PUBG is finally shutting services in India from October 30

The Indian government banned PUBG Mobile and Lite on 2^nd September 2020 in its third strike to stop the functioning of Chinese apps in the country. Though PUBG wasn’t Chinese, it still had connections to Shenzhen-based Tencent. Two months later, today, the South Korean developer is finally shutting its servers in India.

PUBG Corporation announced the update in a Facebook post.

It said that it is shutting down its India servers for the games on October 30. "To comply with the interim order of the ministry of electronics and information technology dated 2 September 2020, Tencent Games will terminate all service and access for users in India to PUBG Mobile Nordic Map: Livik and Mobile Lite on 30 October 2020. The rights to publish the game in India return to the owner of the PUBG intellectual property," the Facebook post states.

'Protecting user data has always been a top priority and we have always complied with applicable data protection laws and regulations in India. All users’ gameplay information is processed transparently as disclosed in our privacy policy. We deeply regret this outcome, and sincerely thank you for your support and love for PUBG Mobile in India," the company added.

It used these servers on Tencent Games. Soon after the state banned the game, Apple App Store and Google Play Store took them down to prevent new downloads. But the servers did not shut. This means that users who already had the game could still play it without interruptions. Surprisingly enough, it had retained more than 90% of its users monthly active users in the country.

A big setback for existing players

The final shutting down of servers will not allow users to play the game anymore. No matter, if they have the game installed in their phones or not. For most of the Chinese apps, the government even restricted access through VPN. However, it remains uncertain if the users will be able to access PUBG Mobile through VPN.

PUBG Mobile had about 50 million monthly active users in India. This figure is almost 10x than that of Call of Duty Mobile, Fortnite or other battle royale game in India. Now, the roles seem to have flipped. With India banning PUBG, games like COD Mobile and Garena Free Fire witnessed a surge in the number of downloads. Garena Free Fire recorded more than 2.1 million downloads whereas COD Mobile had 1.15 million installs, soon after the ban.

India’s ban on PUBG was a big jolt for the South Korean developer. The country is too a lucrative market to lose. Hence, in a bid to get back its dominance in India, the game cut off publishing ties with Tencent Games. In another case, it also asked Reliance Jio as the possible suitor for holding PUBG Mobile’s India publishing ties. However, no official statement came from the game or Reliance.

“We deeply regret this outcome, and sincerely thank you for your support and love for PUBG Mobile in India.” The Facebook post concluded with the last straw.