Think Indian Game Development panel session and one does not even have to guess the line up of speakers. Rajesh Rao, Vishal Gondal, Salil Bhargava, Ninad Chhaya, Sachin Nayak, Anurag Khurana, Anu Ramesh, Rajiv Hiranandani, Arun Gupta are the first few names that instantly come to mind.
The Gaming session at the FICCI seminar at Thiruvananthapuram however did not have any of the above people mentioned. And absence of the regulars notwithstanding the session was still studded with Gaming heavyweights Ajit Pillai from Dhruva and Cyril Ferry from Indiagames.
Also in the discussion were Lakshya Digital‘s Dib Chaterjee and Image Multimedia‘s Ajit Koodily. The session was moderated by AnimationXpress.com Editor Anand Gurnani.
The subject discussed was Opportunities in Gaming and the entire panel unanimously voted the mobile, followed by online as the game development opportunities in the country.
“There are many factors including the omnipresence of the mobile device, the much quicker turnaround times in terms of development, the ability to create games with small teams as well as the lower cost of entry that makes Mobile Game Development the opportunity of choice for Indian Game developers” shared Indiagames Cyril Ferry.
On being asked by Anand Gurnani, if the revenues in mobile were actually being realized, Ferry replied, ‘Yes revenue share with operators is an issue that can be debated forever but the fact is that there are hundreds of thousands of consumers out there who game regularly and the number of game downloads is increasing everyday and even though the game consumption has not gone beyond the roof, the figures are healthy and one can be sure that this is a bright area”
On being asked as to why not even a handful of studios had managed to get a grip on the console and PC development side, Dhruva Interactive‘s Ajit Pillai shared, “We at Dhruva have been constantly delivering top titles for the consoles as well as for the PC. But yes I agree that there are very few studios in the country which have a grip on this market segment. One can attribute this to the fact that there is a very small local market for such products and even that is ruined by Piracy. The absence of the local market leads to this situation of no real growth in this segment except for a handful few players”
Lakshya Digital‘s Dib Chauhari did draw attention to the large opportunity that la in the area of game art and game assets creation. “My studio is primarily involved in Game Art Creation and we see there is tremendous scope for growth in this area, as this generally requires most of the 3D skills that the animation talent pool of the country possesses, the only difference being that here the assets are created in low poly as they are not pre rendered and have to be rendered in real time”
Image Multimedia‘s Ajit Koodily opined, “Today there is a demand for Animation and Multimedia courses, tomorrow we see that this demand will extend to Gaming courses also. That would be yet another area of opportunity, that of creating a talent base for the growing game development sector in India”
The panelists also agreed that there was the need to generate an awareness amongst parents about the opportunities that their children could have in pursuing game development as a career.
Taking the example of new initiatives such as Zapak.com and existing ones like Games2Win amongst others Anand Gurnani asked the panel about whether they thought that the Online Casual Gaming segment would surpass mobile gaming
“Online casual games are big globally” shared Cyril “and they will be big out here too, but Mobile will be the number one platform followed by online games at least for the next few years”
Dhruva‘s Ajit too spoke about their online pool game and how they were planning to introduce advergaming element into the game. He however said that he agreed with Cyril that, “Mobile is going to be the device of choice for gaming, not because of the experience but because of the volumes and the nature of this genre”