PUBG SHOT DOWN: LO, HUM JEET GAYE
It is payback time for Beijing. In no mood to soften up after banning Chinese applications in June and July, the Modi government is out to extract a price for the Chinese misadventure in eastern Ladakh. Staring back at the dragon, New Delhi has banned 118 Chinese mobile apps, including the hugely popular online multiplayer shooting game PUBG.
Tencent's PUBG ranks among the world's top five smartphone games with over 734 million downloads. There are close to 50 million active PUBG players in India, and the game clocks in some 13 million daily users.
It is a mea0sure of PUBG's huge popularity in India that PM Modi, during an interface on exam stress last year, had remarked to a mother complaining about her teen: "Yeh PUBGwala hai kya (Is he a PUBG player?)".
Other apps banned on Wednesday include avatars of applications banned previously, like TikTok and WeChat, Youku, Baidu, Baidu Express and Ali Pay.
A ministry statement said it has received many complaints, including reports about misuse of some mobile apps available on Android and other platforms, for stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorised manner to servers located outside India.
PUBG Mobile, APUS, AliPay, WeChat Work and 114 Chinese Apps Banned: Full...
These applications, the Ministry of Electronics and Information and Technology explains, were banned as "they are engaged in activities prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, its defence, security of state and public order". Welcoming the ban, Praveen Khandelwal, the secretary general of the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), said, apps like PUBG were spoiling the next generation. The popularity of the application can be gauged from the fact that PUBG became the top trend globally af ter the ban was announced. No less than one lakh people were tweeting about it no time. Also, one of the most search related queries on Google seemed to be who owned PUBG. Searches for terms like 'PUBG owner' and related queries such as 'Who owned PUBG' and 'PUBG Owner Country' also spiked. Many on Twitter also wondered if PUBG really qualified as a Chinese app.
Interestingly, in 2017, China reportedly was on the verge of banning the game, claiming it was too violent and bloody and went against the cultural values of the country. In fact, the government offered PUBG lovers a state-approved alternative of the game, Force for Peace. This is where the Chinese company Tencent stepped in and offered to develop a mobile version of the game, PUBG Mobile, after changing the format a bit, says a report in News 18. In India, however, people welcomed the game with open arms. In 2018, a survey carried out by Quartz showed that 62% of the respondents were hooked to the game.