New Delhi: Indian gaming studios are increasingly developing advanced intellectual properties with bigger budgets, and with compact visual design and complex gameplay mechanics, the demand for specialised talent is rising sharply and efficiently. From some sources, staffing firm TeamLease Digital, India’s gaming industry has 50,000 to 60,000 open positions across fresher to experienced roles.
Roles such as experienced gameplay engineers, backend developers, principal animators, 3D artists and environment designers are in demand, and some sources also stated that industry executives and studio founders are. The industry now employs around 130,000 people, compared to the 50,000 in 2022.
The Indian gaming industry is hiring a combination of technical and creative skill sets, said TeamLease Digital Chief Executive Neeti Sharma. Key roles in demand include game developers, backend engineers for multiplayer games, 3D artists, animators and game designers. There is a Bengaluru-based gaming startup LightFury Games, which has a team of around 80. They are hiring for roles across animation, game art, backend infrastructure and gameplay engineering.
They wanted to hire at least 30 to 40 more people. What they look for is talent that they can nurture and train to that degree that they can now start building AAA titles. In gaming parlance, an AAA rating refers to classification given to big-budget, high-profile video games developed and published by major studios. It is not an official rating, but an industry term. AAA games often have development budgets of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
Last year, this studio raised $8.5 million from Blume Ventures, Mixi and Gemba Capital, with the Cred founder Kunal Shah and Unacademy CEO Gaurav Munjal also participating in the funding. It has recently unveiled its first title, E-Cricket, a big-budget AAA game being developed in collaboration with Amazon Web Services, with a 2026 launch slated.
Pune-based SuperGaming, currently expanding its team for its flagship Indus Battle Royal game, said that while developers can earn through casual games like Teen Patti or Ludo, the challenge lies in finding talent motivated to build high-quality, technically complex titles. A good gaming studio typically takes 10 years to achieve success and create a great video game. They have to assemble 0 different kinds of teams, including engineering, narrators, art, music, servers, and marketing. It is a task of complex coordination, and they can do it with only experience.
