Battlegrounds Mobile India, often known as BGMI, appears to have been banned in India today in an unexpected turn of events.
The famous battle royale game PUBG Mobile by Krafton has been taken down from the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store for its India-specific edition.
Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) Banned?
Players of BGMI vented their frustrations about the removal of BGMI from the Play Store early this evening on social media sites and in internet forums. Online reports of the game being taken down from the iOS App Store have subsequently also surfaced, igniting speculation that it has been banned in India.
We independently checked the reports, and neither the Play Store nor the iOS App Store on our devices offer BGMI for download.
Searching for BGMI on the Play Store yields PUBG Mobile equivalents, as shown in the screenshot below, but skips over the game in question.
Also, on Android, moving to Krafton Inc. publisher page on the Play Store only shows the newly launched PUBG New State title. That’s not all, though. We are backing this article we ample proof about the removal of the Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) game in India. We also searched for the BGMI Play Store listing on desktop, and well, the game has indeed been removed. It shows an app “Not Found” error on the desktop.
Over 100 million gamers have joined BGMI, which recently celebrated its first anniversary in India.
Now, less than a month later, the game—an India-only imitation of PUBG Mobile, which was previously prohibited—has mysteriously vanished, leaving us to wonder if BGMI (also known as PUBG Mobile) has once again been made illegal in India.
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Both the government and Krafton, the company that created the game, have not yet issued any public statements.
So keep checking back for additional details.
A Google representative verified the removal of BGMI from the Play Store in accordance to a court order in an official statement to TechCrunch.