Dropout Games is all set to rollout six more new games for the gaming audience. Before you get to know about them, let us have a brief idea about the company. Dropout Games is a 4 people team along with a bunch of close repeating collaborators that work in art, music and design departments. It is an independent studio based in Pune, India.The studio mainly focuses on developing IPs for mobile and PC. They also co-work and publish other indie projects on iOS and android. Ankush Madad, Siddhesh, Saurabh Bhavsar, Sujeet Kumar are the key members of the team. Animation Xpress spoke to the Co Founder of Dropout Games Ankush Madad, who told us in details about his team, latest plans and the future of gaming industry.
Description about Dropout games and key members.
The core team juggles from one role to another and have a minor role to play in different aspects but primarily Sujeet, my co-founder handles the development taking care of developing in-house games from the scratch. He has led the development for all our in-house projects so far.We were eventually joined by Saurabh during Blyss’ development. The studio was in a bad shape at the time and him joining turned things around for us. He shaped a technically strong game into a beautiful one. He’s currently leading the art for our in-house projects. Siddhesh is the third member who leads the game design for all in-house projects as well as well some of the 3rd party collaborations. He was the mind behind Blyss and is solely responsible for most of the relaxing gaming experience Blyss has managed to provide millions of people globally.And finally talking about myself. Well, I fill the gaps wherever necessary. I handle the external things such as PR, marketing and business side of things.
What are the skill sets of your team mates?
All four of us have vibrant set of skills that allow us to switch role if needed. There are instances when we’ve had to do numerous things that don’t necessarily associate with our backgrounds. Sujeet was responsible for the entire art of our game UNWYND as well as parts of Blyss’ UI and theme artwork. Siddhesh has had to work on 3D softwares making assets for one of the projects when Saurabh broke his drawing hand last year during Blyss’ development, me not liking our previous website and deciding to code it from scratch in HTML. There have been many roles where we’ve had to fill into each other’s shoes. It has made things difficult things in past but it has also made us appreciate each other’s work knowing how difficult it is to be good in each aspect. It is one of the primary reasons why we’ve stuck around and thrived in this ecosystem where a lot of developers fade away quickly. Our games have had a good amount of success critically but we’ve not yet struck gold when it comes to commercial success. But at our current pace,even that dream is not so distant anymore.
What are your upcoming ventures next by Dropout Games, give details?
Since Blyss’ launch we’ve been updating Blyss from time to time, working on in-house games and collaborating with numerous devs on different projects. Our recent game Neo Angle launched on iOS last month and we are bringing it soon to Steam and Android. Neo Angle was made in association with Belarus based indie dev Yan Sokalau. Apart from that we recently finished conducting beta for our upcoming puzzle game Wayout. It is developed by Ukrainian developer Konstructors and will be published by us for iOS and Android. We’re also working with some very talented Indian teams including Chennai based Weloadin Studio, a super talented indie duo working on Play God, which was recently nominated for Nasscom’s NGF awards in “Upcoming Game of the Year” category alongside Blyss in “Indie Game of the Year” category. Currently, we have six games in pipeline and more in discussion. We are trying our best to overwork ourselves to death with 16 plus hours work schedules, tackling multiple projects, making interesting games in process and enjoying every moment of it. We only see ourselves going forward from here doing more collaboration with both Indian as well as international developers.
Your take on gaming industry right now.
Game industry as always is going through a shift. While physical sales of games is declining, the digital sales are picking up. There is a big shift toward micro-transactions and E-Sports among the big AAA studios that traditionally proffered 60$ paid games and avoided the Free-To-Play market for long. Real-Time multiplayer games are thriving both on PC, consoles as well as mobile. Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds’ humongous success on Steam is definitely a proof of that. It recently crossed the 10 million sales mark on steam and 1 million concurrent player mark previously held by Dota 2 on Steam. There is a definitely a big shift in PC and console industry and it’ll be interesting to see where the industry heads in those segments.
What do you think about the mobile and AR market?
As for mobile side of things, pretty much everyone is aware that mobile market is grossing more than PC and console. It’ll only grow from this point forward. AR is the new “hot” thing with Apple promoting the ARKit with iOS11. AR will definitely have a crucial role to play on mobile, perhaps not on the gaming side of things but in other segments. As soon as I updated my iPhone to iOS 11 yesterday, I added a bunch of AR games and apps and played around. One particular app that was fun and pretty useful was Asher Vollmer’s Housecraft. I can definitely see AR succeeding in architecture and other fields.
What do you think will be the gaming industry trends in 2018?
From Indian gaming industry’s perspective, 2018 looks really interesting. Studios are finding large scale success both locally and internationally. On one side of the spectrum we see games like Star Chef going strong globally, Nazara aiming for a 1000 crores IPO and on the other side of the spectrum we see games like Asura finding audiences all the way in Japan and new indie studios like Nodding Heads Games attempting a game like Raji, which looks beautiful. There has been this constant mindset in the industry for years where companies are racing towards monetary success and larger focus is on making money off sub-par games. Everybody attempting a version of Teen Patti chasing after Moonfrog’s and Octro’s success in these past couple years is a good example of this scenario. While few companies succeeded in repeating that success, most failed. Indian gaming industry will evolve and grow only when people starting taking creative risks while maintaining their commercial focus. I personally believe that for every Clash of Clans, there should ideally be a Monument Valley. Both sides have their own charm and only if we embrace both sides will we be able to grow as a critically and commercially successful industry.