There are other battle royale games as well such as Fortnite and the new Apex Legends, both of them have surpassed PUBG in one way or the other. And they both don’t get much negative publicity as PUBG gets. It was last month when the Indian police arrested ten college students for playing PUBG in public even though it was put on a total ban in some cities of Gujrat. But it is the first time PUBG has been banned on a nation-wide scale. According to The Kathmandu Post and the Himalayan Times, the government of Nepal has directed every ISP (Internet Service Provider) and mobile operators to ban the game. And the government is even prepared to arrest the players who were found guilty of playing the game as it is now illegal to play it.
Dhiraj Pratap Singh, chief of the Metropolitan Crime Division, told the Post, “We have decided to ban the game before anything unfortunate occurs in Nepal.” Nepal’s Metropolitan Crime Division pushed a ban for the game through the court and put a ban in a single day. According to them, PUBG is addictive and it makes the players violent and aggressive in real life even though there are multiple reports and research done on the subject with no positive result. They also said that they had consulted psychiatrists who believe in the video game aggression theory. They even pointed out that other countries have too banned the game which isn’t entirely true. Because in India the game was put on ban only in few cities and in China the game wasn’t exactly approved by the country. It means that the players couldn’t purchase the in-app items of the game but it was still active. It should be noted that Tencent added a China-only age gate to the Mobile version of PUBG to pacify the censors placed on the game. But it is not the first time Nepal has banned something completely in the country as it had put a total ban on porn last year in October. So, banning something on a wide scale isn’t really new for the country.
