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India's games industry is waiting for its Black Myth: Wukong moment, its developers tell us how it can happen"We clearly have the talent."Image credit: Eurogamer Feature by Lewis Packwood Contributor Published on March 9, 2025 China's video game industry has had some huge, global hits in the past few years with games like Black Myth: Wukong and Genshin Impact. But we have yet to see equivalent success from games made in India - which has a similarly-sized population of around 1.4 billion people, along with the fifth largest economy on the planet. In fact, it's rare to see an Indian game become a big hit outside the country's own borders."Eighteen percent of the world lives here, how can we not be represented in one of the primary entertainment mediums?" asks Shalin Shodhan, director of the Gujarat-based indie studio Masala Games. "That's a mind-boggling thing, if you really think about it. We have so many stories to tell. There's so much interesting stuff, both in ancient and modern India, that could be showcased."Narinder Kapur, a senior analyst at Niko Partners, notes that India-based developers have seen some domestic success, particularly on mobile. Smartphones are the dominant gaming devices in India, with around 94 percent of Indian gamers playing primarily on mobile, according to Niko Partners 2024 survey. "One of the most popular games in India is called Ludo King, and it's basically Ludo in app form," says Kapur, but other hits also include the battle royale shooter Underworld Gang Wars from Mayhem Studios in Bengaluru, and the recently released Indus: Battle Royale from SuperGaming, which has put its own spin on the Fortnite formula with an Indo-Futurism aesthetic.Niko Partners also reports that there are now around 508 million gamers in India, who spent an estimated $943 million in 2024. The venture-capital firm Lumikai puts the figure even higher, at $3.8 billion. Yet India's games industry still remains comparatively tiny. China, with its similarly-sized population and similarly mobile-dominated market, saw predicted gaming revenues of around $49.8 billion in 2024, according to Niko Partners. Ludo King is one of India's most popular and successful games. | Image credit: GametionMultiple reasons have been put forward to explain why India's games industry lags behind in terms of scale. Kapur notes it could be partly down to years of antagonistic attitudes towards gaming in the country. "For a long time, video games were looked upon as a waste of time and a waste of money, especially back when incomes weren't as high as they are now," he says, adding that parents would question the wisdom of using expensive computers for playing rather than education. "Even after Indias software services industry exploded, the video games industry didn't take off in parallel, because a lot of people who had the requisite talent to go out and develop games would go out into the larger software services industry."Beyond that, there are at least two key issues that have stymied the ascent of the Indian games industry: training and funding, with the latter already garnering reports of how investors are failing marginalinsed groups of developers all around the world. "We don't have angel investors or VCs backing us, and platforms like Kickstarter or Indiegogo are not supported in India, so that revenue is not available," says Harish Chengaiah, the founder of Outlier Games in Chennai. Meanwhile, government funding has tended to prioritise essentials like sanitation and clean energy rather than media and entertainment. "So broadly speaking, there's no money anywhere."In addition, the late blooming of India's games industry means there are relatively few people in the country with enough experience to provide training. Chengaiah, who's now 28, experienced this himself when he enrolled into a game design course after high school, only to drop out following his disappointment at the quality of the teaching. "Unlike the West, the first generation of game developers are still working in industry: we haven't gotten old enough to retire and become lecturers," he says.There are also big skill gaps. "We are very good at art, we are very good at programming, we are very good at QA, but design and narrative development is something that we lack. If you see our education system in India, it's very technically competent, not so much creatively competent."Even though India's market is dominated by mobile, Chengaiah reckons that among the 120 or so members of the Indian game dev founders WhatsApp group he created, around 50 are working on PC and console titles. Outlier Games itself has been periodically developing a third-person PC action-adventure game called Deliverance for around three years, often relying on friends doing pro bono work. Deliverance has been put on the back burner for now due to a lack of funding support. | Image credit: Outlier Games"We don't have an office," Chengaiah says. "I mean, for registration purposes, we do have an office, but nobody works in that. It's all remote, nobody's getting paid. So the way I sustain my teammates is I have a day job in another game company, and I do a lot of consulting and freelance game design, game production work."The hope is that if they find a publisher, people can start earning salaries. But PC and console publishers are as rare as hens' teeth in India. The only one Chengaiah knows of is 1312 Interactive, which was formed recently by a friend. "But they are starting small," he says. "They are looking at about 50, 60K funding projects, not bigger than that."By contrast, Outlier Games was aiming for a $1 million USD budget for Deliverance, "which, by Western standards, is actually not that much for a third-person action-adventure game." He reckons a similar title would cost perhaps $5-6 million USD if it was made outside India. Even so, given current market conditions, the publishers he has approached are only willing to put up a maximum of $300,000 USD - so Chengaiah has made the difficult decision to put Deliverance on the back burner and start again with a smaller, narrative-driven title.Like Outlier, Shalin Shodhans Masala Games is a mostly remote-working company, and it mostly relies on contract work. But Shodhan had the advantage of gaining valuable experience in the US. While he was doing his masters degree at Carnegie Mellon University in 2003, a recruiter from EA spotted his work on terraforming, and snapped him up to work with Will Wright on the groundbreaking Spore. After spending years at EA, Shodhan left to join Pixar, working as a shading artist on movies such as Toy Story 3 and Inside Out. But when his wife gave birth to twin boys in 2014, they made the momentous decision to move back and raise them in India."We definitely needed family support," Shodhan says. "So the decision was very big, but also very clear. And in retrospect, actually a really good move, because it freed me to do some of the more entrepreneurial stuff and try some of the more bold things that brings us to where we are, whereas if I'd stayed in the US, Id still have to work within other companies."Now, after around two years of development, Masala Games' first PC title is due for release on 3rd April 2025, accompanied by an animated movie. Detective Dotson features an aspiring Bollywood star who reluctantly becomes a detective after the death of his father, then sets out to solve a series of cases set in modern India. Detective Dotson arrives on Steam this April. | Image credit: Masala Games"I don't just want to talk about ancient, epic, magic, fantasy India; I really want to talk about the India that I walk out into, because I feel that it's more interesting than our past," Shodhan says. As such, Detective Dotson offers a pixellated representation of crowded, chaotic, modern Indian life, with elements such as the ubiquitousness of election posters and the constant, casual littering - which Dotson can take exception to by hurling the litter back at the culprit. "Littering is a real problem here," Shodhan says. "This is a personal pet peeve, and something that I wanted to send a message about."Chengaiah enthuses about the huge potential scope for games set in India. "We have about 3000 years worth of history to tap into, so that's a lot of material, right?" Then again, he adds that the past few years have seen a few hurried releases of mobile games set in India that have "left a very, very sour taste in the mouth of Indian gamers". He cites titles such as the shooter FAU-G, as well as the just-released Indus. "[Indus] is barely in beta, and then they released it, so it's a very rushed game."The much-hyped card battler Kurukshetra: Ascension, based on the famous epic of the Mahābhārata, has also been a commercial disappointment, he says. "Indians don't play card battlers. You can't just have Mahābhārata and then put it in a genre that no one in India cares about." As a consequence of all this, he thinks that Indian gamers have become wary of India-set games. "They'll be like, 'Ah, no, no, we are not trusting that. Make a good game first, and then come back to us. It doesn't even have to be set in India, make a good game'."Nevertheless, a recent report by Lumikai found that 60 percent of Indian gamers want to see more games that represent their local culture and language. Furthermore, all the signs point towards the Indian games industry turning a corner in the near future. The Indian government is implementing a new Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming, and Comics Extended Reality (AVGC-XR) policy, which should provide funding and training for people working in the games industry.Watch on YouTubeChengaiah, who has helped to advise on the policy, says it will make it much easier for games companies to set up subsidiaries in India, and it will also help to fix the "chicken and egg problem" of universities failing to provide video-game-related courses as a result of there being so few jobs in the industry. Instead, Chengaiah says, the government, academies and industry will decide together which courses are required, and the government will offer incentives for universities that run the chosen courses.At the same time, the visa process is being streamlined for foreign nationals who want to come and work in games, with the hope that by attracting experienced professionals from Europe, the US and Japan, "that knowledge will trickle down in our industry," Chengaiah says. Perhaps most importantly, the policy is also looking to provide funding for developers in the form of things like prototype grants and production incentives, where a percentage of a games production budget is reimbursed by the government.Those are the broad guidelines, but because India operates under a federal system, it's up to each individual state to pick and choose which parts of the policy it intends to implement, and in what way. "Some states have already implemented it," says Chengaiah, adding that his state, Tamil Nadu, will be implementing the policy later in 2025. Image credit: PlayStation Image credit: KraftonThere are industry programs, too. Following on from the success of its China Hero Project, PlayStation launched the India Hero Project in 2023 to support and showcase emerging talent from the region, and the inaugural cohort of five games includes Meteora: The Race Against Space Time, Fishbowl, Mukti, Requital: Gates of Blood, and Suri: The Seventh Note. The second cohort has just been announced, too, though it's shrunk to just two games this year: Bloody Boots and Lokko.Krafton, the publisher behind PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, also opened registrations for the second cohort of its Krafton India Gaming Incubator last October, where six to ten development teams will receive six to twelve months of mentorship and financial support to make their game. The first cohort comprised four games, and included Sojourn Past, Tale of Honor, Gangster Carnival and Spice Secrets.Given all this, Chengaiah thinks well be seeing "a very steady launch of Indian PC and console games" from 2025 onwards, while Lumikai predicts that Indias gaming revenues will skyrocket to $9.2 billion by 2029. And if one Indian game was to break through internationally, it could elevate the whole industry and attract much-needed investment, just like The Witcher did for Poland, for example. "Every country has that one game," Chengaiah says, and similarly, Kapur sees no reason why India won't have its own breakout game: "I think the Indian market at some point will have its Black Myth: Wukong or Genshin Impact moment."Shodhan thinks its high time, too. "I see folks from India, such as myself, who go abroad and are plugged into the culture there, and are doing exceptional things. Why can't the same happen here?" He reckons its simply a case of someone being brave enough to venture out and succeed, carving a path for others to follow. "Once that happens, all hell will break loose.""We are already doing a lot of work for these companies all around the world, and we're already providing the quality," he concludes. "We clearly have the talent. It's just a matter of belief and a few foolishly bold investments."
