Krafton Is Putting Another 250 Million Dollars Into India After Two Bans on Its Game: the Money No Longer Goes Into Games

South Korea's Krafton, the company behind PUBG, has announced another 250 million dollars (around 215 million euros) for India over the next three to four years. That takes the total it plans in the country past 500 million dollars, since it has already invested over 250 million since 2021. And that excludes the money in the separate 670 million dollar fund it opened with Naver and Mirae Asset last December, where the company put in around 137 million at the first close.

What is worth noticing is not the figure but the direction. Krafton says openly that the money is going outside gaming - into artificial intelligence, robotics and deep tech. A gaming company that started with a single title is now behaving like an investment fund with a host country.

The reason is arithmetic nobody can argue with. India has over a billion internet subscribers and more than 700 million smartphone users. BGMI, the localised version of PUBG, has over 260 million downloads. When one product brings you an audience that size, the next question is not how to sell more copies, but what else you can sell to the same audience.

The road there was not smooth, and that is the part that says the most. The Indian government banned PUBG Mobile in 2020 along with hundreds of China-linked apps, amid tensions between New Delhi and Beijing. Krafton then came back in with BGMI in 2021, dropped Tencent Games as publisher for the Indian market and moved the servers to Microsoft Azure. In other words: to stay in the country, the company had to visibly cut the Chinese connection.

It did not help straight away. In 2022 BGMI itself was banned, and the federal government only allowed it back the following year, on a three-month trial. A company thrown off a market twice is now investing half a billion there. That is not confidence in the regulator - that is a calculation that 700 million phones are worth more than the risk.

So far Krafton has invested in around 18 Indian companies, among them Nodwin Gaming, Loco, Pratilipi, Kuku FM and One Impression, and last year it bought the Pune studio Nautilus Mobile. The new announcement came after a meeting between Krafton's chairman Chang Byung-gyu and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi.

That meeting is precisely the point. The investment is announced on the same day the man from the company sits down with the man who signs the bans. In the Balkans we know that scene up close - the difference is that here half a billion is carried into the room, so the host listens.