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Time of India
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Talent winning out at Indian gaming cos as focus shifts to high-end titles
As Indian gaming studios increasingly develop advanced intellectual properties with large budgets, strong visual design and complex gameplay mechanics, the demand for specialised talent is rising sharply. According to staffing firm TeamLease Digital, India's gaming industry has 50,000-60,000 open positions across fresher and experienced roles. Roles such as experienced gameplay engineers, backend developers, principal animators, 3D artists and environment designers are in demand, according to industry executives and studio founders. The industry now employs around 130,000 people, compared with 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 (especially with skills in Unity or Unreal platforms), backend engineers for multiplayer games, 3D artists, animators and game designers. Bengaluru-based gaming startup LightFury Games, which has a team of around 80, is hiring for roles across animation, game art, backend infrastructure and gameplay engineering, said cofounder Anurag Banerjee. 'We need to hire another 30-40 people at least… What we look for is talent that we can nurture and train to that degree that they can now start building AAA titles ,' Banerjee told ET. In gaming parlance, an AAA rating refers to a 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 tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in development budgets. Last year, the studio raised $8.5 million from Blume Ventures, Mixi and Gemba Capital, with Cred founder Kunal Shah and Unacademy CEO Gaurav Munjal also participating in the funding. It recently unveiled its first title, E-Cricket, a big-budget 'AAA' game being developed in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), slated for launch in 2026. Pune-based SuperGaming, currently expanding its team for its flagship Indus Battle Royale game, said 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 takes 10 years to be successful and to make a video game great, you have to assemble 20 different kinds of teams including engineering, narrators, art, music, servers, marketing. It is a task of complex coordination, and you can do it only with experience,' said founder and CEO Roby John.
Time of India
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Talent winning out at Indian gaming companies as focus shifts to high-end titles
As Indian gaming studios double down on building ambitious, homegrown IPs—with bigger budgets, slicker visuals, and more intricate gameplay—the race for specialised talent is heating up. India's gaming industry is estimated to have 50,000–60,000 open roles across various experience levels, according to staffing firm TeamLease Digital. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads As Indian gaming studios increasingly develop advanced intellectual properties with large budgets, strong visual design and complex gameplay mechanics, the demand for specialised talent is rising sharply. According to staffing firm TeamLease Digital, India's gaming industry has 50,000-60,000 open positions across fresher and experienced such as experienced gameplay engineers, backend developers, principal animators, 3D artists and environment designers are in demand, according to industry executives and studio industry now employs around 130,000 people, compared with 50,000 in 2022.'The Indian gaming industry is hiring a combination of technical and creative skill sets,' said TeamLease Digital chief executive Neeti roles in demand include game developers (especially with skills in Unity or Unreal platforms), backend engineers for multiplayer games, 3D artists, animators and game gaming startup LightFury Games, which has a team of around 80, is hiring for roles across animation, game art, backend infrastructure and gameplay engineering, said cofounder Anurag Banerjee.'We need to hire another 30-40 people at least… What we look for is talent that we can nurture and train to that degree that they can now start building AAA titles ,' Banerjee told gaming parlance, an AAA rating refers to a 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 tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in development year, the studio raised $8.5 million from Blume Ventures, Mixi and Gemba Capital, with Cred founder Kunal Shah and Unacademy CEO Gaurav Munjal also participating in the funding. It recently unveiled its first title, E-Cricket, a big-budget 'AAA' game being developed in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), slated for launch in SuperGaming, currently expanding its team for its flagship Indus Battle Royale game, said 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 takes 10 years to be successful and to make a video game great, you have to assemble 20 different kinds of teams including engineering, narrators, art, music, servers, marketing. It is a task of complex coordination, and you can do it only with experience,' said founder and CEO Roby company has hired over 25 professionals who previously worked at global studios like Ubisoft, indicating a trend of reverse brain drain , where experienced talent is returning to India to build homegrown address local talent gaps, SuperGaming has also tapped into global hiring. The company employs full-time international staffers through its Singapore-based entity, SuperGaming Pte Ltd, said approach contrasts with other studios that often rely on freelance talent to fill immediate too, has focused on bringing back experienced Indian professionals who've worked on global AAA titles, and is also hiring internationally for some niche roles, said cofounder Tina shift is being driven by multiple forces including rising investor interest in gaming startups, the emergence of high-end mobile-first formats, and easier access to global development tools and cloud growing optimism, scaling a game studio remains a long and capital-intensive top-tier talent, especially professionals with experience in console or PC gaming, continues to be a major casual games, building mid-core or AAA titles typically demands years of sustained investment before any meaningful returns are realised.'A lot of the talent that (in India) is experienced in casual games, and in simulation-based games. Also, there's product and live operations talent available for mobile games,' said Anuj Tandon, partner at Bitkraft Ventures. 'But what's largely missing from India is the experience in certain genres, game designers and very specific technical talent. There's a lot of young, fresh talent, but the experience level is missing.'At the same time, artificial intelligence is starting to play a key role in reducing development timelines and production costs. Studios are beginning to integrate AI tools to create smarter non-player characters (NPCs), generate realistic and dynamic game environments, personalise gameplay, enhance graphics and visual effects, and streamline overall development processes.'If you're not using AI, you're living under a rock. It has impacted game development timelines and efficiency. Has it replaced people? Absolutely not. But it has made people more efficient, and studios are adopting it in smarter, more cost-effective ways,' said Tandon of Bitkraft Ventures. 'Three to five years down the line, when AI is mainstream and we have a stronger talent pool and core skills, it's going to be very transformative for emerging markets like India.'However, studios caution that while AI enhances efficiency, the quality of a game still hinges on the creativity and collaboration of skilled to Avichal Singh, cofounder of Nodding Heads Games, AI is just another tool in a developer's toolkit and the core principles of what makes a great game remain unchanged.'It can help you get there faster, or even help you check for your idea, whether it's valid or not, faster. But beyond that, you will still need those skill sets, which are required to make video games,' he said.
Economic Times
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Economic Times
Talent winning out at Indian gaming companies as focus shifts to high-end titles
ETtech As Indian gaming studios increasingly develop advanced intellectual properties with large budgets, strong visual design and complex gameplay mechanics, the demand for specialised talent is rising sharply. According to staffing firm TeamLease Digital, India's gaming industry has 50,000-60,000 open positions across fresher and experienced such as experienced gameplay engineers, backend developers, principal animators, 3D artists and environment designers are in demand, according to industry executives and studio founders. The industry now employs around 130,000 people, compared with 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 (especially with skills in Unity or Unreal platforms), backend engineers for multiplayer games, 3D artists, animators and game designers. Bengaluru-based gaming startup LightFury Games, which has a team of around 80, is hiring for roles across animation, game art, backend infrastructure and gameplay engineering, said cofounder Anurag Banerjee. 'We need to hire another 30-40 people at least… What we look for is talent that we can nurture and train to that degree that they can now start building AAA titles,' Banerjee told ET. In gaming parlance, an AAA rating refers to a 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 tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in development year, the studio raised $8.5 million from Blume Ventures, Mixi and Gemba Capital, with Cred founder Kunal Shah and Unacademy CEO Gaurav Munjal also participating in the funding. It recently unveiled its first title, E-Cricket, a big-budget 'AAA' game being developed in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), slated for launch in SuperGaming, currently expanding its team for its flagship Indus Battle Royale game, said 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 takes 10 years to be successful and to make a video game great, you have to assemble 20 different kinds of teams including engineering, narrators, art, music, servers, marketing. It is a task of complex coordination, and you can do it only with experience,' said founder and CEO Roby John. The company has hired over 25 professionals who previously worked at global studios like Ubisoft, indicating a trend of reverse brain drain, where experienced talent is returning to India to build homegrown IPs. To address local talent gaps, SuperGaming has also tapped into global hiring. The company employs full-time international staffers through its Singapore-based entity, SuperGaming Pte Ltd, said approach contrasts with other studios that often rely on freelance talent to fill immediate too, has focused on bringing back experienced Indian professionals who've worked on global AAA titles, and is also hiring internationally for some niche roles, said cofounder Tina shift is being driven by multiple forces including rising investor interest in gaming startups, the emergence of high-end mobile-first formats, and easier access to global development tools and cloud infrastructure. Long road Despite growing optimism, scaling a game studio remains a long and capital-intensive top-tier talent, especially professionals with experience in console or PC gaming, continues to be a major casual games, building mid-core or AAA titles typically demands years of sustained investment before any meaningful returns are realised.'A lot of the talent that (in India) is experienced in casual games, and in simulation-based games. Also, there's product and live operations talent available for mobile games,' said Anuj Tandon, partner at Bitkraft Ventures. 'But what's largely missing from India is the experience in certain genres, game designers and very specific technical talent. There's a lot of young, fresh talent, but the experience level is missing.' AI's growing role At the same time, artificial intelligence is starting to play a key role in reducing development timelines and production costs. Studios are beginning to integrate AI tools to create smarter non-player characters (NPCs), generate realistic and dynamic game environments, personalise gameplay, enhance graphics and visual effects, and streamline overall development processes. 'If you're not using AI, you're living under a rock. It has impacted game development timelines and efficiency. Has it replaced people? Absolutely not. But it has made people more efficient, and studios are adopting it in smarter, more cost-effective ways,' said Tandon of Bitkraft Ventures. 'Three to five years down the line, when AI is mainstream and we have a stronger talent pool and core skills, it's going to be very transformative for emerging markets like India.' However, studios caution that while AI enhances efficiency, the quality of a game still hinges on the creativity and collaboration of skilled to Avichal Singh, cofounder of Nodding Heads Games, AI is just another tool in a developer's toolkit and the core principles of what makes a great game remain unchanged.'It can help you get there faster, or even help you check for your idea, whether it's valid or not, faster. But beyond that, you will still need those skill sets, which are required to make video games,' he said. Elevate your knowledge and leadership skills at a cost cheaper than your daily tea. Apple has a new Indian-American COO. What it needs might be a new CEO. Central banks existential crisis — between alchemy and algorithm What if Tata Motors buys Iveco's truck unit? Will it propel or drag like JLR? Paid less than plumbers? The real story of freshers' salaries at Infy, TCS. 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Time of India
15-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Hiring paradox AI both hurts and helps
Academy Empower your mind, elevate your skills Widespread use of AI-driven tools by candidates is creating problems for recruiters. But there are some plus points too. Until a couple of years ago, the biggest hurdle for a job seeker was to get past the application tracking system (ATS), a bot that is used for filtering applications, to get shortlisted for a desired position. This meant getting the error free resume with right keywords and the advent of generative artificial intelligence and proliferation of new age online tools, all of this can be done in a matter of minutes. This is great news for candidates, but not so much for recruiters, who are now dealing with a deluge of resumes for roles. While some companies are deploying AI tools, and stringent assessments for filtering candidates, smaller firms are looking at increasing the in-person interaction to hire the right Sharma, CEO, TeamLease Digital said that close to 25-30% of the resumes are now made using AI, compared to 8% last year, and the numbers are Karanth, cofounder, Xpheno, shared that as much as 50% of CVs are written by ChatGPT, matching with the job descriptions. He pointed out that as a result the firm is seeing 25% increase in the number of CVs they receive for any job Dongrie, Partner and Leader-Workforce Transformation, PwC India, said, 'ATS systems have been using technology to filter candidates even before the advent of widespread AI tools. With AI-enabled resume crafting, the fitment matching has become more accurate. This has led to an increase in the number of applicants immediately following a job posting.'An executive with a Bengaluru-based consulting firm told ET on the condition of anonymity that this has increased the time taken to hire people as shortlisted candidates after the initial filtering process has increased, requiring more human intervention, he also pointed out the need for predictive analytics and sophisticated tools based on historical data to hire candidates as Chemmankotil, Country Manager, Adecco India, said that apart from crafting polished resumes, candidates are also simulating interview responses making it challenging for recruiters to assess their capabilities, making traditional screening methods insufficient.'Recruiters now require deeper subject-matter expertise and more sophisticated tools to evaluate candidates effectively. To address this, many organisations have adopted AI-powered platforms capable of analyzing behavioral cues during virtual interviews, such as detecting lip-syncing or external prompting, to ensure the integrity of the hiring process. PWC's Dongrie said that for organisations with limited and smaller hiring volumes, the dependency for filtering candidates primarily is at in-person interview stage.'However, for organisations with high-volume hiring such as retail banking, insurance, pharma-sales, the focus has shifted towards implementing stringent assessments for filtering candidates prior to interviews. Focus is now more on technical assessments along with existing psychometric and behavioural profiling exercises,' he Karanth said that they are using AI to filter the top 50 out of 200 resumes received, and screen further depending on their pool till they reach 5-10 candidates. 'As of now, only guarding is through human intervention. You cannot depend on AI as of now in this regard because that might not lead to a fruitful outcome. For more senior roles, around 70-75% of the applications are through references,' he Bajaj, Fractal-Hiring, Lead Manager, said that they have evolved their hiring process to include technical assessments, case studies, and Proctored LIVE interviewing, which use AI to detect eye /hand the challenges of using AI in hiring still Sharma said that AI hallucination and bias are still concerns. 'The biggest challenge this poses is making sure that it doesn't have the same bias that a human recruiter would have,' she AI can cover the blind spots, it is getting harder to differentiate between an AI-generated video and a real video of a candidate. 'We need to make sure that our recruiters are skilled enough to identify this difference; otherwise, we would fall flat in the market. The only solution to this is the upgradation of data sets, proper and regular monitoring, and governance,' she said that while AI helps with productivity and improve recruitment processes, its inherent flaws makes it harder to rely on them completely. This includes concerns around bias and fairness and the need for platforms that can be integrated into current systems to make it efficient.
Time of India
08-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Smarter AI needs smarter humans
Academy Empower your mind, elevate your skills ETtech As AI model intelligence peaks, its reliance on complex, human-curated data is only started with microtasks such as transcribing audio files, marking tick boxes, translating language and labelling objects in images. Now, data annotators are correcting software code, checking financial statements and analysing diagnostic reports, as the training needs of artificial intelligence models become more annotation, or simply data labelling, is the most crucial and foundational step for building high-quality datasets to train AI models, enhance accuracy, curtail hallucinations and build safety guardrails against inappropriate or harmful content. And India is fast emerging as a hub for data annotation services with flexible workers, mid-tier business analysts and even skilled data engineers, auditors, radiologists, lawyers, etc., contributing to building high-quality datasets.'Honestly, I think we need to retire the term 'data labelling',' says Jonathan Siddharth, founder of Palo Alto-based talent and AI tools company Turing . 'It's like calling a smartphone a 'portable telephone'.''What we're doing now is fundamentally different. We're not tagging cats and dogs; we're orchestrating teams of Olympiad-level talent to solve highly complex problems across industries,' he said. AI models have got so smart that sometimes you need a physicist, a software engineer, and a data scientist working together just to generate data that challenges them, he Arora, founder and CEO of early-stage startup Macgence, said his company is focussing on curating custom datasets for AI/ML models and agents. 'Businesses now have custom data sourcing needs which capture linguistic and cultural nuances. These datasets are not available on open libraries like Hugging Face,' he global market for data annotation is likely to expand from about $6.5 billion in 2025 to nearly $20 billion by 2030, growing at about 25–30% each year, according to staffing firm TeamLease Digital . In India, the market was worth $80 million in 2023 and is expected to reach nearly $500 million by 2030, growing at almost 30% each year, it this has reflected in the growth of the workforce in this segment from 20,000 in 2022 to 70,000 currently. These include annotators, quality controllers and project managers, who work in startups, IT services and crowdsourcing platforms.'Data annotation has grown more complex with the rise of LLMs, leading to the emergence of specialised, higher-paying roles for domain-specific tasks,' said Kapil Joshi, CEO – Quess IT Staffing, adding that some of its clients have grown 50% year-on-year. With this growth, the sector will soon witness a talent scarcity, said TeamLease Digital CEO Neeti Sharma. 'By 2026, the industry could face a shortage of 40–50% in skilled professionals.''As models evolve, data demands will shift — certain types of data may require lower volumes but others will rapidly expand,' said Ryan Kolln, CEO of Appen, a Washington-based company which has delivered over 15,000 AI data projects , including LLM fine-tuning, evaluation, red teaming, and multimodal annotation. 'A good example of this is LLM work, where elementary math question data is reducing, but data is still growing in demand for more complex STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) problems,' he sector's importance is underscored by Meta's recent $14.3 billion deal to acquire a 49% stake in Scale AI, valuing the data company at $29 billion. This has opened a multi-million opportunity for global companies like Turing and Appen as tech giants OpenAI, Google, Microsoft have reportedly terminated their contracts with Scale. Turing's Siddharth said the deal validates that 'data is as strategic as compute in the race to AGI (artificial general intelligence), and signals that the scale of investment here will rival or even exceed billions annually across frontier labs'. In the past weeks, Turing has added potential contracts worth $50 million, the Time companies have long depended on India's talent and scale for servicing global projects. 'The depth of technical expertise — from IIT grads to domain-specific PhDs in math, physics and engineering — is extraordinary. And it's evolving in sync with what AI needs: not just coding talent, but frontier minds who can help push the limits of reasoning, multimodality and agentic workflows,' said Siddharth of Turing, whose 40% workforce is based in added that data labs need the best minds to compete, 'not just recycle the same talent pool in Silicon Valley. When a physicist in Bengaluru helps train a model that might cure diseases, or an engineer in Pune improves an AI that could revolutionise education, that's the democratisation of both intelligence and opportunity'.Appen's Kolln pointed out that logical thinking and problem-solving skills are strong in the Indian education system given the strong emphasis on mathematics and science. The company has a pool of 50,000 contributors from founder and CEO of Indika AI, said: 'Over the past three years, we've seen strong global demand for multilingual, domain-specific data infrastructure which translated into 5X top line growth for us.' The company's freelance platform, Flexibench, has 70,000 registered contributors, 5%-10% of whom are working actively at any given time, he added.
