How to Create a Hit Games Studio From India? | LILA Games CTO Avinash Pandey

Hello everyone and welcome to philosophy Friday. Today I'm here with my co-founder Avinash Pandey who is CTO of Lila Games. And today we're going to be talking about how to create a hit game or game studio out of India. And I wanted to have a frank discussion about this topic, get your honest opinions. And for some context, when I first came to India a few years ago, I was checking the top-grossing charts, at least for mobile, and it you know, I was kind of scrolling down, scrolling down, looking for the first game that was in the top-grossing charts. And I had to scroll into the hundreds, like 300, 400, 500, before I found a game in the top-grossing charts from India. Today, checking the top-grossing charts, we see Gameshion with Ludo King in the top, let's say, 150 grossing. So, there's some improvement there. But in terms of when we think of other countries like China with companies like FunPlus where I worked, Mihoyo, and

other companies that are evolving now in China both in mobile as well as the AAA side, and we see Turkey with companies like Peak, Dream Games, and companies like that who are starting to emerge and meaningfully create hit games and game studios, I wanted to have this discussion about India. So, to kick off this discussion, Avinash, I thought maybe we could first start by having you talk about the Indian gaming industry today. Maybe with a stronger focus on free-to-play and mobile, but for our audience who doesn't know that much about the Indian gaming scene, how would you describe it? What is it like? All right. So, first of all, my career in gaming started in 2008. So, I'm not as old as Indian gaming industry. So, my I'll I'll have my own perspective on it. Um so, I think Indian gaming industry is still growing. It's not as mature as if you compare it with Western gaming industries. So, you will see that

newness. You will see some of the common mistakes you must have seen or people must have seen in other gaming industries in their early days. Those Those might be there in Indian gaming industry. The second thing which I could see from my personal experience is the way Indian gaming industry itself started. So, India it starts from like India was not a it didn't have gaming culture. So, the access to, you know, PS4, Xbox, and all these consoles were not very common in India. So, only few people had access to those. So, India was mostly into like physical sports, but not on virtual sports. With the advent of mobile, most of the Indian community actually got connected to games. So, that's why people call India as a mobile gaming country. So, in terms of gaming industry, what I could see is many Western companies came to India to set up their studios mainly for art, support, or, you know, just doing some sort of co-development. So, anything I I I don't

remember any game which was built from scratch in early days of Indian gaming industry. So, it evolved that way. So, I I also saw some companies coming out of those companies. So, people who worked in those companies like in Zynga or any other Western studios in India, and then they started their own gaming companies. So, it started naturally that way. So, that's why it's growing. Now, I'm seeing many more studios where it's starting naturally. Like, you know, some developers, some gamers who love playing games, who are very connected to the gaming culture, and then they are building some games. So, I think the right way to start any company is always like not your goal should not be to start a company, but you want to build some game which is not there for players, and then the result of this is like, "Hey, how do I do that?" You know, start a company or start a studio, bring your friend in, and then start building those things. So, those things are happening in India now. Yeah, maybe from my own perspective, I I feel like a few things that I noticed

about, not not all Indian gaming companies, but a lot a large number of them is that when we when you look at like the strategy of a lot of the Indian gaming studios, it seems like there's a strategy to do a lot. Right. So, I would see even small game studios work on five and even sometimes 10 games. And and I would ask them, "How is your small team of, you know, 30 20-30 people trying to work on 10 different games?" Right. And so, then you see a development cycle that's like 3 months or 6 months. And so, a lot of the games are being worked on are more casual in nature. And based on that, I and I would say that we don't see a lot of the depth that you would see from other companies in other places in the world like, you know, where you see extreme depth in a genre, and you see longer longer development cycles as well as more concentration in terms of betting on one game at a time versus trying to have this large portfolio strategy where

the philosophy is, "Hey, we don't know what's going to hit, so we're just going to try and launch five games, 10 games, and hopefully something hits." Right. And I I I think this is very well connected to the point I was talking about. Like, most of the companies were not started by gamers. So, they must have had some other background coming from SaaS or any other industries. So, the core philosophy of building game might not be the the experience they have. So, for them it's a software. So, you know, there's gaming industry, there's some sort of success, how can we be part of it? Right. So, that's how many companies get started. And they're like, "Hey, there's this famous game, maybe, you know, Carrom or something like that. Can we make that game?" And then they have some engineers, they'll say like, "Yeah, we can make it like in 3 months or something like that." Because they have also not done it. So, that's how it starts. And then some other famous game comes in picture. They're like, "Hey, can we make something like Candy Crush?" So, then they will have five more engineers and they start doing that. So, so that's majority I would say like majority of the companies kind of fall

in that category in India. But there are exceptions, especially now where the market is opening up more. Right. And we are seeing more venture capital flow into India. We're seeing more the the market start to merge, a little bit more professionalism in terms of best practices being brought here, but kind of speaking more on the upside of India, maybe more the positive aspect, what do you think when you think about whether it's versus the US or China or Turkey, when you think about India, what would you say are some of the positive aspects of developing in India or some of the benefits that we will have trying to build a company here in India? I mean, first is always the cost structure, you know, in building a game or a team in India would be cheaper than other countries. There will be other options also, but that's one. The second one is, as we talked about, so Indian gaming industry is new. So, there what I personally feel whenever I talk to candidates and other gaming studios, like their aspirations are very high.

Like, it's not that people don't want to make great games. It's just they are not getting opportunity to make great games. Because if the leadership decides like, "Hey, we want to make a casino game or something some board game." So, they don't have a choice. But there is this energy in in developers, in artists to build something amazing out of India. And if they get that opportunity, you will see the result in execution. That that we are seeing also. Like, with some people they are so motivated to build those things. So, I think that's that's one of the thing. And the other thing is which I think started happening recently is now people see games as a career option also. So, earlier in India, gaming was not a career option. It was like something like entertainment. In colleges, even students were not aware like, "Hey, is can I make my career in gaming?" So, that started happening now. And if you see the sheer volume of engineers, developers, and just the talent in India, even if the small percentage of people decide to go in gaming,

that percentage would be huge. So, you know, that you will see that result in coming years where you will see many studios with really great talent. Yeah, and I mean, I agree with you. I think that for me it just simplifies down to the people, right? Like, we have a set of people here who are learners, who have high potential, who want to learn, and who want to try to become the best. And it's not, you know, it's just like anywhere else in the world. Yeah. It's not everybody, but the people that we we can find and we can employ, it does seem like they have a lot of energy and a lot of enthusiasm to try and learn as quickly as possible. So, yeah, I think that's also a very positive aspect. And then in terms of like, if you were to think about specific Indian gaming companies, certainly there's, you know, I mentioned Gameshion during the beginning part of this, but are there any other gaming studios that you think we should be watching out for? Like, ones you think have a potential of kind of breaking out and

potentially becoming a world-class studio? So, I think it will depend on the genre of games you would be looking at. Like, if you are looking at casual games, there are multiple studios. In casino, real money gaming, there are multiple studios. It might be harder to find studios we are who are in hardcore games. So, in real gaming, you would know, like, you know, MPL is doing good. I think in fantasy sports, Dream11 did really well. On board games, King Ludo King is doing really well with their Ludo game. When I try to think about hardcore games, I think that space is yet to be taken yet to be taken by some studios. But I feel if in in terms of, you know, what should you watch out, if somebody is trying to do something ambitious in India, like, you should watch out for that. Because it's they might turn out to be, you know, one of those studios who out of the blue are like, "Hey, who made this game?" So, you know, that that

yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with you. And it does seem like the ones who are more ambitious, like I I I know there's this game on the AAA side, Raji, the game that people talk about that a lot. Raji? Raji, yeah, sorry. And and so like maybe kind of getting to the meat of this discussion, if you were now to think about so what is it going to take? How do we build the next FunPlus, miHoYo in China, the next Dream Games in Turkey? How does India create its next big game studio, next big game? What is If you were to try to identify the top two or three things that India needs to do as a gaming ecosystem to try and help create that hit new studio or game, what do you think needs to happen? So, I think there won't be a specific formula for India. I think to build a successful game or successful company, the amount of work or the framework needed is same, whether you're building a company in India or anywhere else. So, what is what

I can talk about is what might be missing in Indian gaming companies and what they can do to actually become the successful companies. And I think most of the people are aware of that. So, we already talked about like, you know, trying to do something ambitious, something unique is the first step. Like it's it's also, you know, there's this book called Infinite Game. So, you know, if if you try to do something ambitious, it creates a culture of everybody being okay that, "Hey, you know, we can build a shooter game because then there's one more company in India which built that game or some MMO or something like that." So, that's one. Then thinking deeply about the complexity of games. So, you know, what I have found lacking is people have a very bird's-eye view on what it takes to make a good game, but that's not what is needed to build a game. Like building a game is very very complex, like a building a top-grossing game especially or or hardcore or whatever. So, the companies should focus on

processes, should focus on best practices. And if required, like you know, what I really like about Lila is that you are bringing that experience. So, what Indian gaming gaming industry has to do is avoid those mistakes. So, like if you look at any successful studios, their first game was not that successful. They learned over the period of time. So, if India Indian gaming industry or gaming companies want to be successful, how can they avoid those mistakes? And the good part is those mistakes are there, like and people are open to talk about them. People are open to mentor. So, like you know, you came here from that point of view that, "Hey, you want to create a learning organization where you can teach whatever experience you have." Like you know mistakes to be avoided. So, I think those are very very critical things. It's it's it's not only like, "Hey, let's build this game, get into it. Just copy, you know, screen by screen." Even copying a good game is not easy. Like you can copy the screen, you can copy buttons, you can copy the flow, but what exactly is working in that game? That

needs that deeper expertise. So, yeah. Yeah, maybe if I can kind of, you know, kind of extend some of your thinking, like you know, you mentioned the complexity of games. And I I hope that's something that for, you know, Indian game developers who may be watching this take to heart is that that strategy of trying to launch three, four, five different games from one studio and not being deep enough, like not only the processes, but really understanding game genres very very deeply and trying to concentrate and focus and have more depth, I think, is going to help Indian gaming industry become more successful over time. I think also, when it comes to the type of talent, certainly a lot of really great engineering talent here in India, but it does seem like on the design side, there's a little bit more depth when when we talk about design talent in other locations, whether US or Israel or, you know, Turkey. So, so I hope that more people in the Indian gaming

industry would try to become game designers and to learn design in a more fundamental basis. And then I I would say like the final thing for me is that the history of the Indian gaming industry, at least on the mobile free-to-play side, had been kind of from Zynga, from EA, from Glu, where there's a largely like live operations mentality, right? So, there's been like declining games in the West, it gets kind of punted over to India, and then they're it's live operated, but then the mentality, if we want to see a big hit new game coming out from India, is to understand the differences between building a hit new kind of zero-to-one game development approach versus the content cadence and the regularity and stability of live ops. And so, kind of shifting that mindset, I hope would If more people learn about it, more people study it, then I I hope that that would also increase the chances of big hit new games coming out in India I think one thing I can add to that is

about the, you know, going deep in in your game design, in understanding the complexity of game. One thing I think especially the leadership of Indian gaming industry struggles with is FOMO. Like if there are there's some famous game and they're building something, they're like, "Maybe, you know, this game is better than this game." But, you know, one day we were talking about some match-three game. Like match-three is a very crowded market. And now building a match-three is like almost a suicide mission. But some game came out and it like completely, you know, washed out everything else. Royal Match. So, you can still do good in an existing category, existing genre, even existing gameplay. If you go really deep and try to innovate on that and do a get better job. So, FOMO is a is the enemy. And Abhinav, since you're you're the CTO and you've got kind of a technical orientation, do you Is there anything more technically that you could speak to in terms of if you think that Indian gaming studios should focus on anything from a technical perspective,

what would you say that would be if if anything? Oh, yeah. I mean, I can share the mistakes and from my personal experience, uh yeah. So, and this is also not only for studios, but for engineers as well. And I'm I can talk more for engineers rather than your artist and designers. So, one thing I find missing is just the focus on processes and automation. So, like many studios, they just, you know, they just do things on the go. Like, "Hey, let's start building the game. Architecture and everything we'll figure out later, process we'll figure out later, you know, build automation." There are so many things which you can establish once. These are the processes which you have to do once, but they will save so much time in in a longer process. So, one example is just a build automation. So, you know, what I have seen even from my experience, like many studios, they just make the build on their game engine. So, like developers are making build in Xcode,

you know, Android Studios. Whereas if you just spend a week, there are so many tools now, like you know, Jenkins is there, GitHub Action. There are so many tools you can use just to automate that. So, and that will save so much time for your engineers, for your studio. And then you can have a better build process, better testing process, everything else. The other one is when you look at these processes, they generally in the start they seem like waste of time. One of the processes I can talk about is code review, let's say for example. So, in code review, if some engineer does something, you know, it looks like, "Hey, it looks what we are expecting. It's fine. Let's let's just keep merging it to the main thing." But if you don't see how your code base is increasing over the period of time, you will end up paying so much cost. Like, you know, you release the game, you push some change, then everything else breaks. Or, you know, something breaks which you don't even know. Or your QA cycle is so long. So, all these things can be avoided but just having a good code review process, where, you

know, you just define your standards, have a process. It just takes a couple of hours, you know, per commit or whatever, but it can save you so much effort. So, this is like one of the examples I can give. And maybe the final question here, just kind of wrap it up up is like in terms of people. We've talked spoken a little bit about the people in India, but if you were to try to describe, maybe in your opinion, what might be some of the differences between some of the Indian game developers or people in gaming companies here in India versus maybe in the West or other countries, what would you say some of those differences are? So, one thing I wanted to cover in my previous answer which actually is related to your question now. In India, the culture of direct feedback and open communication is not common. So, like if I have to tell you like, "Hey, you are not But yeah, I mean, I can tell from my experience here. So, like it might happen that people might take it personally. So, and because of that, people don't

have those kind of conversations. So, it's not common. So, that's that's one thing I noticed, like you know, people might take it in a very sensitive way or something like that, which is completely not required. Like in a work environment, like direct communication and direct feedback opens so much potential for growth. So, that The other thing especially what I have felt missing is, you know, recently, you know, I I I think Times of India, they were asking me how's the talent in India for gaming. And I just shared real numbers. So, you know, I'm I'm personally interviewed more than 300 engineers, and we were only able to hire three or four. And one common thing I found missing is just the understanding of fundamentals. So, people who are coming in game development, all these game engines, like Unity, Unreal, they make it very easy to do something pretty quickly. Like if you want to do some feature, you do Google, you will find some tutorial, you get it done, it's done. But that's not enough to build a complex game or

that's not enough to build something from scratch. So even if you ask basic questions like here, how does this actually work? Like that that understanding is missing. So that's why I would always advise like you know, focus on fundamentals and don't restrict your learning to your work. So I completely align with everybody that you know, their work doesn't allow because you know, this again if we think from first principle, it comes down to a company is building simple games. So how would I engineer learn how to build a complex game? But that to some extent is could be an excuse also. So build complex prototypes, build Nobody's stopping you building a shooter game. Like you can in your part time, you can just build those challenging problems. Yeah, I I Can I agree with you in terms of that aspect which I which I think should improve over time, but like understanding the fundamentals really questioning why things are happening. So when I interview people, it's like if I were to

interview a PM and ask them, okay, you know, if I were to ask them about a scrum development process. Why two weeks versus one week versus three weeks? Why would we have complexity based upon time or story points or some other some other form and so like having people just fundamentally question how they're doing things and thinking about the differences why. You know, if I were to ask people the different metaphors of different PM tools, they can't tell me because they haven't really thought about it in a deep and fundamental way or even if I were to ask a you know, lead engineer what kind of code process or code review process should be used? Should it be peer based? Should it be lead based? Should it be something else? Yeah. And then they're they're well, we just did it that way in our other company. But why? Right. Which situations would one be better than the other? And so I I would say that you know, I agree with that feedback. I would say the positive that I've seen in it is that you know, time and time again I realize people are people. So whether we're in the US or Canada or Germany or India, there's good

people, there's bad people everywhere. There's people who are you know, really fantastic here and I think that what what I've been very encouraged by is just you know, the friendliness, friendly atmosphere, you know, talking to a lot of people in the games industry. I think that's universal and global that a lot of people in the games industry are a little bit more open, a little bit more friendly. And but maybe you know, one other point of one other point I would raise where I hope could get better is that I do think that to your point about maybe like some cultural norms where it does feel like some people don't feel as comfortable like reaching out and creating this this notion of tribes. Like in the US, you know, I've got a group of you know, certain types of people who I speak to about different things. So like different private communities, different people. I'm just now trying to start a gaming HR tribe where you know, we're getting HR leaders and we're talking about different HR issues here. But I do hope that in order for the

Indian gaming industry to grow faster like for more gaming industry people to share best practices and share things because you mentioned the infinite game, right? The gaming industry, there's so much opportunity. It shouldn't be about Indian gaming companies trying to battle each other. It should be that India rising and competing on a global stage. Completely agree and that's very very important for innovation. And if you want to be one of the top countries in gaming then we cannot skip innovation. So we have to create something original. For that all of these things are really important. And maybe one last point I'll make about kind of like people, but also kind of like game studio is that I do hope and I hopefully people from the Indian gaming industry don't take this the wrong way, but like I do feel like to be really successful, you always want to be more hands-on and to kind of really understand what you're working on. It's

hard for in my opinion to effectively manage somebody if you haven't haven't never done that job or don't know the job. And so kind of like what I see in some game Indian gaming companies is like bigger teams where do you really need to be that big? And then there seems to be this desire after like five years to become increasingly more of a manager that then stops doing work and it's like, okay, what did you do? What did you do? What did you do? Okay, all right, all right and then just kind of manage. And so when I I've noticed that when I interview more senior people often times they're worse than the junior people because they forgot how to do everything. One of my recent interviews, the candidate was I think he had four years of experience and he was a team lead. So I asked him like how much time do you spend in coding? So he said like 20%. Like you are at a stage of your career where you should be doing 100% time in coding. So yeah, totally agree with the point you made. All right. Well, I think those are all my questions. Avinash, any

final words of advice or thoughts about the Indian gaming industry as we also personally want to try to make a head gaming studio here in India. Yeah, yeah. So you know, all the things we talked about, we are aware of them and those are the practices which we are following personally and as our company value, we are very very open to share our learnings. So you know, any gaming studios they want to talk to us, you know, create a tribe. I also personally trying to create a tribe of technical leads in different companies so that so that as a whole we can be better and I'm hoping to see like really really great games coming out of India very soon. All right, guys. That's it for this time. So until next time, catch y'all later. Bye.