Gaming studios make major plans to fill PUBG’s niche

Unlike games made in India, game development in the ‘battle royale’ genre requires a lot of investment, which Indian companies often shy away from. Supergaming is not the only firm making such an effort. Gaming unicorn Mobile Premier League (MPL) Mayhem Studios is set to release a similar game titled Underworld Gang Wars for Android users in May.

And such investments are set to grow, leading to the development of what the industry calls ‘AAA games’ – games that rival movies in terms of the investment required to make them. Indian studios such as Target Digital have created artwork for several AAA games such as Just Cause 3, Elden Ring and Metal Gear Solid, but most of the actual game development work is done in studios in North America, Europe, South Korea and Japan.

“What has changed is that gaming is now seen as a career. Many of the people in India who are creating these games have gone to some of the global gaming companies,” said Robbie John, CEO and co-founder of Supergaming. Have worked and studied game development in some of the best universities abroad.

This shift has also been driven by global game publishers entering India over the past few years. For example, French game publisher Ubisoft developed parts of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (Remake) from its studio in Pune. Other big firms like Rockstar Games have also set up Indian units.

John attributed the lack of exposure to limited game development work in India as a large section of people in India grew up without access to PCs or consoles. “They were very good at engineering, but never played enough AAA games to build it from scratch,” he said.

“The cross-section between arts and engineering is where a lot of talent is lacking. There is a shortage of talent in specific roles such as technical artists. India has got great actors and great engineers, but not enough people working in the middle,” said Oliver Jones, co-founder and CEO of Bombay Play.

However, firms such as SuperGaming have higher aspirations. The company has also developed shooter games such as Masked Gun, which has achieved over 67 million players during its lifetime.

It collaborated with Google last year to offer its game development engine to other firms through Google Cloud Platform. Game engines are software frameworks designed for developing video games and are usually owned by large companies such as Epic Games. SuperGaming’s platform has five big customers, including Japanese studio Bandai Namco.

That said, Penta eSports CEO Anurag Khurana cautioned that the development of games is still complex. “Getting a full game up and running LiveOps, which is crucial for any battle royale game, receiving updates on a monthly basis, is a different challenge than making a shooter game,” he said.

Dayanidhi MG, founder and CEO of Encore Games, which developed the action game FAU-G in 2020, said that many popular games like PUBG Mobile and Fortnite were not overnight hits, and had matured and evolved gradually over many years .

People familiar with the development said SuperGaming is also in talks to raise a Series B round of more than $15 million. The company raised $5.5 million in Series A round in 2021.

“They can make an AAA game and get it to alpha stage on a budget of $5-10 million. But they can’t market it and support a team of 100 people on that budget for more than 2-3 years.” Can keep up,” Jones said.

“Battle royale games are usually large scale projects. It requires experienced teams who have developed, published and handled live ops of mid-core and hardcore games. This requires world-class talent across all key departments such as engineering, design and art to come together to plan, iterate, prototype and develop these highly complex games that run smoothly even on mobile phones, said Dayanidhi. Come on

Although India’s gaming industry is at a nascent stage, it has seen a huge growth in revenue and time spent on games. According to a report by gaming-focused investment firm Lumikai, there are 507 million gamers in the country, of which 120 million were paying users as of FY22. The industry’s total revenue is expected to reach $8.6 billion in FY27 at a CAGR of 27%.