Video Editor: Puneet Bhatia:
Is PUBG a Chinese game?
This question stormed the internet and social media as the gaming app – which is very popular with the Indian youth – was banned by the Government of India on Wednesday, 2 September.
After banning 59 apps in June, that included TikTok, ShareIt, UC Browser and Vigo video, another 118 Chinese apps including PUBG Mobile, PUBG Lite, Baidu and WeChat have been banned by the government.
Soon after the announcement, the most searched queries on the internet seemed to be questions like 'who owns PUBG' or 'which country does PUBG belong to'?
The game was created and conceptualised by an Irish game developer, Brendan Greene, along with PUBG Corporation, a subsidiary of Bluehole, which is a South Korean gaming company. But, this was the desktop version of PUBG, which went on to become an instant hit with gamers.
In 2017, China was on the verge of banning the game, claiming it was ‘too violent' and went against the culture of the country.
This is where the Chinese company Tencent stepped in. Tencent Games, which was part of a Chinese company Tencent Holdings, offered to develop a mobile version of the game after changing the format.
Subsequently, PUBG Mobile released in China on 9 February 2018 and worldwide on 19 March 2018, including in India.
Now, South Korean company Bluehole and Chinese company Tencent both share profits from the sale of the game, as per a prerequisite licencing agreement. But, it's now held under the unified brand of Krafton Game Union.
However, the Chinese company Tencent is the second-biggest shareholder at Bluehole and has an 11.5 percent stake in the South Korean company.
Now that we've established the ownership of the game and the Chinese stake in it, let's see how China is hurting post the ban.
To answer this question, let's go back to how PUBG became a phenomenon, that took India by storm.
Many gamers created content on YouTube and other social media platforms like PUBG game commentaries and tutorials to earn by monetising their channels with advertisements and earned millions of subscribers.
PUBG Mobile Club Open (PMCO) Fall, which is one of PUBG Mobile’s biggest tournaments, saw a peak of 116,000 viewers last year.
After India banned 59 Chinese apps on 29 June citing data security concerns, PUBG Mobile even introduced a new change in its privacy policy for India, to avoid facing the axe.
The revised privacy policy stated that all data collected from its Indian players will be stored on local servers within the country and that the data collected will be shared with third parties like cloud services for data backup, to handle support ticketing and fraud detection.
But now, if the mobile app is banned in India, which was developed by the Chinese firm, a huge user base of the app for Tencent is lost, which is sure to severely dent profits of the Chinese firm, along with South Korea's Bluehole and PUBG Corporation.
On Thursday, shares of Tencent fell more than 2 percent after the PUBG ban in India. The stock traded 2.2 percent lower on Thursday, to snap two straight sessions of gain.
So, coming back to the question: Is PUBG a Chinese app? The answer is both yes and no!
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