Why can‘t India make a decent video game?

After playing through a bit of Trine’s Ra.One last week, I can’t seem to shake the feeling that India can’t churn out decent video games. We have the money, we have the manpower, Lord knows we have the manpower, but there’s one crucial element I feel we lack and that’s creativity. If you look at both the movie as well as the Indian television industry, half of it (or even more) is full of blatant knock offs while the other half is full of formulaic crap that’s being churned out since the dawn of time. While the rest of the world dabbles with a plethora of genres and concepts, Indians are content with their sas- bahu crap, reality TV or painful slapstick humour that’s as funny as a kick in the family jewels. Unfortunately this lack of creativity and need to copy the West has trickled down to India’s gaming industry as well. Most of the big budget and highly publicised Indian games released till date have tried to emulate certain high profile Western games and failed miserably. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that in India, gaming is not subtle. It’s supposed to be loud, in-your-face and of course immature. Shahrukh Khan while talking about Ra.One was as excited as an eight year old tweaking off caffeine and while some may find that endearing, it’s kind of awkward to see Indians haven’t fully comprehended the fact that gaming isn’t for children anymore. Even at events like E3, you’ll see some producer forcing enthusiasm or pasty white people dancing real awkward to a motion controlled dancing game but that’s balanced out to a certain extent when actual games take centre stage. Coming back to Ra.One, I actually went through the game’s press release and there were probably all of five words (or even less) on the actual game itself. What genre does it belong to? What can you expect from the game? Why should I even bother with it in the first place? Nothing was explained to me except for the fact that Shahrukh Khan and Sony were really excited to make a game. Well, if Shahrukh Khan’s excited, it’s bound to be good right? Why didn’t you say so in the first place?It turns out SRK was involved in the production of this game at every step and to quote him, “I was extremely happy with the interactions with SCEE team in developing the game. They understood the vision I had for Ra.One”. So I don’t understand who dropped the ball here. Was his concept a broken one to begin with, was it so ambitious that Trine Studios just couldn’t execute his vision or did Trine release an unfinished product because they were under tremendous pressure to release the game on time? And while I’m sure a ton of money must have been spent on this game, it boggles my mind why a little more wasn’t spent on quality testing. 

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