During the outsourcing panel on gaming and animation at AGI 2007, Tapaas Chakravarti,MD of DQ Entertainment asserted that India is no longer a cost-arbitrage story with skyrocketing salaries and strengthening rupee.In Animation, co-production models is a logical progression.Gaming and animation cannot be likened to the software industry – this is creative work. Smaller players will struggle because of huge capex and manpower requirements – one TV series requires $7-8 million, 250 people. On over 500 Animation studios in India, only 10-11 are making a mark internationally.
Rajesh Rao, CEO of Dhruva Interactive said that when they got into gaming 10 years ago, they realized that there’s no market India, so decided to focus on outsourcing to survive. The talent pool problem in this country is that people haven’t gamed, so when they train developers, it’s like teaching someone who’s never seen a movie, how to make one. One needs to invest in people and domain knowledge. For clients, the quality of game and shipping date are key, and cost arbitrage is No.4 on their list. The cost of transitioning from developing for xBox and PS2 to xBox 360 and PS3 is huge. You need deep pockets – you don’t want to be left with a team of 200 people with nothing to do for two months because the client calls up and says things have been delayed.
Manvendra Shukul, CEO of Kalshya Digital said the world needs to learn process efficiency from the outsourcing industry to reduce time to market – it takes 3-5 years for an international game to be made because of inefficiencies in the process cycle.
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