BackAfter PUBG ban, Krafton's battle-royale game blocked in India following govt order
This development comes a year after the country banned popular game PUBG. Incidentally, BGMI was unavailable on Apple too as of Thursday evening
PremiumAlphabet Inc's Google on Thursday reportedly blocked access to a popular battle-royale format game Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) from Krafton in India following a government order, a Google spokesperson said according to Reuters report. This development comes a year after the country banned popular game PUBG. Incidentally, BGMI was unavailable on Apple as well as of Thursday evening.
The Reuters report said, the removal of Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) comes a year after India's ban of PUBG, a similar title from South Korean developer Krafton. PUBG was banned for its affiliation with Chinese publisher Tencent Games. The reason for BGMI's ban was not immediately clear and IT Ministry has not commented on the matter yet, the report further stated.
Meanwhile, countering popularly held belief, a major study by the University of Oxford published Wednesday said that the short-term mental-health impact of playing video games "is probably too small" to be noticeable. Andrew K. Przybylski, a researcher at the university's Oxford Internet Institute said, "our study finds little to no evidence of connections between gameplay and well-being."
The study surveyed 38,935 players from the English-speaking world, asking them to rate their mental well-being and comparing it with the amount of time they spent gaming in the previous two weeks, according to AFP report. "Many have warned about video games' possible addictive qualities and their potential harm to players' well-being, leading to far-reaching and widely contested health policy decisions," said the study, published by the Royal Society.
The report further said that in China, children are only allowed to game for one hour each day on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. "Our results show that the impact of time spent playing video games on well-being is probably too small to be subjectively noticeable and not credibly different from zero," the study said.
Game publishers including Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo provided researchers with the time each respondent spent playing, with their consent. It followed players of seven titles -- "Animal Crossing: New Horizons, "Apex, Legends," "Eve Online," "Forza Horizon 4," "Gran Turismo Sport" and "The Crew 2" -- over a six-week period, taking surveys at two-week intervals. However, the study's authors said that more work was needed to identify the causal effects over a longer time period.
(With inputs from Reuters, AFP)
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