Battlin Open puts a BGIS slot behind the ₹5 lakh track, and KRAFTON wants anyone to host a BGMI event
KRAFTON’s new Battlin app handles tournament entry, rooms and prize payouts, and its first event offers ₹20 lakh across two tracks from 2 November.
Oct 20, 2026
KRAFTON has given BGMI’s grassroots scene a single front door. Battlin, unveiled in Hyderabad on the weekend the city hosted the BGMI Showdown Grand Finals, is a mobile app where players find, join and track tournaments, and where anyone from a college club to a gaming café can host one. Its first event, Battlin Open Season 1, has a ₹20 lakh prize pool and a route into the Battlegrounds Mobile India Series (BGIS).
How Battlin Open Season 1 works
Registration is open until 1 November, with more than 5,000 slots. Play starts on 2 November and runs across two tracks. Track 1 carries a ₹5 lakh pool, and its winning team gets a BGIS slot. Track 2 has the bigger pool at ₹15 lakh and ends with a finale on 29 November, when the first Battlin Open champion will be crowned.
Teams chasing a path to BGIS should note that split. The qualification slot sits with Track 1, not with the larger cash prize, and the full round-by-round format had not been published when the event was announced.
What changes for organisers
KRAFTON’s pitch is that community tournaments are too scattered, and that running one is too much work. Battlin automates the brackets, rooms and notifications, logs results, and handles the prize payouts itself rather than leaving them to whoever organised the event. Reward conditions and payout timelines are shown in the app before a team signs up. Setting one up, the company says, should take “an evening, not a week”.
“India has a strong base of competitive players and passionate communities,” said James Yongkwan Kim, who leads Battlin at KRAFTON.
The legal fine print
KRAFTON was also careful to say there is no wagering, staking or betting on the platform, and that results are decided by skill. That matters in India now. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 bans online money games but treats esports as a sport, which can charge entry fees and pay prize money as long as nobody is betting on the outcome. A tournament app that holds and pays out prize money is exactly the sort of product that has to sit on the right side of that line.
The timing fits a busy run for KRAFTON India. Team SouL won the BGMI Showdown in Hyderabad on 18 October, and the BGMI International Cup brings 16 teams from India, South Korea and Japan to the NSCI Dome in Mumbai from 30 October. Battlin is aimed at the players a long way below those stages. If it gives them a cleaner, paid-on-time route to a BGIS slot, that will matter more to Indian esports than one more headline LAN.