9/23/2005
Video Games Outsourced To India Give People Two Weeks To Learn "Fun"
By Aaron McKenna: Friday 23 September 2005, 18:15
FORGET ABOUT outsourcing your call centres to India, the video games industry is outsourcing the whole show with low wages and an abundance of programming skills making the country an attractive place to develop games.
"Our real advantage is that we can combine low costs with abundant creative talent and programming skills that can be tapped here," said Rajesh Rao, whose company, Dhruva Interactive, based in the southern technology hub of Bangalore, completed a project for Microsoft this year and launched its own tennis game for mobile phones in May.
A lot of projects undertaken in India are either smaller mobile phone games or labor intensive sections of larger videogames – for example 90 of the 250 cars that feature in Forza Motorsport were made in India. Other programming intensive tasks that tend to go to India is porting work in order to enable games to be played on multiple platforms.
Full creative design of games has not yet made a wholesale move to India however, with North America, Europe and Japan being the home of the creative directors. Ironically says Rao, Indian’s tend to spend too much time on study and not enough on playing videogames when they’re younger, leading to a creative skills deficit.
"Very few Indians grow up playing games, because they're too busy with studies and thinking about their future," Rao said. "We let our new employees just play games for the first two or three weeks, so that they will get hooked."
