James Yang: PUBG Mobile Esports Will Sustain After COVID-19 Lockdown In India

PUBG Mobile has been growing steadily in the last few years – the game has garnered explosive popularity across the gaming community, with millions of players playing the game competitively. Because of this, Tencent planned to expand the Esports scene of the game even further in 2020, with a whopping 5 million dollars for tournaments.

However, with the COVID-19 pandemic hitting India and the world, LAN tournaments are all postponed and canceled. Pro players and fans in both India and the world have been pretty anxious about this – some even questioned the future of PUBG Mobile’s esports scene.

To resolve that problem, yesterday in a press conference, James Yang - PUBG Mobile esports director, has shared his thoughts and the developers’ future directions for the game.

While the lockdown that was imposed in quite a few countries to deal with the pandemic can be pretty restrictive for LAN tournaments, PUBG Mobile can still hold online ones. With everybody having to stay home, user engagements on PUBG Mobile’s tournament live streams have almost doubled – according to Yang, this is definitely enough to continue sustaining the game after the lockdown ends.

Furthermore, Yang also shared that the game has been popular enough on streaming platforms that you can just tune in and watch gameplay at any time of the day. A lot of people like to watch the gameplay even if they don’t play the game, and that is super important for a spectator Esport like PUBG Mobile. Because of this, even if all tournaments become online-only, people would still tune in and watch the matches, keeping the growth of the game steady.

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