After the announcement of the Pokemon UNITE Championship Series 2022, many players from India were looking forward to the competitive scene where they could play against the best teams across the world. Unfortunately, when more details regarding the series were announced, it only led to disappointment as India and even the whole of South Asia had been excluded from it. Many people took to Twitter to share the plight of esports in the country.

The lack of recognition from both the local governments and from international levels has made it harder for talented gamers and esports athletes to thrive in India. Although India has become one of the largest mobile gaming markets, the lack of representation has become a worrying factor for the country with a population of more than 1.2 billion people. It can be seen in the Pokemon UNITE Championship Series announcement where South Asia was not even mentioned as a qualifying region.

The MOBA genre has still not received much recognition here as they are considered to be quite harder to play than the other games from FPS or Strategy genre. Moreover, with Mobile Legends: Bang Bang getting banned in 2020 and League of Legends: Wild Rift never being released here, the scenario of mobile MOBA looked very dim in this region.

https://twitter.com/PokemonUniteIn/status/1492500606619373568?s=20&t=ezR6lu-YuJ0cSPFwV13eBw

Still, players of this genre got some semblance of hope when Pokemon UNITE was launched on the promised date in India. As the game gained over a million downloads here soon after its release here, even the esports organizations in the country had decided to invest in forming teams for the competitive scene of Pokemon UNITE. YouTubers, content creators, and some esports teams have regularly focused on playing the game online to climb leaderboards and promote it to more audiences. S8UL had also announced their Pokemon UNITE roster a few weeks back for competing in tournaments.

But unfortunately, all the hard work of the passionate Pokemon UNITE players from India has been put off as South Asia was not even considered for the Championship Series. Although the game has been launched in India for more than seven months, such ignorance from the game publishing companies will impact the esports development in the region. We can only hope that our South Asian region may get considered in the future iterations of the tournament.