Indian Government bans PUBG despite it being #1 downloaded app
The Government of India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has banned PlayerUnknowns Battleground Mobile during a slaughter of 118 apps bring wiped from its stores.
PUBG Mobile is the number one downloaded app in India and is home to the fifth-best team in the Eastern Division, Team SoloMid Entity.
In a press release which has gone viral, the Indian Government stated that the 118 banned apps are "Prejudicial to Sovereignty and Integrity of India, Defence of India, Security of State and Public Order.
"The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has received many complaints from various sourced including several reports about misuse of some mobile apps available on Android and iOS platforms for stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users' data in an unauthorised manner to servers which have locations outside of China".
Other banned apps include Tencent Weiyun, Rise of Kingdoms, Zakzak, CamCard, and Baidu.
The news has been branded "as big as banning TikTok" by prominent esports figure Daniel Ahmad, who stated PUBG Mobile has been downloaded nearly 200 million times in India. This makes it the highest-grossing app of all time in India in terms of both revenue and downloads.
The app-massacre isn't likely to stop here either, with sceptical eyes firmly poised in the direction of Call of Duty Mobile too, who's developer, TiMi Studios, is a subsidiary of Tencent. There's been a wave of Tencent apps wiped from the Indian app stores. The only difference being Activision is the publisher of COD Mobile, rather than Tencent itself.
Esports giants, Team SoloMid and Fnatic both have Indian PUBG Mobile teams, who will now be left without an app to compete on, despite being within the TSM Entity having won over $180,000 in prize money.
OrangeRock will also be one of many teams having to disband, even though itbecame the second-best team in the East this year at the PUBG Mobile World League 2020. Some players have up to 2million followers on social media platforms such as Instagram, who will be forced to look elsewhere to make a living.
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Image via Tencent | Team SoloMid | Fnatic
