The Indian gaming market, estimated to touch $45 million (around Rs 180 crore) by 2008, has spawned a new breed of professional gamers, testers and developers.
Games or animation loosely comprise artwork, special effects, game porting, game quality analysis and end-to-end development.
Take the case of Kabeer Ghengis, who works as a game developer in a Hyderabad-based animation outsourcing company. He joined straight out of college and after one year at work, draws a salary of Rs 35,000.
"I was a gaming freak, and never realised that I could make money out of my passion," he confesses. After doing computer engineering, Ghengis decided to join the nascent animation industry.
"I started by developing small casual game modules and testing graphics for various game versions for many international game publishers," he says.
On the other hand, Abbas, an IT professional-turned game tester, ventured into testing by sheer chance. "I began testing games on weekends. Soon, I realised that I enjoyed gaming more than IT projects," he says.
Today, working with Zapak, this avid gamer aspires to find his niche in the gaming industry by getting into end-to-end product management.
And there are those like Milind Shah who is into game ideation. He says his focus is to create a concept and then work on gameplay, art assets, rendering issues, compatibility, soaking (when game is left in a particular state for hours or days) and finally localisation.
"We conceptualised a game called Raju Meter, where the rickshaw driver Raju saves people from accidents and races against time to meet deadline for important meetings and events of his customers," explains Shah who works for Games2Win.
He is one of the few thousands who have found their calling in the emerging domestic gaming market.
It is expected that the gaming industry will grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 78 per cent and reach $300 million by 2009. The domestic gaming market, according to research group iSuppli, should touch $125 million in 2010.
Walt Disney, Sony, Applied Gravity, MTV, Warner Brothers, Activision and Imax are some of the popular companies that have outsourced full-length animation work and feature films to Indian animation firms.
And it's the cost arbitrage that is helping them. For instance, while the total cost of making a full-length animation film in the US is between $100 million and $175 million, in India, it can be made for as low as $15 million-$25 million.
The talent pool, however, has to be much deeper to serve the growing number of businesses that demand more and better employees with computer science training to build an ecosystem needed to remain competitive in the fast growing gaming industry.
Says Rohit Sharma, COO, Zapak, "India has a gaming mindset, which is waiting to explode, but it is also true that we need professionally-qualified employees who can fuel growth of the mobile and online gaming industry."