gaming tournaments when PUBG makes a comeback. We are hoping to see a big bang return,” said Ashwin Haryani, co-founder of GamingMonk, a community-focused gaming company.

Another e-sports streaming platform, Indian Gaming League, is expecting a 35 per cent increase in daily active users (DAUs) once PUBG is unbanned. 

“We had over 15,000 PUBG teams on our platform at one point. We are expecting all of that audience to come back,” said Yash Pariani, CEO of Indian Gaming League.

According to Piyush Kumar, CEO & founder of sports content platform Rooter, online gaming unlike social media presence is not something that loses its user base. “Whenever the game is relaunched, players will immediately resume playing. They will probably love it even more. PUBG streamers may have been exposed to other popular games but once PUBG returns, they’ll probably play and stream it along with the other games.”

What could put a damper on this excitement building around the speculated return of PUBG is that there still has been no official word from the government authorities on reversing the ban. 

“The government had issued an order under Section 69A of the IT Act to block the app, so that order has to be revoked for it to make a comeback to India,” said Jay Satya, a Mumbai-based lawyer and founder of Glaws.in, a website that monitors developments in the gaming industry.

The app was banned along with over 100 other Chinese apps after rising border tensions by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology on the grounds that “they are engaged in activities which are prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order”. 

The government had highlighted the misuse of some mobile apps for stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorised manner to servers which have locations outside India. The government, according to several reports, is not expected revoke the ban on PUBG unless all its concerns are answered.

In a first step towards making a comeback to India, PUBG Corp, which is a subsidiary of South Korea’s Krafton, had snapped ties with Chinese multinational technology conglomerate Tencent, which had the publishing rights for the mobile version of the game in the country. However, Tencent continues to be a stakeholder in the company. It is noteworthy that Tencent is also an investor in several Indian startups, including Unicorns such as Swiggy, Dream11, Byju’s and Udaan.  

In another move early November, the parent firm Krafton had signed a global deal with technology giant Microsoft adding that its games, including PUBG Mobile, will be hosted on Azure to ensure personal data protection. “This means all the data from PUBG mobile app would be going to a data centre in India run by Microsoft, if it is relaunched here,” explained Haryani.

PUBG Corp has also announced that it is planning to create an Indian subsidiary to enhance communications and services with players for which it will hire over 100 employees specialising in business, e-sports, and game development. “After an Indian subsidiary is set up, if anything goes wrong in the future the government can place the liability on the people involved in the running of the day-to-day business of the company under Section 79 of the IT Act,” said Salman Waris, managing partner at specialist technology law firm TechLegis Advocates & Solicitors. 

The Act entails liabilities of intermediaries, in this case obligation on PUBG India to comply, with the local law.

PUBG Corp has also announced an investment worth $100 million in India to cultivate the local video game, e-sports, and entertainment industries.

Belonging to the battle royale genre of games, PUBG had a massive following in India prior to its ban. The battle royale genre has created a huge fanbase in India over a couple of years as it is an interactive form of gaming which doesn’t involve one or two opponents but several dozen gamers giving it a competitive edge.

According to a report by data-driven insight provider Sensor Tower, India ranked number one for PUBG downloads, generating about 175 million installs till July, or 24 per cent of the total downloads. There’s a lot at stake, then, for PUBG’s India return.