India ‘s major game services provider Gameshastra, who are based in the southern city of Hyderabad have gotten into an agreement with California-based casual game publisher and developer, Freeze Tag. The deal will allow Gameshastra to develop the ‘Etch A Sketch’ game while Freeze Tag will publish it.
Prakash Ahuja, CEO, Gameshastra said, “We think Freeze Tag as a publisher has great vision for identifying good titles. It has chosen some very exciting and exceptional licenses that we hope to expand jointly under this partnership. This agreement with Freeze Tag reiterates our position as a leading global game services provider for both Core and Casual games.”
Craig Holland, CEO of Freeze Tag said, “We have worked with many offshore developers, and Game Shastra is the first company that has really ‘exported’ US game development expertise and management to its offshore operation, while still maintaining a US onshore staff in key developer roles. Gameshastra’s talented and experienced management team and aggressive pricing were attractive features, but the main reason we picked Gameshastra to develop our high-value licenses was simply the opportunity to work with a really great game development team.”
Bjorn Book-Larsson is the chief technical officer and the vice president of game development at Gameshastra. He comments, “At Gameshastra we provide a very flexible project environment for our customers for game development, game art and game testing in a single location which is very difficult to pull off on-shore, besides offering competitive development costs leading to shorter development timelines and higher quality products Our presence in Los Angeles provides quick response to our customers, and keeps us tightly integrated throughout the entire project.”
Gameshastra would be developing the PC, Web, and Mac versions of Etch A Sketch. However, Gameshastra will also have the rights to develop any future versions for platforms such as Xbox 360 Live Arcade and Nintendo Wii. Gameshastra has been doing very well and some time ago they had signed up a deal with Activision.