This is the second part in the three part series of the interview with Mr. Sangam Gupta, CEO of Trine Games.
GG: Have you outsourced any other game development work to any other company or country?
SG: Yes. It actually was quite funny, there was a prototype project. It came in 5 months back from a US publisher and we actually outsourced out artwork back to the US guy. So it was a little strange. But yes we do outsource a lot of our work to Indian companies, lots of Indian art companies. We outsource to Chinese and German companies. So basically, it just depends; you know what kind of project you are working on. That’s how you decide who to outsource on.
GG: Is the Indian game development market getting saturated?
SG: Not at all. There is still a long way to be saturated. But again, I have seen only very few companies in India itself, which are actually doing good art development. I have seen thousand of companies coming up in India doing game art and stuff. I have seen that only a few of them are actually good at it. So you can’t say that the market is saturated, the smaller players will come up. You have seen in the animation industry, 4-5 major animation studios and after that there are 100 mid grade animation studios. So the market is still not saturated for animation. Still there is lot of work coming in, specially, like I mentioned, current-gen shifting to next-gen, like your PlayStation 3 game, so the development budget sky-rocketed.
All the US and European companies, are now looking to outsource to a lot of companies. For example Codemasters. They get a majority of their work done in Bangladesh. What would you expect; they have over 100 people in Bangladesh. That’s where all their artwork gets developed, next-gen artwork I am talking about. All the companies have been looking for a while and there are new companies too, which haven’t looked. They themselves are looking towards India and China, because what was happening is that the work was getting outsourced to Eastern Europe. What happened with Eastern Europe was that all countries started getting converted to the Euro, European Union. So the work is going to the Eastern European companies like Poland and Czech Republic as well. Now they are part of Europe. So now the prices have gone up as well.
The only places which I see myself are affordable are India and China and this is just basically a threat to the Indian company, which just came up. The upcoming generation in China is all English speaking and China has controlled the dollar and the Yuan. The Indian government hasn’t done it. That’s why we are actually losing a lot of our work to Chinese companies, outsourcing companies that it is. But again it doesn’t affect us as a company, since we are working on two or three projects a year. I tried to make sure that I closed the deal by January only, the first month or the year. So I don’t have to worry about my project getting outsourced to China or my project getting taken away to China. But again in China, there isn’t much game development. There are lots of art companies, but if you see who are actually doing game development, there are only two or three companies, which are actually doing in China itself, so, that is not a threat to the Indian game developers. Again it is just a threat to the outsourcing companies.
GG: What do you have to say about the Nintendo Wii? What do you have to say about the concept?
SG: Honestly, the Nintendo Wii has a huge potential. You can see yourself how well it has been selling worldwide. Even the Queen of England plays Wii now. You know there is not much to say about it anymore. From a developer’s perspective, it is a great console and a great platform to put a game on. The development cost for a Wii game isn’t that high as they are for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Nintendo Wii is suited more for the casual gamers, people who have never played games before.
For example, at Trine every single console is present, including Xbox, PS3, PS2, Wii. But what people play the most is the Nintendo Wii and even the ladies, I keep on telling them to play games here. But they don’t play games like COD 4 or Need for Speed. However for the past couple of weeks, I have actually started seeing them play Wii Sports in our gaming room. Even my sister likes playing games and likes the Wii as well. Because it is very interactive, so I think it is great. It is a really, really great console and it is an extremely great platform to develop on.
GG: What are your views on the next generation console wars? People had thought the PS3 would do well, but it is not doing that well…
SG: When something comes out in the market, it will be expensive. When Ferrari launches the car in the US or any other country, it comes very expensive. You can’t expect people to jump on it and start buying it. But as the product matures, people do start buying it. You can see the PS3 is doing very well in Europe now. I think I might be wrong, I just read somewhere that it might be crossing the Xbox 360 quite soon in Europe. So it was just a more advanced platform console, which came out, which people weren’t ready for. It has 7 cores. I think in the coming year, year and a half, when the other consoles like the Xbox 360 and others go obsolete, then you will see the PlayStation 3 coming in, specially since it has Blu-ray.
PlayStation is known to standardize a format. When DVD came out, it wasn’t that popular, but after PS2 2, DVDs became like a regular thing for a consumer. So now Blu-ray is coming. You probably read the news that Warner Bros. and HBO are going completely only Blu-ray for the next movie platform. So again, I don’t see why PS3 won’t work. Plus the PS3 has Blu-ray. Developers can essentially put more memory, high-resolution textures on a disc. On an Xbox DVD, maximum 9 gigs of data can be put compared to 40 gigs. So that just means the game kind of looks more realistic with much higher resolution.
GG: What do you have to say about the gaming scene in India?
SG: Honestly, I would completely contradict with what other people say. I think the Indian gaming scene is already here. There is nothing called like Indian gamers should learn how to play games. We have been playing games for years. Name me one person who hasn’t played a Mario or a Contra when he was growing up. However the new generation hasn’t been playing games like Counter-Strike or Age of Empires. What is happening is nothing gets documented. So stuff gets pirated. But the piracy sales are actually very high in numbers. Very popular games at least sell in lakhs like 4-5 lakh copies for a very popular game in India. So the market is there. People are buying those games, but it is just that they are buying pirated games. Like right next door, there is a guy who actually sells pirated games. There is a huge, huge line. He is selling it right in front of a police guy in broad day light. So people are buying games, for sure.
GG: So is piracy affecting you? What about the censorship issue?
SG: Of course, it is going to affect. Am not sure right now, my game has not been out in India as yet but of course it is going to affect everyone. If Censorship comes in, I don’t see how we are going to work. We will be able to start working towards making an Indian game. Mild violence is a part of a video game. Video game is something, which is like a virtual life, what it gives you. You can be yourself in a game. So if a game is like Grand Theft Auto etc, they have cars running over people. But what do you expect from it. I don’t think anyone wound be interested in bringing their games here because censorship is something, which would just keep it strictly to the movies, not games. Yes there are ratings, like just in US, they ESRB ratings, they call it E for Everyone, M for Mature, so if that comes in then that’s fine.
You can put the ratings on the box, not a problem. We have already put it. When we work with a US company, they already put it on every product that comes out of your company. But censorship, cutting stuff from the game, that doesn’t make sense to me. So let us see. But as a developer, we won’t be affected that much ourselves because as I mentioned to you, there will be more focus on the global market. And for a racing game, I don’t see any violence in the racing game. We have some features, like a player can run over some people or he can run over some dogs on the streets, but that’s about it. If a dog is chasing you, what do you expect to do to him? So we have a feature like that implemented, like a car is going by, you will have street dogs chasing you and barking at you. But let us see if they don’t want us to do it, we will remove that feature, but that is not going to affect the game, it is just going to affect the experience.
GG: Are you looking out for any VC investments?
SG: VC investments, we got 2-3 term sheets also. But the companies from which we were getting some term sheets had already invested in other Indian companies and we didn’t a conflict between the group companies, the other portfolio companies of the VCs. So we went for private investment, which in my opinion is more relaxing than the VC investment, because private investors are usually friends and family of ours. So they won’t put in much pressure. They would really understand the situation and they will ask fewer questions because we guys are here to make games, we are here to sell the games. So we have been studying those markets, we have been learning the art of development of gaming for years now and it is still going. It is not that after X amount of years I will know everything about gaming. Gaming is something which is a growing phenomenon. So everyday you would see something new happening.
Probably you have heard about Club Penguin, which is an MMO like a flash website for kids. It has revenues that are similar to World of Warcraft now. Could you imagine that? It is for US kids. They pay 5 dollars to dress up the penguin and the stuff to other penguins in the world. This stuff just keeps on happening. We went for the private investment, because it was much quicker process and much relaxed process, stress free process.
GG: How many jobs can the game development industry create in India? How much potential does it have?
SG: In India, game development will create a lot of jobs. Companies have started carrying out proper game development. I see lot of work coming to India. How animation started, gaming is very similar to how animation is going on in India right now. Just like animation, as the projects are coming in, like in the US, animation costs are getting higher, European costs are getting higher too. Gaming is a much bigger industry than animation. Globally, it is a much, much bigger industry than animation. In the UK itself, you saw the sales for games were much more than the music sales. It has already been happening in the US, gaming makes twice the money than Hollywood and music industry. As the projects start coming into India, when people actually start developing some good quality games, when people start attracting publishers, I think it would create a lot of jobs. At Trine we have 190 people and are adding more. There are already a lot of outsourcing companies which we talked about, like some companies, which have games here. They have hired a lot of people and like us, usually go to universities and campuses to recruit people. We tell ourselves, why go for the experienced guy as when he actually comes in we will have to train him in everything. So why not got a fresh student out of college, who is very enthusiastic and train him rather than training a guy who knows some C++ but doesn’t have any gaming knowledge. So we are going to have to spend the same time on both of them. So that’s what we are doing.
(Keep watching this space for the concluding part of the interview.)