Mobile Legends: Tracing the origin of India's banned game

The government of India on Monday announced the ban of 59 Chinese apps amid growing tensions with China. The list of banned applications includes Mobile Legends Bang Bang, a mobile game that is quite popular in India.

The game has over 100 million downloads on Google Play Store and is rated 4.2 with over 20 million reviews.

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Origin of Mobile Legends and controversies following it

Moonton - The developer and publisher of the game

The development of Mobile Legends began after the successful launch of Magic Rush: Heroes. The game is developed and published by Moonton, a video game developer and publisher from China. It was released in 2016 and gained massive popularity in Southeast Asia.

However, the game's release faced a lot of hiccups due to lawsuits filed by Riot Games and their parent company, Tencent.

Before the lawsuit, Riot had even contacted Google to get the game removed from their Play Store. However, Moonton themselves removed the game and relaunched it with the new name 'Mobile Legends Bang Bang'.

According to a report by Sensor Tower, the game surpassed the lifetime revenue of $500 million by the end of 2019.

There are only two Chinese games that are included in the list of applications banned by the Indian government. One of them is 'Mobile Legends' and the other is 'Clash of Kings'. Elex Wireless, a Chinese company, developed the latter.

Other popular applications such as TikTok, Shareit, Likee and UC Browser have also been included in this list.

Here is the list of applications that have been banned by the Indian government.

List of applications banned by Government of India