Finance Minister Sitharaman had made an announcement during her Budget 2022 speech on 1 February that India’s creative industries have been waiting for a long time. Finance Minister announced the setting up of an Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming, and Comics [AV GC] promotion task force while presenting the Union Budget.
“An AV GC promotion task force, with all stakeholders, will be set up to recommend ways to realize this and build domestic capacity for serving our markets and the global demand,” said Finance Minister.
The larger idea behind this announcement is to give a fillip to youth employment potential in this sector. The announcement has garnered a mostly positive response from industry players.
Mannish Agarwal, CEO of Mumbai-based mobile gaming and entertainment company Zara Technologies, said that the task force would facilitate employment for the youth. India presently commands around 10 percent of the global AV GC market, and has the potential to reach 20 to 25 percent by 2027,
Gaming, a growing sector in India
According to a Red seer report done with Luminal, India’s gaming market is expected to jump from $2.2 billion in value in 2021 to $7 billion by 2026. Also, India’s gamer base is expected to touch 700 million by 2025. The report also found that gaming company studios increased from just 25 in 2015 to over 500 in 2021. Speaking to First post, Salon Senegal, general partner, said that the taskforce was a step in the right direction. “Task forces are useful for achieving awareness and education as well as recommending actions to policymakers. It can result in outcomes such as increased employment in the sector, clarity on regulations, and private sector funding attracting more domestic and global venture capital funds,” said Senegal.
Back in December 2020, Minister for Information and Broadcasting Prakash Javadekar called AV GC a sunrise sector. He also announced that the government was forming a Center of Excellence [COE] in partnership with IIT Bombay, where courses in the AV GC sector would be provided. The Karnataka government has also launched an AV GC Center of Excellence in Bengaluru.
When asked about the challenges facing the task force when it comes to the gaming industry, Senegal outlined four aspects that needed immediate attention to ensure the task force led to policy outcomes.
- Talent development: Creation of Centers of Excellence encourages institutes to come up with video game development courses. This has to be a constant endeavor to encourage youth to take up game tech and game design as a mainstream career option.
- Financing: This includes a combination of government and private sector financing.
- Access to global best practices: Having worked in the gaming sector for over a decade, Senegal has seen the benefits of knowledge exchange between industries in different geographies. According to her, India has a thriving deep tech and animation sector, but there is still a lot to learn when it comes to best practices in areas like data science, UI/UX design, and there is immense potential for collaboration.
- Building from India for the world: “The last two years have been exciting, and Indian companies are seizing the global landscape in the B2B, SaaS, and edtech space. We should be leading from the front when it comes to gaming culture and entertainment as well,” noted Senegal.
Another area where Senegal felt the task force could help was in popularizing Indian gaming events. “Right now, a lot of gaming focused events such as the India GDC are managed by game developers and enthusiasts. There is immense scope to make it a global gaming event.” According to Pavan Panda, co-founder of Win ZO, the gaming industry has the potential to become a trillion-dollar industry. Win ZO has announced a $20 Mn Game Developer's Fund with an aim to provide a platform to the best minds to disrupt this emerging global gaming industry. One of the major roadblocks when it comes to the sector is the talent. According to Sitharamana, All India Council for Technical Education [AI CTE], which regulates technical education in India, will be one of the stakeholders on the educational front, and will also seek recommendations from industry bodies. Aishwarya Shivakumarna, CEO, Odds Finance, a decentralized finance trading platform, told First post that there needed to be regulatory clarity in the sector. “The task force should assess the sector and propose legislation to mainstream it in India. It should establish parameters for monetizing the business in order to keep illicit activity at bay,” said Shivakumarna.
Last year, many states in India had banned online fantasy sports apps. Unless there is a clear categorization of gaming apps, this issue will keep cropping up, notes Senegal. “When the government says they are going to ban real-money games, it has an impact on all online gaming it is important to have some regulatory clarity,” she said.
Getting meta?
Unless you have been living under a rock, there is no way you have not heard of the term metaverse. Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his company to Meta Platforms Inc. According to Matthew Bell, a venture capitalist who has also penned 'The Metaverse Primer,' The Metaverse is an expansive network of persistent, real-time rendered 3D worlds and simulations that support continuity of identity, objects, history, payments, and entitlements, and can be experienced synchronously by an effectively unlimited number of users, each with an individual sense of presence. A major segment of the metaverse lies in creating virtual worlds which make users feel as close to reality as possible. Disciplines which this touches on encompass animation, visual effects, and gaming apart from the hardware implements such as augmented reality [AR] or virtual reality [VR] glasses.
According to media and entertainment sector leader at Deloitte India, the AV GC task force can help create close to 20 lakh jobs according to Deloitte projections. These are critical skills for growth of the metaverse, and India is poised to take advantage of this ecosystem. But is a future-looking technology sector such as the metaverse really relevant for the Indian market yet? Senegal feels the task force should have short-, medium-, and long-term goals.
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