KRAFTON India brings stepwell heritage to life inside BGMI in collaboration with tgthr.
KRAFTON India has introduced a new and interesting update, a stepwell, in its flagship game, Battlegrounds Mobile India. Beyond offering a novel and breathtaking landscape for gamers, the new update brings one of India’s most unique architectural legacies into the gaming realm. Packed with detailed and interactive elements like a dive point and a photo point, the stepwell is a visual spectacle. With so much to offer, a typical ad wouldn’t have captured its essence. It needed something more; a content piece that could excite gamers and nudge them to explore it for themselves.
Digging deeper, a powerful insight emerged. In India, stepwells are primarily seen and experienced as tourist attractions. While the country has over 3000 stepwells, the one in BGMI is India’s first digital stepwell. So, it didn’t just call for an update announcement but a full-fledged tourism campaign. Thus, KRAFTON India and tgthr., under its content vertical tgthr. Originals, launched ‘Destination BGMI Stepwell’, a tourism campaign designed to spark curiosity, conversation and cultural discovery among millions of BGMI players. The campaign transforms the in-game stepwell into ‘India’s hottest tourist destination, not on any map’.
Presented as a vlog-style video content series, the campaign features leading influencers and gamers, merging in-game exploration with cultural storytelling. Each vlog taps into the cultural stories around India’s stepwells, delivering them with the humour and banter quintessential to BGMI.
Like any tour, each episode has a tour guide and tourists. Amongst the tourists are not only top gamers including Scout, Dynamo, Punkk, Admino, LoLzZz and Zgod, but also influencers from different walks of life like Naman Arora, Abhishek Jain, Shiv Thakare, Arun Mashettey, Adarsh UC and Arohi Khurana, showcasing the landmark through their unique perspectives.
Srinjoy Das, Associate Director of Marketing, KRAFTON India, said, “Introducing the stepwell in BGMI is our way of blending gaming with India’s cultural heritage. BGMI has always been about discovery, and this update adds a new layer of meaning for our players. With the campaign, we are excited to see this landmark not just played but celebrated like a true cultural hotspot inside the game.”
Pragati Rana, Head of Originals, Regional Creative Officer – West and Founding Partner at tgthr., added, “Content isn’t just storytelling anymore, it’s story-living. The story really lives when it’s as authentic as possible. Content today doesn’t have time for polish. It’s raw. It’s got dirt under its fingernails. It’s real people saying real things. Unfiltered and unapologetic, not some sanitised brand-speak. Destination BGMI Stepwell is about history but it’s not a history lesson. Instead, it’s about the kind of chatter gamers actually care about; banter between friends, side-eye from frenemies, and digs between players. The beauty is packaging the message in the mess. And not making the message a mess.”
With Destination BGMI Stepwell, KRAFTON India continues to blur the line between gaming and culture, giving India’s heritage a new stage in the digital world.