More than a game? Why Krafton believes BGMI has become a social lifeline | HT Tech Insider (HT Tech)

From giving creators greater ownership through the Partner Programme to bringing collaborations such as Naruto and Spider-Man to the game’s 4.5 update, Das outlined Krafton’s approach to keeping BGMI relevant in an increasingly competitive market.

Virtual logistics, it seems, remain hilariously stubborn regardless of how technologically advanced our devices become. Before Srinjoy could join our call, a brief comedy of tech errors unfolded. There was an audio-first, video-second sequence required to bypass a persistent conference room echo.

“The fun fact is that we had to go to audio first and then video, in that order specifically,” Srinjoy chuckled, finally settling into the frame, his energy completely unaffected by the minor digital hiccup. “In any other order, it was not working. But yeah, sorry for the minor interruption, folks!”

Today, my conversation with him wasn’t merely about updates or cosmetic skin drops; it was about a foundational pivot. We sat down to discuss how an application that occupies gigabytes of storage across hundreds of millions of Indian smartphones is actively transitioning from a tactical battle royale into a sprawling, cultural mega-platform.

The philosophy behind that is simple: we want users to be in control of the experience that they want while playing the game. So, if you’re okay with sacrificing a little bit of graphical fidelity in exchange for getting a slightly higher frame rate (FPS), you can make that trade-off.

Beyond that, we are very conscious of what FPS can be unlocked on what phones, and we do that only when we are completely satisfied that a particular tier can be unlocked after extensive internal testing. The second thing which gives us a huge advantage over almost any other company is that the size of our user base is so high. We get an incredible volume of data as to how these games perform on specific, real-world devices. We work closely with certain OEMs from time to time, alongside data that the Google Play consortium shares with us, to make sure that we take care of these aspects.

Even if you have an older phone, or a newer phone that you’re unable to buy because of RAM increases and memory price hikes, it doesn’t materially change the experience. The philosophy in a nutshell is to give that entire power to the users.

Gamers these days no longer look for just an experience curated for them by the developers; they look forward to creating it themselves, which is incredible. If you look at the two largest creative platforms in gaming in the world, Roblox and Minecraft, they are places where users are actively encouraged to build the environment. We set up this journey a year back and introduced a lot of beautiful tools inside BGMI where you can take an independent asset and create your own map. It’s called our WOW Mode (World of Wonder) and the PGA Editor.

The response has been so humongous. We now have almost 15,000 custom creators operating inside our ecosystem, generating millions and millions of plays per map. Our top user-generated maps have in excess of 80 million plays.

If you’re a YouTube creator, you know how difficult it is to get to even a thousand subscribers and hit a million views. And a view there is just a three-second loop counted by an algorithm. When you are a video gamer and someone plays your map, it means three distinct efforts have been taken: first, the user made a conscious choice to play your game; second, they chose to download the custom assets; and third, they spent their valuable time. It’s not a three-second swipe; it’s a full commitment of their ten, fifteen, or thirty minutes. Now imagine 80 million of those interactions per map! As an ex-mod creator myself, who managed to create mods for different FPS games back in the day, it gives me tremendous personal satisfaction to see what these creators are achieving.

For example, a couple of years back, we started the personalisation aspect where you could fully colour the final-level outfit that you get from the Royal Pass. We ran a BGMI design contest where the final outfit inside the crate was entirely designed by a community member. These freedoms always existed. But what we want to do right now is take it further. If you want to truly become a platform, you have to give full ownership. A platform only works if you yield that level of control.

Secondly, there are a lot of games in the world that do personalisation. How do you break out of that loop to become mega-viral? You give them full ownership: your map, your rules, your design. You design the mechanics, you design the sets, and you come up with whatever experience you want. It creates an incentive that goes way beyond the monetary, it’s about social credit. If you created something beautiful and people interact with it, you get validation. You can talk to your friends and say, “Hey man, my map has been played by 80 million people.” That is absolutely crazy.

Increasingly, we are seeing that players are using BGMI as a medium of pure social connection. So, while players obviously love the adrenaline of chasing down a Chicken Dinner, there are many other things they want to do. Recently, we introduced the BGMI Cricket League inside the game. It was a fun way for people to interact with something that is considered an absolute religion in this country. We had hundreds of thousands of users interacting with that feature, and they loved it.

Look at our Training Ground. Initially, it was supposed to be a place where you just roam around and practice your driving or shooting skills. However, it completely turned into a social square where people go to hang out. I saw people who were driving around simply practicing car drifts throughout the entire session! (laughs) That told us that this is now a social platform.

This platformisation play is what will turn large-scale user base games into the true mega-platforms of the future. At the end of the day, traditional gaming is just one source of fun for them; they are looking for more from this brand. A lot of players say, and this is not our phrasing, this is theirs, that they think of BGMI not as a game, but as an emotion.

If you go to our YouTube videos, you see people commenting that constantly. Why do they refer to it as an emotion, which is an intangible asset? They don’t think of it as a game taking up a certain number of gigabytes on their phone; they think of it as an emotion because they have a deep, true bonding with the community and the content surrounding it. Winning Chicken Dinners is still extremely rewarding, but we hope to be the pioneers of a model where, in a year or two, we can claim that we have turned this into a platform that goes far beyond just raw playtime.

The key thing with updates like this is absolute authenticity. We have seen anime represented in various forms of media or games in a very cross-road, superficial way. The amount of hours we spent with the original IP owners to bring out what is authentic about Naruto, in its own philosophy, without interfering with competitive balance, is tremendous.

If you or your readers are fans of Naruto, you will relate to this: the Leaf Village has been recreated exactly as it is in the anime inside our map. The Ichiraku Ramen shop is represented flawlessly. You can physically walk inside the shop, have ramen, and it gives you a slight boost to your health pool. We’ve created these beautiful pockets where people can feel like they are in the world of Naruto while still playing the core game. There’s a massive boss fight that requires players to team up to win, which respects the spirit of the original storytelling.

Go over to Spider-Man. We’ve all grown up watching Spider-Man. We spent an enormous amount of time detailing Peter Parker’s apartment for this update. Whether you look at the multiverse films or the classic cinema, the apartment is a key space. You can explore it, you can web-swing… and look, this isn’t a dedicated swinging game, it’s a tactical shooter! However, we made sure that you can swing with full mechanical authenticity. You can even tie up your enemies using your web-shooters during combat.

We’ve also paid respect to the lore. Where there is Aunt May’s grave, you can’t have a shootout battle. We made sure that we respected the parts of the IP that deserve that boundary. Beyond that, both in Naruto and Spider-Man, there are beautiful hidden Easter eggs that fans of both series will discover and inevitably put on YouTube. Those hidden pieces of lore within the maps will lead to a small chuckle when found, so I will not speak about them right now. I’ll let your readers find them out.

We can’t forget Ferrari! We have a long-standing, deep relationship with top-tier automotive brands. We had Porsche earlier this year which was a tremendous success/

Our fans gave us feedback that they wanted to see these iconic Italian sports cars. The total number of sports and luxury cars you can acquire in this Ferrari collaboration is the highest we’ve ever done in a singular drop. The initial response to the teaser has been overwhelmingly positive. When you compile everything together, it makes four massive IPs in one landmark update. This is going to be an era-defining moment in the history of the game.

We aren’t just saying this as a corporate line; we have actively done it. Wherever our users said they loved a past mode but couldn’t play it due to real-life commitments, we brought them back into rotation simply because the community requested it. When you show a player base that there is a set of developers listening to Indian users and building content explicitly for them, they value it deeply.

We’ve been building content for India across every collaboration imaginable, from bringing in domestic superstars to integrating India’s biggest automotive icons like Royal Enfield inside the game. We collaborated with India’s largest homegrown animation creators, like Not Your Type, and worked with ten separate local anime studios in India to promote their creations.

When we partnered with the IPL for the Chennai Super Kings and Kolkata Knight Riders, we gave them an in-game photo booth where they could take photos with their favourite superheroes right in the middle of the match.

We know what fans want because they write about it so passionately in our comments sections and customer service portals. Companies that successfully build experiences based on fan feedback will inevitably gain a larger share of time spent on the phone, and consequently, a larger share of the overall mobile gaming market. If you do the right things to cultivate fan love, the output metrics like user base share naturally follow.

Globally, a lot of casual folks might rate a massive property like Naruto over it, but within our core domestic fanbase, that local collaboration remains incredibly special. It’s my personal favourite, though different members of the Krafton team have their own reasons for backing others.