What in your opinion is the biggest bottleneck in India for the success of game development studios? Infrastructure or skill?
I doubt either of these are a factor. I have seen many small teams (2-5 resources) come up with great products in the Bay area. So skill can be acquired, and it is progressively taking less and less time to do so.
In terms of infrastructure, AWS Cloud services helps build for the scale, and that shouldn’t be a challenge for anyone at all.
I think India has no lack of a creative & skilled workforce in the gaming & industry. I think the key constraint is the exposure to the business side of Gaming, and the lack of data driven decision making. I can think of only one or two studios that actually do significant category analysis before planning products.
Of course in the Indie scene, most Indian game developers and small game studios cannot afford to build extensive business, design or server engineering teams. What they now need to see is that they cannot survive if their games don’t feature social and multiplayer game play. PlayBlazer plans to be the bridge that enables even a single game developer to configure a complete game server with support for complex game logic practically out of the box in a matter of minutes.
Isn’t last mile bandwidth a challenge for the adoption of cloud infrastructure in India?
Not really. Last mile bandwidth has improved dramatically over the past 5 years, and besides it wouldn’t be a constraint for Cloud Infrastructure alone, it would equally affect locally hosted infrastructure too.
I think the decision to build in the cloud is driven by a different set of factors. These are related to decisions like whether you build infrastructure as a CAPEX or OPEX model – for more mature companies and products, own infrastructure probably may turn out cheaper – only if they have the CAPEX budgets which every good company large or small will need to consider it carefully as tying down precious capital to own hardware infrastructure is not the best use for fund for growing your business. Also, where scale or monetization is not well known, it is best to adopt cloud infrastructure, as it gives you the lowest TCO in the short & medium terms, while enabling you with the business agility immediately that has a long term positive effect.
We have been very happy with low latency and fast performance in accessing the resources of the AWS Cloud services regardless of which AWS Regions we use.
