PUBG Mobile banned in India, but you can still play it on your PCs & consoles

The PUBG mobile app is now no longer available for download on Google Play and App Store, following the ban announced by The Indian government on Wednesday on PUBG and other 117 Chinese apps. The game is still working for those who had downloaded it earlier and this number is close to 145 million. However, PUBG still can be played on consoles and PCs.

The government has put a ban only on the mobile version of the game (due to which Tencent has lost nearly $34 billion of its market value in the last two days) and not on the original version which is still available to play on consoles and PCs. And PUBG lovers can still play the game on their PC, Xbox, or PS4. Hence many PUBG players are eying this variant of the game.

Is PUBG a Chinese app?

PUBG is not entirely Chinese – a fact that many people are not aware of. In fact, PUBG and its mobile version PUBG Mobile are two different games developed by two different developers. Developers of PC versions are not Chinese. PUBG was originally conceptualized by an Irish video game designer, Brendan Greene. The PC and console version of the game was developed and published in December 2017 by a South Korean company PUBG Corp. which is a subsidiary of Bluehole, a South Korean game development studio. 

And, later Tencent was given the right to create a mobile version of the game, which was published in March 2018. Due to the heavy-graphics of the game, Tencent later published a lite version (PUBG Mobile Lite) of the game along with PUBG Corp. in August 2019. As you can see, Tencent’s association is limited to the mobile version of the game and not with the version that is available to play on PC and gaming consoles.

Is playing PC version of PUBG is legal in INDIA?

Playing PUBG on PCs in India is perfectly legal as the Indian government’s list of banned Chinese apps only talks about the mobile versions of the game. And the PC version of PUBG can be played on any regular PC or a console without the need of a VPN. As both PC and Mobile version of games are different from each other, you may find it tough to acclimatize with some features. In fact, the PC version is supposed to be more advanced and claimed to have better graphics.

Is PC version free as Mobile version of PUBG?

PC version of PUBG is not free and can cost you Rs 999 if you download it from Steam. And for this, you need a PC or a gaming laptop with 64-bit Windows OS (not older than Windows 7) with  Intel Core i5-4430 or an AMD FX-6300 processor and also a 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 or an AMD Radeon R7 370 graphics card. Your system should have at least 8 GB of RAM and 30GB of storage space available to play the game smoothly. One can also opt for PUBG Lite for PC to play free version on low-end laptops but this version has low-end graphics.