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In a recent livestream, Stalwart Esports’ co-founder Towqeer Gilkar and GodLike Esports’ professional Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) player Vivek “ClutchGod” Horo were hosting a PUBG Mobile Global Championship 2022 (PMGC 2022) watch party. During this session, they talked about BGMI’s potential return and discussed the possibility of global matchmaking.
Global matchmaking is the feature that allows the players to play with/against players from outside of India. Although the feature was available in PUBG Mobile, Krafton did not include it in BGMI for data privacy.
Stalwart Esports Founder and ClutchGod discuss BGMI’s potential return
While discussing BGMI’s potential return, Gilkar stated that PUBG Mobile and BGMI would have the same meta after the game returns. “As far as I know, if the game comes back, whenever it comes back, the developers will imply the same meta on all the regions, including on BGMI. Previously, BGMI had a different meta, including zone shifts and all,” he said.
The government of India banned PUBG Mobile in September 2020 under section 69A of the IT Act 2000. The government stated, “It (PUBG Mobile) is engaged in activities which are prejudicial to the sovereignty and integrity of India, defense of India, security of the state, and public order.” With no hopes of the return of PUBG Mobile, Krafton introduced BGMI in the country to fill the void of PUBG Mobile in July 2021. However, the government of India went on to suspend BGMI under the same law one year after its launch.
ClutchGod asked Gilkar if BGMI would allow global matchmaking after its return. Replying to this, Gilkar said that global matchmaking requires the game to share data across the borders of the country to allow matchmaking, and BGMI and its predecessor PUBG Mobile both were blocked for sharing data in the first place, so BGMI might not feature global matchmaking. He further added, “Unless the publishers go with a telecom provider for the data protection.”
Following this, Gilkar claimed that Jio is working on building a game studio. “Also, Jio is claiming that it is building a game studio. Yeah, Jio is getting into gaming. They want to be Tencent of India. I think if Jio does that, it will do it on a good scale. I hope so.”
It has been almost four months since BGMI was removed from the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store, and still, there is no official announcement from Krafton about the game’s return. However, there have been recent positive developments around the game in the last two months. Krafton’s latest press release claimed that it is working on resuming BGMI services in India. Furthermore, a lot of creators have also claimed that the game might return in early 2023.
