MUMBAI: Realistic Indian themes
are big for game developers in India. Now you can drive
an autorickshaw through the streets of an Indian metro
while evading the unruly traffic, fight off the British
at the Mysore Palace, or deliver food as a dabbawallah.
All of these are now computer games made by Indian game
developers.
Game developers are turning to
Indian-inspired themes to develop games for mass-appeal.
These are not games inspired by mythology, but
situations that Indians come across on a daily basis.
This marks a shift of mentality of Indian game
developers who have grown up on games based on space
aliens, plumbers (Mario brothers) and the Vietnam war
(Contra).
“The world over people have
drawn from their own cultures to design games. And now
this has to become our differentiating factor,” says
Alok Kejriwal, the founder and CEO of Games2Win.
Kejriwal refers to the numerous games that have been
based on themes that essentially belonged to the culture
they were made in- like a game on Eskimos. This does not
include mythological and sports-based games, which has
and always will have enormous potential. Instead it
refers to things the average Indians come across
everyday- like an unruly auto-driver.
Localisation is key, for the
casual games business. We outsource the development of
our games to outside studios and put an Indian layer
over it,” says Rohit Sharma, the COO of Zapak.com. He
says that even though the point of gaming is to get a
sense of escapism, it isn’t the case with casual gaming.
Escapism through gaming happens more with hardcore
gamers who spend three to six hours per sitting on a
game. This is the sort of audience that Vishal Gondal’s
Indiagames caters to. Indiagames caters to a totally
different kind of gamer- the kind that spends a few
hours a day in virtual reality, not the sort who is
killing time between work, or at a cyber cafe.
GamingHungama.com’s approach is
unusual. They create games based on the current season
and festivals- like Diwali and Holi. Carlton D’Silva,
the creative director says, “We do this because the
festival name is at the top of most people’s mind and a
link to the game pops up when they search for it on the
web. Brands also want to be associated with these
festivals. For instance, in our Holi game we made the
bottles for the rocket Coca-Cola.”
A key reason for this change is
a change in the target audience for game companies over
the last 15 years. In the mid-nineties, the only form of
gaming was console games. This was meant only for the
few Indian families that could afford it. Back then, for
the lack of variety, children were more than happy to
play shoot-and-kill games. There wasn’t a need to
develop localised content. With the internet, gaming is
now available to anyone and everyone who is connected.
This has suddenly made gaming accessible to the millions
of middle-aged people at an office computer.
To
introduce this new audience to gaming, game companies
are experimenting with various ways to get them hooked.
Game developers believe that shoot-and-kill games will
always remain popular with the largest demographic, the
youth. | 
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