Garena's battle royale mobile game Free Fire and several of Chinese gaming giant NetEase's gaming titles are among the 54 China-linked apps banned by the Indian government under section 69A of the Information Technology Act on February 14.
Garena is the gaming arm of the Singapore-based Sea Limited that also owns online shopping platform Shopee. Chinese tech giant Tencent is one of its key investors with a 18.7% stake.
Free Fire, which interestingly had benefited from the ban of PUBG (PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds) Mobile in September 2020, was the highest grossing app across Google Play and Apple's App Store in 2021. It had clocked about $34.3 million in app spend last year, according to estimates by app intelligence firm Sensor Tower shared with Moneycontrol.
India was also the top market for Free Fire in terms of downloads, accounting for about 26% of the game's overall downloads which was at 24 million instals as of December 2021, according to Sensor Tower.
About 40 million of the game's 70 million monthly active users are also in India, according to TechCrunch.
Note that the government has banned only the standard version of Free Fire called 'Free Fire: Illuminate' while 'Free Fire Max' continues to be available on Google Play at the time of writing this article. Apple however has removed both the versions.
Garena Free Fire - Illuminate generated close to 55 million downloads in India across the App Store and Google Play during 2021, while Garena Free Fire Max accumulated close to 13 million installs in India in last year, following its launch in September 2021, as per the data shared by Sensor Tower.
NetEase, which is China's second largest gaming company after Tencent, has seen several of its games suspended as part of this ban. This includes Onmyoji Arena, Onmyoji Chess, Astracraft, UU Game Booster, Extraordinary Ones, Badlanders, Twilight Pioneers, and Stick Fight: The Game Mobile. The firm has also witnessed similar bans of its games in the earlier wave of Chinese app suspensions in the country.
In a statement to Moneycontrol, Google said they are complying with the government order.
"On receipt of the interim order passed under Section 69A of the IT Act, following established process, we have notified the affected developers and have temporarily blocked access to the apps that remained available on the Play Store in India," it said in a statement. Apple is yet to respond to Moneycontrol's queries.
Chinese app bans in India
Monday's app ban takes the total Chinese apps banned by the Indian government to 274 apps in less than two years. The government had banned 59 apps including TikTok in May 2020, followed by 118 apps including PUBG Mobile in September 2020 and 43 mobile apps in November 2020.
Krafton had relaunched PUBG Mobile as Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) in July last year with the assurance to store data locally and adhere to the Indian government laws for data security. This is likely the only app until now which has made a comeback to the country.
India had said in January 2021 that it had imposed a permanent ban on the first batch of 59 Chinese apps that also included Bytedance's Helo, Alibaba’s UC Browser, Shareit and Club Factory, besides TikTok.
TikTok ban
The suspension of the Bytedance-owned short video app in May 2020 had led to a boom in the short video market in the country.
TikTok had more than 200 million users and close to 600 million downloads prior to the ban. Local and global firms jumped in to cash in on the void created by the Bytedance-owned app. This includes ShareChat’s Moj, MX Takatak, Instagram Reels and VerSe Innovation’s Josh, all of which were launched within a month of the TikTok ban.
That said, consolidation is afoot the country's short video segment, with ShareChat announcing a merger with rival Times Internet-owned MX TakaTak in a $600-million cash and stock deal. This also comes at a time when Meta and Google are doubling down on their respective short video services Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.
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