Dark hour for Pubg players.

PUBG, one of the apps banned on Wednesday, is an online game that can be played on mobile phones, personal computers, and also gaming consoles

The hugely popular game PUBG, selfie app FaceU and business card scanning app Camcard are among the 118 apps that have been banned by the the Union Information and Technology Ministry on Wednesday citing security reasons.

India was PUBG’s largest market, with the country accounting for the most number (175 million) of downloads of the app. This amounted to 24 percent of the global numbers.(approx)

FaceU is also a widely-used app across the world, with 300 million users globally.

The ban on 118 China-linked apps is the third such crackdown by the Union government since 29 June, when the government first banned 59 apps. TikTok, the highly popular social media app, was included in the first list of 59 apps that were banned by the government.

The second such crackdown, on 27 July, was on 47 apps which were clones of apps that were earlier banned.

These actions were taken after clashes along the Line of Actual Control between Indian and Chinese troops. The total number of China-linked apps that have been banned by the government now stands at 224.

PUBG, if you don’t know, lol.

PUBG (PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds) is an online game that can be played on mobile phones (both Android and iOS), personal computers, and also gaming consoles like Xbox, as mentioned in a report by The Statesman.

In a PUBG game, 100 players jump on to a battlefield chosen by them, without arms or weapons, and get on the task of collecting supplies and ammunition that would help them survive.

The game has been extremely popular in India, and about 22 lakh people in the country played the game in May 2020, according to a Times Now report.

In fact, in early 2019, when a concerned mother of a ninth-grader complained to Prime Minister Narendra Modi about her son’s online addiction during the Pariksha Pe Charcha 2.0 event in Delhi, he light-heartedly commented, “Ye PUBG-wala hai kya?” [“Is your son also a fan of PUBG?”]

While the PUBG game was developed by a Korean game-maker, its mobile version was developed by Tencent, a Chinese conglomerate.