PUBG was banned in the Indian state of Gujarat in March amid fears about its violence and addictiveness; police had arrested 21 people for playing it in public
Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed News : Tweets: @katienotopoulos and @pranavdixit Tweets: Katie Notopoulos / @katienotopoulos : Personally, I applaud India for banning a vilioent video game and throwing gamers in jail. They've got it figured out there https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... @pranavdixit : He had never been inside a police station. Now he was sitting across the desk from two plainclothes cops who threatened to throw him in jail for playing a video game. I met the boys arrested in Gujarat's Juhapura to unpack India's national PUBG hysteriahttps://t.co/DLomS81sl9
Context & Ripple Effects
Pranav Dixit's reporting on the Juhapura arrests captures the ground level of what became a years-long arc: Gujarat's March ban over violence and addictiveness fears put plainclothes police across the desk from teenagers, months before New Delhi escalated. The national wave followed with India banning another 188 Chinese apps, PUBG included, on security grounds.
The game's Indian life since has been a cycle of removal and conditional return — a nine-month absence ended when PUBG Mobile relaunched as Battlegrounds Mobile India, then a second delisting hit the renamed title while it counted 16.5M monthly users, before authorities granted Krafton a three-month trial approval to come back again.
First-order effects
- Twenty-one players in Juhapura face criminal exposure for playing a game in public, making individual users — not just publishers — the enforcement target in Gujarat.
Second-order effects
- Krafton absorbs repeated market access shocks: the local hysteria presaged the national ban that forced the nine-month blackout and the BGMI rebrand, then a second delisting at 16.5M MAUs, with its Indian business surviving only on regulator-granted trial terms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, India's gaming governance settles into a regime where titles operate at the state's discretion — bans issued on security or social-harm grounds, relaunches gated by approvals — a logic now extending beyond battle royale to online real-money games, which IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw tied to roughly $2.3B in user losses.
The trend: India is consolidating a discretionary ban-and-relaunch regime for games, where state-level moral crackdowns scale into national access decisions and publishers re-enter only on government terms.