India can ban PUBG Mobile as part of its ongoing crackdown on apps from Chinese companies, Gadgets 360 reports.
On June 29, India blocked 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok and WeChat. This week, another 47 apps were blocked, and apparently, more will follow. The Indian government is allegedly looking at an additional 275 apps from Chinese publishers that can soon be shut down in the country. One of them is PUBG Mobile, which is developed by PUBG Corporation (South Korea) and Tencent (China).
While the government has imposed the bans citing data privacy and security issues, the crackdown seems to be a retaliatory move. On June 15, 20 Indian soldiers were killed in a border conflict between India and China in northern Ladakh region. Following the skirmish, anti-China sentiment has soared across the nation, with the country’s media calling for Chinese products to be banned.
China exports over 3,000 products to India, which is China’s fastest growing major market. India is also China’s biggest external market for TikTok and PUBG Mobile. If the battle royale is banned in the country, which accounts for the game’s 175 million installs (24% of the total download count), it would be a serious blow to developer PUBG Corporation.
To prevent the potential ban, Tencent has updated the PUBG Mobile privacy policy to indicate that the data which from Indian users will be stored on servers located in India. Moreover, PUBG Mobile has support, engineering, and other teams located in India.
We are yet to see how Beijing will respond to the bans.