Developed in India
Indian game developers have woken up to the challenge. There are around 8–10 significant players and numerous small players in India competing in the mobile games development market.
Take for instance, Mumbai-based Paradox Studio. It has created more than 120 games that are available with international aggregators such as Zingy Inc., 2ThumbZ Entertainment, Cellucom, eMbience, Games Federation, Global Wireless Entertainment, Orange Gum and U club.
Paradox, owned by one of the top Indian mobile service provider, Reliance Infocom, has skills in developing games in BREW, a Qualcomm-developed environment that is pitched against Java and is fairly popular among CDMA mobile service providers.
Another major player is Dhruva Interactive that has created waves in the gaming arena with its recently developed game “Maria Sharapova Tennis”, which was rated “7.9/10”, by the game reviewer website Gamespot.com. This game, launched by British game company I-Play, figured in the top downloads list of Vodafone during the Wimbledon championship.
Another developer, Indiagames is not far behind. It has developed games based on movies like Jurassic Park. Chinese wireless Internet Company, TOM Online, invested $17.7 million; Cisco Systems Inc. and Macromedia Inc. invested $4 million in Indiagames for 18.2% ownership.
Mumbai-based Mobile2Win win has largely worked with handset makers such as Siemens and Motorola in China and India.
Other major names include Tinfomobile, Lakshya Digital, Small Device and Gametrix.
There were around 600 employees in this sector in 2005, and according to Nasscom, the figures are expected to rise to 2,000 by 2007.
Game testing is surely a new path, which Indians are treading on. RELQ, an Indian testing company, already enjoys an exclusive status from Sun Microsystems. RELQ is one of the three companies, which was certified by Sun for testing. “We have been there in the testing industry for the past 4 years and at any given time there are around 100 people working on the game-testing arena,” Says Dr. Prakash Mutalik, President and Co-founder, RELQ, RELQ earned around half- a-million dollars in revenue from mobile game testing last year and is pitching itself to be the best in the game testing industry.
“The reason for the huge growth of mobile gaming is because they are being offshored end-to-end and are relatively easy to develop as compared to PC and Console games. Big companies outsource less core aspects of their games, and that is the reason for the low growth of offshoring in this area,” says Dib Chaudhary, CEO, and Lakshaya Digital.
Developers in India get their money by developing, designing, testing and porting the games, and the clients save money in the bargain, and make money by providing better and more volume of games to their customers. And have been succeeding.
That has prompted some major publishers to look at India strategically. From the top five mobile gaming companies (according to Q3 2005 report of Telephia, a mobile research and performance measurement firm), three have already been using India to develop their games. Jamdat Mobile has opened a development center in Hyderabad, India. Hyderabad is also home to the offshore development facility of Gameloft. MFORMA, another major publisher has a development facility in Bangalore, which it is planning to scale up.
Another major publisher, I-Play has been collaborating with India-based Dhruva Interactive to develop some games for the European market.
Do not to get surprised if you find a “developed/tested/ported in India” tag on the game you download the next time.
