PUBG Mobile fans saw a silver lining when last week a report suggested the company is planning to relaunch the smash-hit battle royale in India later this year. Several preparations are underway to ring in the re-entry of PUBG Mobile, including a marketing campaign that will go live sometime around Diwali. Now, the company’s latest move seems a right step in that direction. PUBG Corporation’s parent company Krafton has signed a deal with Microsoft to store user data on Azure cloud network, which could allay the Indian government’s data localization fears.
The latest cloud deal between Krafton and Microsoft will encompass a series of products, including the PUBG, PUBG Mobile, and PUBG Mobile Lite games. This means that all the user data from these three games will be hosted on Microsoft Azure servers, which are available in India as well. Krafton might choose to store the data of Indian users on Azure’s local servers, hence, complying with data localisation policy. This development comes shortly after last week’s report that said PUBG Corporation is talking to cloud service providers in India for PUBG Mobile data hosting.
PUBG Corporation that has developed the original game and its various versions is a subsidiary of Krafton operating under the umbrella company Bluehole in South Korea. PUBG Corporation recently snatched the publishing rights of PUBG Mobile and PUBG Mobile Lite from Tencent Games in India. Prior to the ban, the data of PUBG Mobile users from India was stored on Tencent Cloud in China. The government had announced a ban on PUBG Mobile and PUBG Mobile Lite in September alongside several other apps.
PUBG Corporation is also looking for a publisher in India for PUBG Mobile. It was allegedly talking to a number of Indian companies for publishing rights, including Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio, who could take over the operations of PUBG Mobile title in India. PUBG Corporation has even talked to Alibaba-funded Paytm for publishing rights, according to media reports. For now, it is not clear who has shown interest in this offer but given the popularity and the profit that PUBG Mobile can bring, the search for the publisher is poised to end well.
PUBG Mobile is likely to be relaunched in India by the end of this year, the first announcement of which was supposed to come in anytime last week. We can treat this Microsoft Azure deal as the first announcement towards the rejuvenation of PUBG Mobile in India. A Diwali campaign for PUBG Mobile might follow this announcement
