I may not be a professional gamer at all, but I’ll admit, I’ve been dabbling in a few online games for years. My first experience with the popular multiplayer Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) was interesting, to say the least. It was the Erangel map. The ‘place’ had a delightful coastline, green valleys, and majestic mountains. The only odd thing? Everyone was trying to kill each other. Gunfire, stuttering footsteps, faraway explosions, and mangled vehicles - I was immediately hooked. It was a new type of online shooting game for me, called battle royale. The idea is that around 100 people drop on an island (or a map), look into buildings to take up weapons and potions, and fight to the death. Meanwhile, the playable area keeps shrinking. The game turned out to be so popular that American game developer Epic Games even launched its own version called Fortnite. Gamers—including those in India—made a fortune out of streaming— either videos of themselves playing these games or “tips and tricks” videos. At one point, the game had about 170 million installs in the country. And then came the ban. In 2020, India banned multiple Chinese apps, including PUBG. At the time, Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent was the game’s franchisee owner and the second-largest shareholder in South Korean gaming behemoth Krafton Inc., the game’s publisher. But why am I talking about a game that was banned in 2020? Because, as gamer Rehan Shaikh - who goes by the gaming nom de plume ‘Mortal’—says,
It’s déjà vu. You see, Krafton—which has invested around US$100 million in various Indian firms—decided to jump into the arena itself. It launched Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI), PUBG’s successor, in July 2021. And just a year later, on 28 July, BGMI was unceremoniously pulled from Google’s India Play Store and Apple’s App Store. The game had well over a hundred million registered users; its BGMI Masters Series tournament became the first e-sports event broadcast on primetime television and clocked over 1.2 million TV views. Déjà vu. Tournaments have now been put on hold, streamers and platforms have taken a hit with both viewership and revenue. But unlike last time, the ecosystem is pre-emptively moving on.....
