PUBG Mobile was arguably the most popular and downloaded Battle Royale game in India from the Play Store or App Store. A few days back, the Indian government declared the app to be unsafe for the privacy of Indians and along with some other apps, banned it in the country. So users and players can’t download the game from Play Store anymore. While this was bad news for the PUBG Corporation and Tencent, it became good news for the other similar games and their companies. With the ban in place for PUBG Mobile in India, people started to look for alternative games from the Play Store and App Store. That resulted in higher downloads of the alternative games. More on the story ahead.
PUBG Mobile Ban a Good News for Alternative Apps
According to a report from ET Telecom, rivals of PUBG Mobile — Call of Duty Mobile, Battlelands Royale, and Garena Free Fire all saw higher download rates after the ban of PUBG Mobile. As per statistics, Call of Duty Mobile started getting 9x more downloads than usual. Call of Duty Mobile on an average got 7,500 downloads in a day before PUBG Mobile was banned, but after the ban, the numbers rose to staggering 67,000 downloads every day in the September 3-7 period. The game got 3,30,000 new downloads in that five day period.
Along with that, Call of Duty Mobile saw an increase in the daily active users (DAUs) by 50% reaching a high of 4,80,000 active users on a daily against the 2,00,000 active users before the ban. Talking about other games such as Garena Free Fire and Battlelands Royale, these games got 2x more downloads after the ban of PUBG Mobile.
Free Fire got around 80,000 downloads a day on an average before PUBG Mobile was banned. But after the ban, the numbers rose to 1,60,000 downloads daily. This stat is for the same period (September 3-7). Free Fire got a total of around 8,00,000 downloads in the five day period and the DAUs rose by 5% (45,50,000 active users). On the other hand, Battlelands Royale witnessed a 41% rise in its DAUs from India.
PUBG Mobile has broken its ties with the Tencent and is looking to work with the Indian government to bring back the game to India in an official capacity as soon as possible.
