{"id":11395,"date":"2023-01-07T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-07T05:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zaanews.in\/?p=11395"},"modified":"2022-12-08T13:57:40","modified_gmt":"2022-12-08T08:27:40","slug":"krafton-dreams-of-ascending-the-world-stage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zaanews.in\/index.php\/2023\/01\/07\/krafton-dreams-of-ascending-the-world-stage\/","title":{"rendered":"Krafton Dreams of Ascending the World Stage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Walk into the topmost floor of Krafton’s HQ \u2014 spread across eight floors of a 35-storey glass-and-steel building in Seoul’s posh and trendy Gangnam neighbourhood \u2014 and you’ll be greeted by a giant curved screen. On a breezy, overcast November morning, it’s playing a loop of Krafton’s latest collaborations, including a tie-up with K-pop girl group Blackpink for an in-game concert. But it’s what lies behind that screen that defines the South Korean video game giant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A row of awards and trophies is dominated by seven Guinness World Record plaques. They are all for the battle royale title\u00a0PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds\u00a0\u2014 colloquially known as PUBG \u2014\u00a0Krafton’s\u00a0most famous game to date. Following its massive success on PC, Krafton designed a free-to-play mobile offshoot,\u00a0PUBG Mobile, in partnership with Chinese tech behemoth\u00a0Tencent<\/a>. It was by far the most popular mobile game in India, until its highly controversial ban in 2020. At the time of its ouster, India was PUBG Mobile’s biggest market,\u00a0accounting for<\/a>\u00a0slightly less than a quarter of its global total downloads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The PUBG and BGMI era<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Citing national security concerns and privacy issues as the reason for\u00a0the ban, the Indian government included PUBG Mobile in a list of apps 118 long, alongside suspect business card readers, flashlight apps, music and video players, apps for news, dating, photography, search, and a bunch of other games. But many, including\u00a0CNN,\u00a0CNBC, and\u00a0Financial Times, noted that it came in the wake of Chinese incursions on the Ladakh border region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

India said that the apps were \u201cengaged in activities which [are] prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defense of India, security of state and public order.\u201d China said India had \u201cabused the concept of national security and adopted discriminatory restrictive measures against Chinese companies,\u201d according to CNN. FT labelled it \u201ctough economic action targeting the country’s companies\u201d \u2014 in PUBG Mobile’s case, against Tencent. But as\u00a0Inc42\u00a0pointed out, a South Korean firm had been \u201ccaught in the crossfire.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Walk into the topmost floor of Krafton’s HQ \u2014 spread across eight floors of a 35-storey glass-and-steel building in Seoul’s posh and trendy Gangnam neighbourhood \u2014 and you’ll be greeted by a giant curved screen. On a breezy, overcast November morning, it’s playing a loop of Krafton’s latest collaborations, including a tie-up with K-pop girl …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11396,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[15512,3,11],"class_list":["post-11395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech-news","tag-facts","tag-games","tag-tech"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zaanews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11395"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zaanews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zaanews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zaanews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zaanews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11395"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zaanews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11398,"href":"https:\/\/www.zaanews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11395\/revisions\/11398"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zaanews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zaanews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zaanews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zaanews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}