Garena’s Free Fire returns to India in new avatar after February 2022 block

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Garena on Thursday announced the relaunch of Free Fire India, an Indian version of its popular battle royale game Free Fire, over a year and a half after it was blocked.
The Sea Ltd-owned game has been relaunched just a few months after the most popular game in the Indian esports ecosystem, Krafton’s Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI), returned from a government block on a three-month trial basis late in May. BGMI had roughly 100 million registered users in the country pre-block.

Free Fire, a battle royale game where multiple players fight each other in a set location to “survive”, was one of the most popular online games in India before it was blocked, according to executives in the gaming industry.

Garena is employing servers run by Yotta, a unit of the Hiranandani group, to provide cloud hosting and data storage services, the firm said in a statement.

In February last year, Free Fire had been blocked at the same time as 54 apps of Chinese origin were banned by the government over concerns that Indian user data was being sent to servers in China. The Indian government did not clarify why Free Fire in particular was blocked.

The block led to Garena’s New York-listed parent, Sea Ltd, seeing its market value drop by $16 billion in a single day.

Reports suggested the Singaporean government made a diplomatic intervention asking Indian authorities about the ban, but could not get the issue resolved at the time.
Roughly a month after the block, parent firm Sea Ltd closed its ecommerce firm Shopee in India, citing “global market uncertainties”. However, another Sea Ltd product, called Free Fire Max, continued to be available in India.
Executives at Garena declined to comment on whether Free Fire India had also returned on a