Sakriga Puri is a sixteen-year-old high school student in New Delhi who is preparing for his medical entrance test. Like most of his friends, he plays Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG for short) whenever he has free time. The mission of the player is to be the last one or on the last team to survive, regardless of which strategy they use.
Puri and his friends only play PUBG to relax and they properly never would have thought that their habit would go as far as winning them an award. They formed a team called Terrifying Nightmares and entered the PUBG Mobile Campus Championship and won ₹15 lakh. Their parents, who were once concerned about the so-called childish habits of their children, must be surprised to know this. The contest is held on a large scale, indeed, with 250,000 university students signed up for it.
Just by looking at the number of contestants in this contest, we can conclude that PUBG has become a new trend in India. Showvik Das, living in Mumbai, reconfirmed our statement by telling his own experience of being woken up by his roommate. “It was 4 am. I and my other flatmate rushed down thinking the house had been robbed, but my flatmate was yelling only because he had just died in PUBG.”
At first, the game was popular among PC and console players. The company behind PUBG: Bluehole, a South Korea company, decided to establish a branch called PUBG Corp. specialized in developing this game only. Working with Tencent Corp in China, they started to publish the mobile version of the game. It has been a huge success since gamers worldwide downloaded the game on Andriod more than 100 million times just over the last eight months.
The case on iOS was even more impressive, as PUBG became the most installed game on this system in the first 3 months of 2018, reported Sensor Tower. It recently became one of the five most downloaded game in India on Andriod.
Although the original version of this game was for PC and console, in India, most gamers play it on their phone. Puri plays it on his OnePlus phone, but other players can play it on virtually every smartphone. Fraud analyst Akash Karpupta uses his iPhone, while another player, Agnibh Mudi, uses Xiaomi Redmi 4, a low-cost phone to catch up with the PUBG trend.
The game tournaments in India are not popular, mostly because of the low prices that they offer. PUBG is an exception, with its prize up to ₹50 lakh. The commitment of players to PUBG lies at the time it takes to finish one round. Puri shared that it takes him half an hour to play one session, a sufficient amount of time. Moreover, the players do not have to play PUBG every day, while its competitor Fortnite requires.
Most players play it whenever they have free time, regardless of the destination: at home, in class, on the metro. Mudi is a chef at a restaurant based in Delhi, and he often complains about his employees unwinding from their work for a game of PUBG. Shrey Pacheco, another player, received a call from his friends saying that he needed him to form a full team to play the game. Kargupta and his co-workers play PUBG during their break, however, “Each session runs for about half an hour, so we end up taking a lot of half-hour breaks”
As we mentioned before, according to Sensor Tower, PUBG was a hot app in the first three months of this year since it got more installments compared to YouTube, Netflix or Snapchat. With the trends that it is gaining, the number is expected to rise quickly in India.
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