Garena Free Fire has been blocked for players from India

The Government of India has decided to ban the mobile game Garena Free Fire, as reported on the ET NOW Twitter account. The publication published a list of 50 banned games, which included a project developed by 111dots Studio. Most of the applications were made in China. The main reason for the ban was cited by the state as a “threat to the security of the country.” According to the authorities, Garena Free Fire regularly collects data about users who have installed the game and sends it to other countries. Recall that Garena, the company that provided the gaming platform, is based in Vietnam and belongs to the Singaporean holding SEA Ltd.

On February 12, Garena Free Fire was removed from the iOS and Android stores. At first, users did not understand what was going on and began to suspect that the title was banned in mobile stores. This became known for sure on February 14th. The publisher promised Indian players to try to resolve the issue with the Indian government, but did not say that the game was blocked in their country.

The problem with this situation lies in the extremely high popularity of the game in India, which means a huge loss for the publisher. If we talk about more accurate figures, then this is 53.55% of the entire audience of the game. TechCranch reports that there are over 40,000,000 players from India for the 75,000,000+ users of the battle royale. In addition, it was the fans of this title from India who contributed the lion's share to the set record at the Free Fire World Championship in 2021. More than 5,400,000 spectators watched the matches of the mobile game at the peak, 2,000,000 of which were natives of this country.

For India, this is not the first time a popular game has been banned in their country. A similar situation happened in 2020 when the authorities decided to ban PUBG Mobile from mobile stores. The publisher of the latter, by the way, is the Chinese company Tencent, and the political situation at that moment really gave the state logical reasons to ban the title for the natives of India. Then not only PUBG Mobile fell under the knife, but also other equally popular games and applications, including TikTok, WeChat, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang and even Arena of Valor.

The developers were able to negotiate with the Indian authorities and made a compromise. As a result, a special version of PUBG Mobile with the subtitle Battleground Mobile India was released for the inhabitants of this country. The main change was a different color of blood, which made the game less violent. In addition, Tencent decided to invest $100,000,000 in the development of the gaming industry in India and made a $200,000 charitable donation to fight COVID-19 in this country.