East, west, home’s best
The Indian videogame scene is about to explode – and the India Game Developer Conference has been preparing the country
India’s game industry is growing. We attend its biggest event
The Indian game industry knows how to party. As we walk out of the Hyderabad Convention Centre and into the balmy evening air, the sight of pools, palm trees and gleaming trays of biryani is usurped entirely by the noise. Dance music pounds from the IndiaJoy Music Festival stage, in front of which hundreds of revellers – many of them business moguls and game developers – jump and sing. Confetti cannons go off, it seems, roughly every 30 seconds. The VIP bar glitters with guests in silk suits and sarees. We are in jeans.
The glamour of the India Game Developer Conference is a far cry, then, from the many western counterparts we’ve attended. The largest developer conference in South Asia, its 11th year connected over 3,000 delegates from 24 countries, and boasted over 200 speakers giving talks across eight tracks over a two-day period. Its halls buzzed with visitors to over 200 stalls – at which we spotted all manner of games, hardware innovations and apps, with significant square-footage for viral video app TikTok – and hosted ten major events, including the aforementioned music festival, VFX Summit, InfluencerCon and the finals of Rainbow Six: Siege’s India Series.
This is the flagship event of an industry still in its relative infancy. India has always lagged behind the west when it comes to videogames; Japanese companies such as Sony and Nintendo courted the west with their consoles back in the ’80s and ’90s, but largely ignored India, whose population’s average disposable income was very low. But with affordable Android smartphones coming in from China, and the recent mobile data boom – around two years ago, spotting massive business potential, Reliance Jio launched the world’s first 4G-only network at a bargain rate via the biggest, most expensive startup ever seen – India’s gaming industry is enjoying rapid growth. Some of the west’s largest, savviest players are now hitching a ride to the rocket; Epic’s Unreal Engine was IGDC’s main sponsor this year, providing would-be game developers with show-floor workshops, and Tencent and Unity also had huge presences during the conference.
It’s a significant year for IGDC chairperson Rajesh Rao, then, who has been one of the key figures in the rise of the industry since he founded India’s first game company, Dhruva Interactive, back in 1997 with a loan of 150,000 rupees (about £1,600), a computer and a modem. “I travelled the world to understand the industry, and realised that it was a humongous business outside of India,” Rao tells us.
It was a good time to start a game company in India, it seemed; Intel was looking for tech experts to help develop gaming-based software for its Pentium II chip, and a meeting with one of its representatives led to an opportunity. The company ended up building a game engine, ThunderDrome, and Rao met with publishers around the globe to demo it – its main selling point was that it could render things such as particle effects without the help of a graphics accelerator, just using the CPU. French company Infogrames soon spotted the potential. “The CTO and co-founder there, he took a liking to us,” Rao says. “He said, ‘Games have to go beyond the traditional territories’, and he said, ‘I appreciate that you guys have gone into the industry, even though you’re a small company’ – we were a ten-man company then.” Infogrames promised to give Rao a call when the right project came up; six months later, he, his team and their engine were invited to work on the N64 release of Mission: Impossible. “And so we went to Lyon, and parked ourselves there for two or three weeks.”
Back in the late ’90s, “there was nobody”, Rao laughs, in the Indian gaming industry. “I mean, we were just young and completely foolish to start the business. That Intel evangelist and us, we went to an eating and drinking joint and got drunk into the night, and we got all excited, like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it!’” However bacchanalian the beginning may have been, it marked a beginning not just for Dhruva, but for the Indian industry as a whole. “We aspired to be India’s first big gaming company,” Rao recalls. “‘We’re going to make games for India, we’re going to rule the market’. Then slowly we realised, there is no market! There are no devices. People don’t have money to buy consoles or PCs. So if we make a game, it’ll probably sell 100 copies. What do you do?” The answer, of course, was services. Dhruva quickly became the biggest and most successful game company in India – but as a
It connected over 3,000 delegates from 24 countries, and over 200 speakers gave talks across eight tracks
services operation, rather than a developer. “Three years becomes five, five years becomes ten, then becomes 15,” Rao says. “And still the market is not there. And by then, the mindset of the team is of a services company. And we realised that, you know, it’s gonna be a hard pivot.”
They had, of course, kickstarted a longstanding business model: more studios began to pop up around the country – India Games and Paradox Studios among them – as western companies looked to outsource parts of their projects to capable and fast-working teams. “And none of us talked to each other,” Rao says. “We were too proud to talk to each other – it was an overnight rivalry. We were all bloody young and foolish, and I don’t know what we were thinking. There was a perfect case for us to share knowledge.”
Finding and training new hires was a difficulty for every studio, and talent was usually headhunted from the west, rather than within the country. Only in the last few years has formal game design training become a reality in India, and there was a general lack of basic experience. “People that we were hiring hadn’t seen a console in their lives – these were crazy challenges,” Rao says. It was stunting the growth of India’s industry. In the event that the public appetite for games in India would appear, they weren’t going to be adequately prepared.
And so, IGDC was born as a way to bring together aspiring game-makers from India’s many states and districts. Not-forprofit industry association NASSCOM was already supporting India’s animation industry, and around 2008 became interested in throwing its weight behind the game industry. “They asked me, ‘Would you like to start a forum for games?’, and I said, ‘Yes, this is a good time’.” Rao recalls. “And they said, ‘What would you want to do there?’, and I said, ‘Stop being stupid, because we should start talking to each other’. And that’s why the conference started.” It was a one-day event within a larger animation event in Hyderabad, in the very same convention centre in which we’re talking to Rao; just 100 people turned up. But it grew over the years.
It was partially down to Rao’s sense of timing, certainly, with the first affordable mainstream smartphones flooding in from China (nowadays, the ubiquity of them is incredible; even in the less affluent areas of the city we see people sitting by dust roads or on the backs of mopeds tapping away at glossy Huawei handsets).
IGDC was also structured to be accessible, starting with six or seven city chapters across India ensuring that as many people as possible could get to a meetup, and start connecting with some of India’s brightest business and creative talents. And it was curated according to the needs of a young industry hungry to learn. “When we were curating our talks, we said, ‘Let’s focus on postmortems and failures’ – success has many fathers,” Rao says. “If somebody listens to a failure and says, ‘Oops, I’m doing what he’s talking about’, then that’s one team’s time, money and effort saved from going down that path.”
It was the responsible tack to take: the reality is that India is still one of the poorest countries in the world in terms of per-capita income, and that for a population that doesn’t have access to welfare programs, developing a game can be an even steeper risk than it is in the west (a topic we find covered in detail and with a great deal of charisma by Anand Ramachandran, creative director of Big Fat Phoenix Interactive, in his Friday talk Surviving The Indian Game Industry). Not to mention the fact that your family are probably still struggling to understand why you would stake your livelihood on such frivolous things as videogames – although as India’s middle class broadens and disposable income becomes more of a reality, this mindset is starting to soften.
Ever since that data boom, India’s appetite for games has shown up in a big way – not on the still-pricey consoles and PCs, but smartphones. “Housewives are playing, grandparents are playing, because they have time,” Rao explains. “Three years back, they were watching the reruns of soaps, which were targeted at them. Now, they’re on WhatsApp, watching YouTube, or now with OTT streaming watching pretty much whatever they want – and they are playing games.” It’s why, after a long no-show period, Epic is such an enormous presence at IGDC this year, has funded Indian indie Raji: An Ancient Epic via its Epic MegaGrant and is evangelising Unreal Engine to an audience of eager new developers. It’s why Tencent is enjoying runaway success with PUBG Mobile India, as dirt-cheap, super-fast data – and India’s long-standing cultural connection to more traditional games as a means of social connection – sparks a huge interest in online multiplayer. It’s why India’s own government is funding the construction of a gigantic new office building in Hyderabad (a diorama of which sits proudly in IGDC’s main hallway) so that budding devs can use its facilities to make more of the games that are set to contribute huge amounts to the country’s economy. A large proportion of India’s estimated population of 1.37 billion is in the early stages of having the means and desire to both play and develop games – and everyone wants a piece of the pie.
Sampling everything that’s on offer around the modestly-sized showfloor, it seems their interest is well-founded. From small, creative indie games and brilliant mixed-reality hardware spun up in dizzyingly few months by tiny teams – many of whom are so keen to hear feedback that they actively chase us down from across the showfloor – to giant esports stages for mobile-game esports events, there’s a sense that the Indian industry has found its feet, and momentum is building fast. Rao, naturally, hopes that IGDC will continue to grow, and serve as a space where the young startups that are popping up everywhere can be mentored by the small pool of Indian industry vets. He’d also love to reopen IGDC’s city chapters and run multiple events yearround, instead of the one localised event, he tells us, further enacting IGDC’s vision as an event built to develop the incredible amount of potential talent in his country. Two things are certain: if the multi-day parties at this year’s event are anything to go by, the future of the Indian game industry is bright indeed – and we’re going to need a fancier pair of jeans.
India’s appetite for games has shown up in a big way – not on pricey consoles and PCs, but smartphones