Shortage of designers plays havoc with gaming industry

NEW DELHI: Jaydev Dhakan is 24, and sporting enough for a good game. He knows exactly which game will sell and where, how to devise and balance stories and levels within games. As a game designer, that’s his job at Jump Games, a game content firm controlled by Reliance Entertainment. But now, as the Rs 100-crore organised gaming industry matures in India — growing at a 100% clip annually — an acute shortage of game designers is being felt.

Industry estimates put the designer crunch in the country at anywhere between 500 and 700. Bereft of creative talent, homegrown gaming companies are either hiring ideators at a huge cost from abroad, or twiddling their thumbs while grooming in-house talent over a two-to-three-year gestation. Essentially, a game designer has to have passion for gaming, but India doesn’t foster a gaming culture and there’s little passion among its people for it. “However, firms have now started turning overseas for talent even as they build training processes to acquire design capabilities,” says Nitish Mittersain, CEO-promoter of Nazara Technologies.

The overall gaming industry in the country cutting across the internet, mobile, PC and console, is less than a decade-old. While the focus on technical capabilities has sprouted dime a dozen programmers in India, there are very few creative personnel available for the industry. The absence of academic courses around gaming adds to the industry’s woes.

“Out of 180 people at Jump, we have just 5 designers. That’s the reason we are now talking to international talent at anywhere between $2,000-3,000 a month,” points out Ninad Chaya, executive VP, Jump Games. Raj Menon, COO at Contest2Win, yet another gaming company, has a different take on the scarcity.

“The (gaming) environment in India is more narrowband, and people here are being churned out for only narrowband graphics,” he observes.