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The
number of avid gamers in India has reached quite a respectable limit,
but unfortunately there has hardly been any serious attempt at developing
games. The result: India hasn’t seen a home-grown Quake or
Lara Croft, but some patchy efforts even which tried to copy the
American games. All this looks set to change with a game development
course being introduced in India for the first time by Arena Multimedia,
the multimedia arm of the training major Aptech.
Understandably,
Sudhir Mathur, Head, Arena-Multimedia, is upbeat. “The online
gaming industry in India is valued at Rs 40 crore, growing at the
rate of 35 percent. The animation industry which has already found
a firm foothold in the movies is now diversifying into this gaming
sector and we are hoping that there will be a requirement for about
5000 people in the industry. With the mounting number of US based
companies looking towards India to satiate their demand and with
markets like Japan and Korea holding forth tremendous potential,
there is a huge opportunity waiting for the country in the world
market of the gaming industry.” The point is that the gaming
industry requires not only animators but also developers to work
on the gaming engines.
Arena
Animation Academy has been established in Santa Cruz in Mumbai with
more centres planned in Kolkata and Hyderabad. By April 2002, Arena
is looking at 50 such academies with around 10 seats in each of
them. All these academies are Authorised Training Centres of Discreet,
who are the leaders with their state of the art animation applications
like Combustion, Edit, Inferno, mostly vital for post-production
work like compositing and editing. In addition, these academies
offer specialisation in Maya for 3D animation as well as Animo and
US Animation for 2D animation. These are also allied with Alias
Wavefront, Toon Boom and Cambridge Animation.
 The
courses on offer are on Classical and Cel Animation, Maya, US Animation,
Animo, Audio-Video Editing and Special Effects. The average duration
is around a year and it sets back a student by around Rs 30,000.
The three decade old gaming industry that originated out of creative
urge and the entertainment needs of the electronic hobbyists and
technology geeks is poised to witness an 11 percent growth in 2001
and 20 percent for the years 2001 to 2002, according to the Digital
Software Association (US).
The
gaming industry recruiters include 3-D artist, User Interface artist,
Director of Creative Operations, Animator, Artist, Character Animator,
Lead Artist and Project Director. According to Forester Research,
online game revenues rose from $70 million in 1997 to $227 million
in 1998 and is expected to cross $1.9 billion by 2002. India is
expected to garner a large section of this pie.
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