Why Garena Free Fire removed from Play Store, iOS Store? China angle or Krafton could be factors
India Today
Garena Free Fire is no longer available on Android and iOS app stores, but is the government behind it or is it Krafton that sued Garena recently?
Garena Free Fire players were stunned over the weekend after their favourite battle royale vanished from the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store in India. While some saw the sudden delisting of the game as temporary, many others speculated that the Indian government had to do everything with this move. A report by ET Now has suggested that Garena Free Fire is one of the 50 Chinese apps that have been banned by the government, but this may or may not be behind the removal of the battle royale.
While neither Garena nor the government has officially said anything about the sudden disappearance of Free Fire, the major speculation is that the government has banned it because it is a Chinese app. But this is not true, at least going by the company profile. Garena's parent company, Sea Ltd, is registered and headquartered in Singapore, while its owner, Forest Li, was born in China and then moved to Singapore.
The first wave of banning apps and firms with association to China began in 2020 when PUBG Mobile, along with over 100 apps, was blocked in India. So far, a total of 270 apps have met the same fate, but whether Free Fire has joined them is not officially confirmed.
The Google Play Store no longer lists Free Fire, but surprisingly, Free Fire Max is available for download in India. Apple’s App Store, on the other hand, has delisted both Garena Free Fire and Garena Free Fire Max. No company has given a clarification behind the move.
A huge chunk of people are speculating that the Indian government has banned the game, but there are some reports that beg to differ. According to some media reports, it is not the Indian government but Battlegrounds Mobile India creator Krafton that could be behind this.
Krafton, which owns the intellectual property rights to Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) and games related to it, filed a lawsuit against Garena recently, alleging that its Free Fire battle royale is a blatant copy of its PUBG games. The lawsuit compares elements of Free Fire like the vehicles, landscapes, names of locations on the map, weapons, and skins with its own that you see inside a range of PUBG-related games, such as PUBG Battlegrounds, PUBG Mobile, Battlegrounds Mobile India, Game for Peace in China, and PUBG New State. It also said that Garena Free Fire has grossed huge revenues and become popular because it resembles PUBG Mobile.
There is no information on whether or not a ruling was reached in the court in response to Krafton’s lawsuit, but the delisting of the apps might as well be self-imposed censorship by Google and Apple since the name of these two companies is also in the lawsuit. Krafton accused Google and Apple of promoting Garena Free Fire on their app marketplaces without verifying its originality.
