based on existing intellectual properties and sport licenses, in this case Bollywood (the Hindi film industry) and cricket - which constitute the majority of Indian audience specific content. Many studios, including Indiagames, do work on global IPs too and they take the design seriously. As Hrishi puts it, “For our designs to be effective, they must be able to use the best of what the property has to offer, and merge it with the best of what would be suited for that game.” He further adds about their experience on working for a game based on the American TV series ‘The Office’, “we really got into that show and we watched every episode of the show which had aired till the time of making of the game to really understand the characters and understand what makes the show tick.” Working on existing IPs is one way of deriving sustenance, but with the creative control does hold back on certain viable design choices. Not to mention the bulk of the industry still relies on work for hire jobs that are outsourced in the country. It does not inspire development of original content. Of course,
innovation and profit have to be mutually exclusive to encourage it further and it’s not easy to divert resources into, well, an idea that probabilistically has a chance to not yield profit. Hrishi puts it straightforward, “when you have external investors in the company and employees salaries to pay, this is not an option. Once we started making mobile games and it reached some commercial success, it was clear that this was the way to go” - an imperative decision when a company begins sizing up.
Rise of the Indian Indie
During the Game Developers’ Conference, organised by NASSCOM (The National Association of Software and Services Companies) earlier this year in the city of Pune; I met some folks from the mushrooming independent developers community in India resulting in several discussions we termed as creative flatulence. The independent community is a small but a very valuable arm of the industry. They seem to have a fundamentally different approach towards develop-
ing games and most of them seem to live by a purpose of developing globally competitive games. The choice of platform, for the majority, still remains the mobile. It’s cheaper to develop for it but the saturation and the general awareness of best practices make it a brutally unpredictable market. Most of the founders have worked in the industry prior to setting up. Shailesh Prabhu, of the Mumbai based Yellow Monkey Studios, shared the brief history and the reasons of venturing into a gaming startup business. “Me and a couple of friends had been toying with the idea of a studio for a few years and around 2006 I had made up my mind that something had to be done or every last creative grey cell would die of creative starvation. In 2007, I quit my job and formed Yellow Monkey. We wanted creative freedom. We wanted to target the global market. We wanted to make games, and show that India is not just a place for services but for innovation in games too.” Overwhelmingly, most independent studios share a similar tale. Kinshuk Sunil, of Delhi based Hash-
Figure 3: Gaming industry structure by business models
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04/2012