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Sony Pursuing Cheap Indian Game Development

by Chris Faylor, Aug 05, 2008 2:31pm PDT
Related Topics – PlayStation 3, Sony, PlayStation 2

In an effort to reduce game development costs, PlayStation maker Sony Computer Entertainment intends to bolster its development efforts in India--a popular choice for outsourced labor.

If successful, the initiative could break even in three years and lead to a dedicated Indian development facility, SCE country manager Atindriya Bose told news site DNA.

Using technology and talent from other SCE branches, such as SingStar and Getaway veterans London Studio, Sony will be coaching local programmers in game development and loaning out development hardware.

Four Indian developers have been tasked with five projects thus far. Sony hopes the effort will help lower game costs, with an 18-month PlayStation 2 game currently budgeted between $3-5 million while a PlayStation 3 title is estimated at $20-30 million.

"The future of the Indian game development market will depend on the quality of the game developers who are starting at a zero base," Bose noted.


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Comments

16 Threads | 52 Comments
  • #52
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    By: freakynipples69 This person is cool! x
    Reply
    This is an old article, but I had to come back and share some knowledge that I've just learned.

    While many companies outsource their customer service/tech call centers to India, this is going to be a huge mistake. India does have several of thousand universities, yet the top talent pool in India doesn't come close to America. In fact, there are barely 20 universities in India that are comparable to American universities in terms of quality of education and grad output.

    So, sure, it's going to be cheap game development, and it's going to be horrible. Game development isn't something you can be mediocre in and still turn out a decent product.
    Aug 06, 2008 6:52pm PDT
  • #6
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    By: kinnoch x
    Reply
    The company I work for deals with our outsourcing very well it seems. We have a group of developers in Silicon Valley (i'm one of them), then we have a team of developers over in China. Projects are generally split up, so there isn't too many dependencies between which projects each location works on. They also have their own set of managers. Its basically operated like we are here, except they are in china. Our QA is also split accordingly, we have QA in China and here in the US. The projects done in China are QA'd by china. Some of our groups also have QA in India, but I haven't had to interface with them yet. It can be a pain in the ass when you have to coordinate across seas though :)
    Aug 05, 2008 2:49pm PDT