Call of Duty Mobile Garena and Global—what’s the difference?

If you’re confused between the Garena and Global versions of Call of Duty: Mobile, don’t worry—we’ve got you covered.

Call of Duty: Mobile has been developed by Activision in a partnership with Tencent’s Timi Studios. While it has been published globally by Activision, Garena has published the game in Southeast Asia.

The two games are exactly similar. CoD: Mobile Garena is for players only in Southeast Asia (except Vietnam). The global version, published by Activision, can be enjoyed by players in all other regions except Vietnam, Belgium, and China.

Players from Southeast Asia can’t play the global version and vice versa, since the respective versions will be unavailable for other regions. The matchmaking for both versions is different as well due to server differences.

Both versions are still unavailable for China, however, even though Tencent is a Chinese company. The country has strict regulation laws for video games which have led to several developers releasing a separate version of their game for China. An example would be Game for Peace, the Chinese version of PUBG Mobile, which Tencent had to release to get the game monetized in the country. We could see something similar happening with CoD: Mobile as well.   

Similarly, CoD: Mobile has crates that give players random chances to get rewards. It is most probably due to this reason that the game isn’t available in Belgium as this counts as illegal under the country’s gambling laws.