BENGALURU: The India gaming story is evolving with industry players, academia, government and talent contributing and supporting growth, but one of the biggest challenges the industry faces is shortage of game developers, say experts, stressing on the need for proper institutions to equip and groom video game developers.
Speaking at the Bengaluru Tech Summit on the future of Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming, Comics and Extended Reality (AVGC-XR) on Friday, Sai Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Mobile Premier League (MPL), said the potential of the gaming industry is getting bigger as in India itself the gaming industry is bigger than the film industry.
“Games are the only form which has no boundaries and gaming is probably the largest digital industry in the world. In the US and China, even if you combine the movie and audio industry, they can’t even come close to the gaming industry,” he said, adding the need for more game developers and encouraging skills
among youngsters.
The recent HP India Gaming Landscape Study says that 61% of respondents were not aware of gaming courses in India, with more than half of gamers relying on YouTube and game buddies to enhance their skills. Lumikai in collaboration with Google released a report recently that says India’s gaming market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 20% to reach $7.5 billion in FY28 and the future growth is expected to be driven by growth in in-app purchases and ad revenues in casual and midcore games.
The gaming sector at present employs over 50,000 people and of which 30% are programmers and developers. It is expected that the sector will add more jobs in the coming years mainly in domains such as games test engineering and game developers, among other roles.
In August, MPL reduced its workforce by 50% or about 350 people after the government retained a 28% GST on online gaming. Though experts did not discuss tax, they pointed out the need for coordination among various state governments in case of gaming policies as at present it works under different departments.