In mobile gaming war, PubG is already a winner
Sakriya Puri, 16, is preparing for his medical entrance examinations. In his free time, he plays a mobile game with his friends called Player Unknown’s Battleground (PubG).
The objective of a player in this hugely popular battle royale game is to become the last person, or team, standing.
Puri and his friends are not professional gamers. They play PubG on their phones only during their spare time. While it is typical of Indian parents to dismiss video games as a waste of time, consider this: Puri and three of his friends—they call their team Terrifying Nightmares—won ₹15 lakh in the PubG Mobile Campus Championship. The event had 250,000 registrations from over 1,000 colleges. Of these, 40,000 players competed in teams of four.
The championship demonstrates the fact that PubG has become a phenomenon in the country. It evokes a lot of passion. Shouvik Das, a Mumbai resident, relates one such incident.
He was once rudely awakened by his flatmate screaming downstairs. “It was 4 am. I and my other flatmate rushed down thinking the house has been robbed, but my flatmate was yelling only because he had just died in PubG.”
PubG originally gained fame among more advanced gamers, through its console and PC versions. The game became so popular that its owner, South Korea-based Bluehole Inc., formed a subsidiary called the PubG Corp. to focus on the game.
The mobile version of PubG was launched this March, in partnership with Tencent Corp. In the last eight months, PubG has been installed more than 100 million times on Android phones worldwide.
A recent report by SensorTower said PubG was the most downloaded game on Apple’s App Store in the first quarter of 2018.
The game is among the top five most downloaded games on Android in India right now, according to Google Play rankings.
NEWDELHI: