BGMI ban: Will find ways to bring BGMI back to India, says Krafton CEO

Highlights
  • Krafton’s Battlegrounds Mobile India was banned earlier this month from the country
  • The BGMI ban was reportedly enforced in line with Section 69A of the Indian IT Act
  • The developers state that they are working with the Indian government to resolve issues

Krafton, the Korea-based developers of the popular mobile game franchise, Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, has seen two of its titles banned in India now. After the eponymous PUBG Mobile was banned in India in June 2020, the company released Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) in the country as a replacement of the previous title in July 2021. However, the replacement title has now been banned again earlier this month. Now, the BGMI developers have stated that they are working with the Indian government to resolve the issues.

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“We have been directly running the service based on stringent data security standards and monitoring,” said Krafton CEO Bae Dong-Geun during the quarterly earnings call. “We will closely cooperate with the authorities to find ways for the users in India to keep enjoying BGMI.”

Why was BGMI banned?

According to Krafton’s latest earnings call, Krafton chief executive, Bae Dong-Geun, affirmed that its tweaked India title, BGMI, was banned in India. As a result, the company is now reportedly in conversation with government officials — in a bid to resolve the issues that the game has faced. The government, however, has not issued a clarification regarding the ban.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) is the department concerned with handling mobile apps and technology-related incidents.

According to reports, the Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 was used to ban BGMI in India — one of the most popular battle royale games in the country. The section instructs entities to be banned or restricted in light of the sovereignty and national security concerns. However, it is not clear as to how BGMI violated these clauses — which is what Krafton might be looking to understand and resolve.

PUBG Mobile was also incidentally banned under the same clause. At that time, Krafton officials had also claimed to be in talks with the government to resolve its plight. After an intervening period, BGMI was released with revised data localisation clauses — as well as reduced violence graphics. However, such changes could not alter cases of underage user addictions with the game, in both PUBG Mobile and BGMI guises.