No, it’s not a trending topic on Twitter. Why? Cause, it’s Indie. These Indian Indie developers make games are and thus called ‘Indie Gamers.’ I’ve been following Indie game development for a while in India. There are absolutely dedicated and hard-working developers who have made some excellent games. But, most of the work that I get to see is derivative of ‘popular games’ like Subway Surfer, Temple Run or Candy Crush. A lot goes into developing games and as the trend goes… The west glorified their Indie Game Developers into demigods with a documentaries. While we left our Indie developers starving in the sun.
These movies though insightful borderline on chauvinism as most of the Indian game developers have been facing the same issues but at a larger scale. At least with a western audience you stand a better chance to earn back the capital that you invested. But, not all game developers are that lucky and most of them would be Indian. A simple reason for that is Indian’s don’t pay and for these developers to crack it foreign markets requires a mix of great PR, marketing, amazing concept and development to get some attention. Working with an App development company for the last three months has helped me understand the problem better.
Some of the key issues are:
1) The Indian audience is not mature enough yet
Most of the Indian consumers still do not buy apps. As much as we like to boast of our gold-plated iPhones and bathroom tile Samsung’s… We do not see the value in buying a $ 1 app. Why because we do not see the effort that the developer has put into it.
2) The misleading perception that apps are easy
This could not be farther from the truth. Apps are ‘not’ easy to make and like one of my colleagues, Gokul, rightly points out, “smaller screen does not mean lesser code.” There are some glaring misconceptions. To cite an example: HTML 5 website is NOT all you need to make an app, even with default template pulling RSS feeds is not a 20 minute job and NO, we won’t work for food. Wondering how much your app should cost, try it here.
3) The media covers only the ‘wonders’
The mainstream media’s editorial team can never keep pace with the technological advances. They need a sure shot way to milk the whole shebang before they invest their time in it. What that means is that, advertisers with vested interests get more mileage than the real players. This is what has been the scenario for eons. If at all, they cover a story on an app developer, it would be about a whiz kid or something just as outrageous. They do not want to see the normal starving game/app developers cause that’s not really news.
Indian blogs or websites on the other hand have a few players that take the effort to cover relevant issues and games/apps but these are too far and in between. The other aspect these web portals cover are success stories but again the parameters to qualify for a story are plain ludicrous.
I’ve seen the perseverance of the game/app developers in India and I applaud their work. I would particularly like to congratulate Shailesh Prabhu of Yellow Monkey Studios for bagging the game developer of the year and (Huebrix) best game of the year award at the NASSCOM Game Development Conference.
Here is Shailesh talking about his journey with NASSCOM and the Ping Network:
We the people & media must realise that we have left a huge vacuum that if utilised well would change the face of our game and app industry for good. Just that someone has to take that first decisive step. The quality of apps and games developed in India is tremendous and we are fools to ignore it. The mainstream media is playing catch up but we as bloggers can make a dent. To prove my point, I am going to publish a series of games/app YouTube videos and you post in the comments as to which is the Indian V.s Foreign Developer.
Perceptions of me, Mercury. 