There was a time when the aspiration amongst game companies was to develop games, these days the trend still is to develop games but developing platforms and moving up the value chain to become aggregator, publisher is now the in-thing.
Kolkata headquartered Virtual Infocom which has ops in several other Indian cities
( Allahbad, Jaipur, Pune) along with a presence in NYC and Nigeria as well, is working on developing a resource portal and platform for Inde Game Developers.
The portal is still in beta stage but when it is complete and at peak performance, the intention is to serve the entire Inde game development community including Professionals, Individuals and Young Studios as well as Students who develop their games to find an opportunity to get published. That’s not all; the portal will also offer them a vast array of resources that are required in development of a game. It will also have a large community of players for instant feedback.
The site which is soft launched, though currently going through a lot of backend changes and front end enhancement, already has complete games and game elements from 34 Indian developers and 125 students.
It has segments for Action, Arcade, Adventure, and Casual Games etc. The professionals and students can upload the games created by them which will be promoted and marketed by Virtual Infocom. The portal has a store from where one can buy objects, music, voiceovers as well as one can hire musician’s, game developers. It also has an outsourcing model from where people/ company can get jobs and can outsource jobs.
Talking to Animationxpress.com about the gaming portal, Arijit Bhattacharyya, CEO and the Founder of ‘Virtual Infocom’, said “While creating games in our own unit we saw that there is a big requirement for Props and other game related objects as well as from our training institute’s experience there is a gap that students don’t have the opportunity to build games and showcase their creative mind in an open forum. There is a gap for a game outsourcing portal, from where one can get to know the requirement regarding games, Proper mentoring website on game languages and Store for tailor made objects, music and games. So, we thought to come up with a platform wherein individual game makers, game development companies, start-ups, game designers can have game objects, voiceovers, music, background score and intro score as well as people can play free games which are created by students and Individual game makers”
Further talking about the response Arijit said, “We have already 34 Indian developers connected with the portal, one musician from abroad, 125 Students from different colleges, many people who want to put their created objects at the store. We are not done with the portal yet, it will be done soon within next Month where in people can connect with each other through our own social networking site. We will connect with fresh graduates and inspire them to make games and animation and put them in the portal itself. We are already in talk with 36 different colleges in and around India and have got good response from them. Currently the existing games are created by the students itself and we are promoting their works. If anyone uploads a game there, whatever we are earning from the ads/ his/her game page, we will be sharing 75% of the revenue to the developer.”
“We are getting good response from USA and UK, people do give their feedback in positive way from outside India. I am looking for the same from India, so that we can have a good healthy community” concluded Arijit.
Virtual Information and Communications (virtualinfocom) is widely spread accross various regions including Kolkata, Jaipur, Pune and Allahabad in India and Nigeria, New York. It has two different domains; one is to create game, comics, simulation and animation. Another one is they have a training institute Since 1998 in game programming, animation, game design, game art, iPhone, Android application ,Automobile design and IT.