In Bengaluru, Megha Gupta runs Vala Interactive, a small gaming studio with a workforce of half a dozen people. they are working on it spook-a-booA ghost-hunting “couch co-op” game in which multiple players work together to trap a group of ghosts in a series of levels with progressively challenging layouts.
Gupta started the studio in 2017, but this will be their first game for personal computers (PC) and gaming consoles, and one of its few original titles. Most of the work his team has done over the past few years has been relatively invisible: developing mobile games for “hypercasual” game publishers, who hire firms like Vala Interactive to develop their gaming ideas.
“We actually developed over 50 games in two and a half years with a team of four people,” Gupta says over a phone call. Those games included over 70 different mechanics – a wealth of experience. He acquired the studio a small fortune which he chose to invest in spook-a-booA “bootstrapped” game that she is self-funding with $200,000. It appears to be in an advanced stage of development, given that their company has released a demo of it on the PC gaming storefront, Steam.
Vala Interactive is part of a growing movement within India’s creative industries – animation, video games, comics and more traditional entertainment industries – that is progressing from simply complementing the low-cost workforce of the world’s major Hollywood studios and game publishers to actually considering and owning intellectual property (IP) and selling it to audiences around the world.
occasional hits
Despite having firms working behind the scenes for many global franchises, India does not have any breakout franchise that resonates across the world. Sometimes there are titles that have had some success such as the Telugu blockbuster RRR, which benefited from its re-release in the United States which took it all the way to the Oscars, where it made history by winning the Academy Award for Best Original Song for the track Naatu Naatu.
Actor Aamir Khan’s films generally perform well in China when authorities allow their screening under the annual quota for foreign theatrical titles. However, the creative efforts of Indians have not yet yielded a steady stream of cultural production and the resulting financial benefits.
Writer and game designer Zain Memon in his office in Panaji, Goa. , Photo Credit: Emmanuel Yogini
One hurdle is finding an audience at home. Gupta points out that PC and console gaming are “practically non-existent” in India, while mobile gaming is big enough to attract global attention – battlegrounds mobile india (formerly known as pubg mobile) has been downloaded over 240 million times, leading its Korean developer, Krafton, Inc. has achieved a scale that only China can compete with. For gaming on the big screen, the numbers are much lower: industry estimates suggest there are fewer PlayStation 5 consoles in India than village panchayats. Only about 10% of households have a desktop PC or laptop.
“It will always be 10% of the audience and we have to fight for that 10% of the audience the time,” says Gupta, who explains the decision to be global by design. The global video gaming industry is worth hundreds of billions of dollars and much of its value comes from players spending significant sums on PC and console titles. The market for those lucrative segments is thriving abroad, though limited in India.
Abir Kapoor and illustrator Ujan Dutta who has published a graphic novel, Zorawar and the Lost Gods. , Photo Courtesy: Shashi Shekhar Kashyap
Government. Initiative
There is a recognized gap between the work of Indian artists on games, films and other large-scale content and the scale of globally resonant creations produced in the country.
A major effort of the Central Government to bridge this gap was the establishment of the National Center of Excellence for Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming, Comics and Extended Reality (AVGC-XR), targeting the same areas where Indian expertise is already being leveraged.
A statement issued by the government last year had said, “This National Center of Excellence will also focus broadly on building India’s intellectual property for domestic consumption and global reach, thereby overall creating content based on India’s rich historical and cultural heritage.”
At the World Audio Visual and Entertainment Summit in Mumbai in May this year, the government convened a range of speakers from companies like YouTube and Netflix as well as Bollywood stars to further the aspiration of bridging this gap at home. Ahead of the event, the government announced a $1 billion fund to support the creative economy. This kind of support is important for one key reason – content thrives in an ecosystem – and creators understand this deeply amid the lack of appetite to risk money on creative endeavors.
Abir Kapoor has been running Civic Games Lab from a converted residential flat in South Delhi since 2018. He has created board games such as The Poll based on Indian elections and published a graphic novel, Zorawar and the Lost Gods, with longtime collaborator and illustrator Ujan Dutta.
A game artist sketches character concepts at Vala Interactive Game Studio in Bengaluru. , Photo Credit: Alan Agenews
Kapoor was able to complete many of his projects not because of what he promised investors, but because the thriving ecosystem and non-profit creative funding abroad was available to him through Germany’s main foreign aid agency Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit and backers such as the Gates Foundation.
He says, “We are a service delivery partner to international development organizations as game builders. And whenever we get an opportunity to build what they want, we do that.”
In Germany, where Kapoor has spent some time, he saw an ecosystem where “you are able to germinate an idea and take it to market” and “a variety of local and state-level funding, from private to public, that invests in the business of storytelling”.
He says that from university and local government levels to the highest reaches of the federal government, Germany has a thriving AVGC-XR ecosystem – winning the country’s Spiel des Jahres (‘Game of the Year’) board game awards practically guarantees increased sales around the world.
Beyond the ecosystem, Kapoor says there is huge potential in existing IP that he considers “incredibly underutilized”.
He points to the deal between game studio Ubisoft and action-adventure novelist Tom Clancy, in which the firm bought the rights to use his name for a series of games – a deal that runs into the millions of euros.
India is likely to do the same with the fictional town of Malgudi in RK Narayan’s Malgudi Days, says Kapoor. “We are deeply impressed by the idea of Malgudi,” he says.
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“India needs to constantly create and recreate the types of Malgudi… India has a static IP. There is no sharing like in the West. Let’s take Malgudi and Tom Clancy’s novels. Both are full of stories. Both have a set of characters, right? And basically, they are both beautifully constructed worlds.”
He says that the world of Malgudi could have been exploited continuously but it did not happen. The country needs “canonical, contextual works” because “by working with them again and again you build a visual culture for a society”. Right now, Kapoor says, he is constantly talking to the estate of Pran, the Hindi comedy maker behind Chacha Chaudhary, and trying to convince them to let him work on the property.
Leaning towards the mic during the interview, he says, “Abir and Uzaan want to be able to work on Indian IPs that are existing and old, including but not limited to Chacha Chaudhary, Commando Dhruv, anything owned by Indrajal, Diamond Comics. Please get in touch.”
funding from abroad
In Goa, at the office of the Department of Lore (DOL), founded by filmmaker Anand Gandhi and his longtime creative partner Zain Memon, more than a dozen young people are developing an entire IP, Maya, a “transmedia” franchise they hope will resonate around the world. Like Kapoor, the team has largely relied on funding from abroad, raising funds through a campaign on the Kickstarter platform with the majority of funds coming from US-based contributors.
Memon, whose board game Rule has been a breakout hit around the world with strategy elements rooted in its interpretation of Indian politics, said in an interview at the DOL’s office that he and Gandhi had worked for four years on the setting of Maya, developing hundreds of pages of lore and “millions of years” of history.
Seed Takes Root – the first novel (multiple formats are planned, including a board game and, if everything works out, a movie) – is a David vs. Goliath story of an off-the-grid upstart’s early days in Neah, a planet with mystical trees that requires seven species to “connect” to dream, allowing an AI-like simulation that almost always perfectly predicts the future.
Maya has raised over $420,000 from contributors on Kickstarter, surpassing its goal of $10,000. Memon and Gandhi relied on the project’s international appeal and ignored funding precautions to stop projects like theirs. “For mass impact, you need mass distribution,” says Memon, explaining the crowdsourcing strategy before the book goes on sale next year. “To deliver at scale, money is not the end goal – money becomes the means to that goal. If you stay independent, stay small, you start preaching to the choir.” He adds, “We need a cultural monument that gives adequate representation to the billions of people of the Global South on the world stage.”
time and resources
Why haven’t franchises like this already been able to attract a global audience, and why might one do so now? Memon says this is due to a combination of time and resources: “For the first time, our generation started out with a privilege that no one else had – we grew up on the Internet, so we grew up with the best cultural capital of the West, while also having access to the best cultural capital of the East. Markets have opened up for everything from venture capital to distribution, and in a post-Internet world of distribution, we’ve really seen the playing field flattened for those who want a great game or a Can make great films.”
Gandhi, who has a reputation as a “brutal brain” in the film industry, spoke on a Zoom call from New York after attending three fantasy and comedy conventions across the US. He says storytelling is at the heart of passing culture from one generation to the next. He added, “We’ve forgotten how powerful stories are and we’re using a nuclear reactor to make coffee.”
Is it finally time for a franchise to exit India? Without any doubt, he says. “We have been enjoying a great monologue for the last few centuries – and it has been a wonderful monologue,” he says.
“This is a monologue that gave us (Albert) Einstein and (Charles) Darwin and (JRR) Tolkien and (Joseph) Campbell and (Steven) Spielberg. It’s too late to turn this inspiring and enlightening monologue into an inspiring and enlightening dialogue.”
aroon.dep@thehindu.co.in
Edited by Suhas Munshi
