Electronic Arts – may well be one of the biggest names in the gaming industry with titles covering all bases from the PSP to the PC. It was only very recently at Anifest India 2012 that I got the opportunity to interview Amol Gurwara, the gentleman who is currently heading the Indian operations of Electronic Arts based in Hyderabad. Hyderabad is home to one of EA’s largest facilities worldwide – not just making games for our side of the pond but development on a global scale is carried out from here as well.
Talking about his experience at Anifest India 2012 Amol Gurwara shares, “Anifest was great. It was my first time there and I am really happy with the experience. I was
introduced to Anifest by Prosenjit, who is a dear friend and a really talented guy. He spoke to me about doing the gaming session at Anifest and as I knew about him being involved and about the credentials of some of the organizers.”
“I was pleasantly surprised to see the enthusiasm of the folks there and the quality of
the presentations. My mailbox is now flooded with questions from people asking about
career options in this industry. We’re looking to follow this event up with a bunch
of workshops for gaming enthusiasts looking to carve out a career in this industry. I
am happy that people are keen on game development as a career option and events
like Anifest really serve as fantastic touch points for animation and game industry
professionals to connect with enthusiasts and career aspirants.”
Elaborating more on the working process and culture at the India studios of EA, he said, “EA worldwide has a great work culture, high quality talent and some of the best brands in the business. The India office is a fully owned subsidiary of Electronic Arts and embraces the organizational culture fully”.
“We’ve got a diverse team of around 750 professionals, from different disciplines –
art, design, production, client and server engineering, product management, analytics,
animation, quality assurance and also other shared and corporate functions pertaining to finance, Global IT, etc. We’re passionate about providing the best experience and service to our players; We try to look at what the people want and how they consume our content using telemetry data and we put that knowledge to work in our games to improve the experience. We want to win on both, qualitative and quantitative factors.”
“The Hyderabad office has a very open and friendly culture. Managers and leads are
approachable; the place feels very young and vibrant. There’s a gaming lounge in the
office, there are sports events going on constantly, there’s knowledge sharing sessions on different facets of game development, there’s technical and soft skills training that allows people to Level up their skills. The culture we try and create is one of quality. From the concept and planning stage through to production and distribution, our aim is to provide the best quality games to our consumers.”
As we ended our conversation, we asked him about his thoughts on the Indian gaming
industry, what the highs and lows are, to which he said, “Gaming habits are changing.
There is an explosion of gamers – clearly on the mobile and social side but also in terms of the yearly growth in console hardware and the adoption of PC games. You walk into a retail store or a mall, and you just cannot miss the amount of shelf space dedicated to gaming these days. While the western markets are definitely more evolved, India is one of the TOP 10 growth markets as far as smartphones are concerned with a 170% year on year growth in the installed base. However, it is still a low ARPU (Average Revenue per User) market. Consumers are not really spending along the levels we see in other regions.
“Hopefully that will change as consumer consumption patterns evolve and as gaming
becomes mainstream entertainment. We need that to change to make this a viable market for developers to target with great content. We have to keep providing them high quality content. Lowering production standards and cutting corners because revenue is low, is a vicious circle that local developers need to avoid. You can never build credibility in the market that way”
“Since 2007, the EA team in India has grown steadily since and is continually expanding
its range of activities. The experience has been fantastic so far. We’ve got great talent and we’re always looking to add more from places such as NID, IITs, NITs, JJ School of Arts, etc. We’ve got a fair amount of diversity in our teams so although we are based in Hyderabad, we’ve got a lot of colleagues from other cities such as Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Indore, Pune and Jaipur. We’re currently expanding our teams with more production and engineering talent.”
