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Wondering why there aren't more Indian-made video games? In a way, you've been playing them for years without realising it. Faced by a massive rise in AAA development budgets since the early noughties, international publishers like EA typically outsource work to skilled but lower-wage workers in less affluent regions.Many of India's biggest studios derive most or all of their income from overseas contracts. Lakshya Digital has produced art for ZeniMax Media, Disney and Valve, hiring mentors in the US to walk its staff through the finer details of properties like The Elder Scrolls, while Starbreeze-owned Dhruva Interactive's partners include Playground Games, Remedy and Rare - it recently created assets for the latter's piratical Xbox One title Sea of Thieves. As with the sight of a "made in China" label on a Union Jack T-shirt, it's peculiar and a little depressing to think that games you might deem inextricable from a certain culture are in fact crafted with the help of people in farflung countries, willing to do much the same work for considerably less.
Indian developers are hungry for more, however. The country's games market has exploded in the past decade, with mobile games especially reaping the benefits of rising living standards while consoles struggle in the face of software piracy and a scarcity of specialist retail. Casual and gambling games account for a large proportion of revenue, but Indian gaming is increasingly diverse, with single player games and more obscure genres such as real-time strategy beginning to pick up pace. In the absence of local funding opportunities for more ambitious experiences, smaller teams are availing themselves of self-publishing programs online to pitch their games worldwide.
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