The ban of PUBG in India created chaos in the gaming world, being a disadvantage for the makers of PUBG but resulted as an advantage for the rivals. The South Korean makers of PUBG had cut off their ties with China Tencent to reverse the action of the ban; however, the rivals like Call of Duty Mobile, Garena Free Fire, and Battlelands Royale and other such shooting games and reaping rich rewards.
These gaming apps have noticed an increase in the new installs, roughly, 9X, 2X, and 2X surge respectively, since the official ban of PUBG on 2nd September 2020 (data sourced by TOI).
The everyday downloads of Call Of Duty was an average of 7500 in 10 days before the ban of PUBG, but the new installs observed during September 3-7 averaged to hike up to 67,000. The number reached up to 3 lakh new installs of the game in India in the first five days. The app’s DAU (Daily Active Users) also bubbled up by 50%.
The game Free Fire had an average download of approximately 80,000/day before the ban. But in the first five days after the ban, the daily downloads shoot up to 1.6 lakh approximately. Also, the new installs were around 8lakhs during the period. Similarly, Battlelands Royale observed a hike of 41% in its active users base from India.
Free Fire, Call of Duty, Hunter Assassin, and India’s own Ludo King made it to the top five games on the Google’s Play Store charts immediately in the first five days after the ban of PUBG.
On the other hand, Fortnite, another PUBG rival got removed from the app stores on August 13th 2020 and hence is not accessible to gamers nationwide.
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