In an indigenous ecosystem where mobile games (and developers) have taken the lead in churning out IPs, there are only a few companies which are dedicated in creating AAA content. For people who are unfamiliar with the term, AAA games or Triple-A games refer to titles which are of high quality and have high development and promotional budgets.
AnimationXpress reached out to one such indigenous company named Crass Infotech. “We have developed and published around seven apps and we have published two games, Agent 777 and The God’s Chain,” said Crass Infotech, CEO and founder, Siddhant Dixit.
They do not necessarily develop all the games on their own; they outsource developments to some companies overseas as well. While that’s there, their upcoming game, Be Safe, which is a zombie survival based open-world shooter, is being developed by the company itself.
However, we were curious to know about the challenges (if) the company has been facing as they are not in an ecosystem where these types of games are made.
“No, actually we don’t face challenges because we are pretty much the only company in India which is producing games like this for PC and we are getting a very good support from the users, we got around 50,000 downloads in the first week after the release of The God’s Chain.”
The core team consists of only six people and they frequently hire professionals from around the globe on a freelance basis. In Dixit’s words, sometimes they even hire “about 50 – 100 people and the number varies in every project”.
The company even has deals with Valve, Greenman Gaming and Humbe Bundle.
“When we started creating games, we went to Valve for publishing and we give royalties to them when we sell a game.” Apart from Valve/Steam, the company also has similar deals with Greenman Gaming and Humble Bundle.
Speaking about The God’s Chain’s sequel, Dixit said, “It is an AAA game which has pretty good photo realistic graphics, it is a sci-fi first person/third person shooter game (You can switch to whichever mode you want with the press of a button).” The studio already has an update planned for the game and version 1.3 of the game would be hitting sometime around Diwali. While Be Safe, which has been made on the Unbreal 4 engine will be launched around Christmas.
Crass Studios is the development wing and Crass Infotech is the publishing arm of the company.
While browsing through their website we saw some apps by the company as well and asked about the state of those apps, as the company was more focused on their games.
“They are not doing so well as we expected because we have not been able to focus on them. We launched all the apps within just a month and moved to the PC market and, got a lot of support so we stuck to it,” concluded Dixit.
Currently, the games from the studio are available on MAC, Linux, PC and Xbox One, however he stated that the company is going through some legal formalities and their XboX titles should hit the market sometime next month.
The studio has also plans for an open-world MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game), of which not much information was divulged at this moment.
We hope more developers in India at least try and explore the genre and same goes for the investors. Mobile games are no doubt great, but if more games like these are developed, India might become a major player in this sector as well.
