Mayank Grover

India’s next Global export could be Games! We’ve exported IT services. We’ve exported films. We’ve exported cricketing legends. It’s time to add something new to that list, Games. India is home to some of the world’s most creative minds, skilled engineers and rich storytelling traditions. Yet for decades, our gaming industry has been seen through one lens: - Mobile first. - Outsourcing heavy. - Not a serious contender in the premium PC & console space. But that’s changing. Quietly, teams across the country are building world-class games, not just for India, but for global players. With the right ecosystem, in a few more years these games can stand shoulder to shoulder with titles from Japan, the US and Europe. Why is now the moment? ✅ Global demand for diverse stories is at an all-time high. ✅ India’s cost advantage means bigger games can be built for less. ✅ The talent pool here is expanding, from artists to engineers to designers. ✅ We now have the ability to publish and market worldwide, without borders. If IT and cinema put India on the map, games can make us a permanent fixture in the world’s living rooms. We’re not talking about “Make in India” just for the sake of it. We’re talking about Make in India, play everywhere and making it one of our next big cultural and economic exports. The next global hit game could have been born right here in Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore or Hyderabad. And if we get this right, it won’t be the last. Let me know what you think about this in the comment section below 👇 #gamingindustry #makeinIndia #PCgaming #consolegaming #Indiangaming #globalgaming #storytelling

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Your next job offer might double your salary and destroy your career at the same time. A student from Clan-14 messaged me yesterday about an offer he'd received: 50% salary hike, Unreal Engine + AI projects — exactly the kind of work he dreamed of doing. The perfect move on paper. He'd been at a major game studio for 3 years, worked on a Warner Bros mobile title, and recently doubled down on Unreal. The new offer aligned perfectly with where the industry is headed. To make the decision easier, his current studio wasn't even making games anymore. They were quietly shifting devs to C++ roles for video streaming platforms. Meanwhile, the new opportunity was at a smaller, unproven studio betting big on simulation tech. My answer was the opposite of what he wanted to hear.   A 50% hike means absolutely NOTHING if the company doesn't survive the next 6 months. And let me be clear — I'm not saying big studios and AAA companies mean job safety. Hell, the last two years have taught us how unstable even the biggest names can become. There have been mass layoffs everywhere. What matters is asking the RIGHT questions when switching jobs. For small/mid-sized studios, it's about financial runway and investor commitment. For big studios, I would've advised checking the certainty of the specific game project and its position in the company's priority stack. I've seen this movie before. Engineers chase the money, join unstable studios, and end up job hunting again before their signing bonus clears. The market is brutal right now. My advice was simple: "Figure out the company's financial health before you switch. The rest looks solid." This is what nobody tells you about career growth — It's not about jumping at every salary bump. It's about finding stable (for lack of words) or relatively better ground to build compound skills that last years, if not decades. What's one career decision you made that seemed risky but paid off? Comment below, I'm curious. #gamedev #jobs #internship #career #gaming

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India’s gaming ecosystem is booming and not just in obvious ways. Just before the RMG and fantasy gaming ban, the Indian online gaming market had grown 23% year-on-year in FY24, touching $3.8 billion and was projected to reach $9.2 billion by FY29 which is a 5-year CAGR of nearly 20%. Of course, a major chunk of that revenue came from Real Money Gaming and Fantasy platforms, which dominated the charts at the time. But the ban has quietly triggered a positive shift, the industry’s focus is now moving toward pure-play games: original titles, console and PC development, and IP-led projects. More studios are being formed, more games are being made and more investment is flowing into game creation rather than game betting. Here are some numbers worth taking seriously: ✔️ India is home to 600+ million gamers (~20% of global gamers) as of recent data. ✔️ Over 11.2 billion mobile game app downloads happened in India recently. ✔️ The industry comprises nearly 1,900 gaming companies employing ~130000 professionals. ✔️ Mobile games account for roughly 90% of the Indian gaming market’s revenue, compared to ~37% in the U.S. ✔️ Demographics reveal that 44% of Indian gamers are women and 66% come from non-metro cities. This has also resulted in the inclined graph of paying consumers in Gaming. Behind these numbers lie opportunities for designers, programmers, artists, producers, QA engineers, business analysts and storytellers. If you’re thinking of a career in this space, the question isn’t whether the industry will grow it’s who will grow with it. #IndianGaming #GameDevIndia #GamingCareers #GamesIndustry #MakeGames

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Gaming Industry in India had another seismic moment today. The govt has tabled the online gaming bill - one should wait for the final language of the bill when it passes into Law but at a policy level the intent is clear. 1) Support Online Casual Games and video games 2) Promote esports 3) Ban on any app/game that does cash in and cash out. (Real Money Gaming) It is no secret that Indian gaming industry revenues are dominated by Real Money Gaming companies - this has come in when atleast 2-3 RMG companies were prepping for their IPOs which is clearly now a thing of past. Short term RMG companies that have used their balance sheet to diversify will live to fight another day. Indian free to play and casual gaming industry will get the much expected push hopefully (devil lies in the detail) but the bill clearly differentiates between different gaming classes makes me hopeful that our policy makers understand nuances of this industry well. This is obviously a short take there are just so much depth in this issue that will unravel as time goes on especially on regulating the sector and other details. #IndianGaming Image below is from the official govt X handle.

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Geat job IGPDA Its aim is to foster "the creation of original made-in-India IP, bringing Indian stories into gaming, skill-building across the animation, visual effects, gaming and comics (AVGC) value chain, and enabling India to produce globally competitive AAA titles." The industry body has been structured to bring primary members (game developers, studios, publishers, and platforms) and partners (tools and tech providers, academia and training institutions, investors and "ecosystem enablers") together to collaborate on game development.   Full article in the first comment   Tara Gaming Limited #gaming #gameindustry #theageofbhaarat

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Lighting is not just about making things visible; it is about guiding the player's eye. If you are flooding your scene with Fill Lights just to avoid dark shadows, you are killing the mood and the depth of your environment. If you want to achieve cinematic quality with proper visual hierarchy, you need to be intentional. Here is how to light for depth and storytelling: 1. Master the Warm/Cool Contrast: Stop using white light everywhere. In nature, light and shadow rarely share the same color temperature. Use warm highlights (sun) against cool shadows (skylight), or vice versa. This color separation instantly adds depth to your assets without adding a single extra light source. 2. The 70/30 Value Rule: Apply the 70/30 rule to your exposure values. Your scene should be roughly 70% shadow/mid-tone and 30% highlight (or the reverse for high-key scenes). If everything is 50% grey, the viewer doesn't know where to look. The ratio might be different based on your target, so it’s not always 70-30 3. Rim Lighting for Environment Rim lights aren't just for characters. Use backlighting on silhouettes, pillars, and props to separate them from the background especially in linear spaces where the player is going to have a single path. These techniques are just the starting point. In the Top 1% Lighting Artist Program, we dive deep into these workflows, helping artists clean up their technical debt and improve their portfolios from Week 1. Join our upcoming round from here: https://lnkd.in/d_WpMAMV #lighting #environment

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Online gaming companies A23, Games24x7, and Junglee Rummy have approached the Karnataka High Court challenging the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025. The court has scheduled the hearing for 30th August. This is a huge decision taken by these three big companies. Meanwhile, platforms like WinZO, MPL, and Dream11 stepped back and chose to leave the field even before the fight began. Mobile Premier League (MPL) Dream11 WinZO Paavan Nanda Saumya Singh Rathore Sai Srinivas Kiran G

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Making less then 5L a year on music ? This is a first is a series of shorts coming to you as part of BOBKAAST indian music industry insights ! A guide on : •⁠ ⁠why musicians need managers, •⁠ ⁠what they do vs don’t do, and •⁠ ⁠the financial reality of hiring a manager in the indian music industry. #bobkaast #musicbusinessindia #indianmusicindustry #creatoreconomy #musiclaw #artistmanagement #managers #streaming #musicindustrytips #streamingindia

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🚀 Meta’s Big Move in India’s Gaming Space! 🇮🇳🎮 Exciting news for the Indian game dev community — Meta has launched its Gaming Accelerator in India to support and scale up our next-gen gaming talent and emerging studios! 🙌 The accelerator will provide: • Funding support • Mentorship from global experts • Exposure to creator-led and AI-powered innovations • Access to Meta’s global gaming network This initiative is more than just an accelerator - it's a launchpad for Indian developers to build globally competitive games rooted in local creativity. 👉 With the rapid growth of India's gaming ecosystem, this step by Meta signals strong confidence in our game development potential, storytelling culture, and tech talent. 📈 Whether you're an indie creator, startup founder, or gaming enthusiast — now is the time to collaborate, build, and innovate! Let’s power up India’s gaming future together. 💥 Read more: https://lnkd.in/gQuYyTU7 #MetaGamingAccelerator #GameDevIndia #IndianGaming #Metaverse #GameDevelopment #EsportsIndia #IndieDev #CreatorsFirst #AIinGaming #StartupsIndia #LinkedInGaming

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Building Hard Tech. First, my condolence to victims of brutal terror attack in Kashmir, Navy Officer Vinay Narwal is from my city Karnal who lost his life in this inhuman act. -> Big Idea <- Living virtual world- Currently games use smart event driven approach to make the world feel alive, means game world changes based on player actions or conditions. But I am working on to build the tech which allow the game world to evolve with or without player progression dependencies. -> Challenges <- It is very hard simply put but not impossible to achieve. Some Key Problems & Potential solutions: 1. Managing Real time mutation -> Changing the game world in real time which may involve millions of moving pieces, it is possible in theory and even testing but this will be totally unrealistic for a long time for consumer hardware. This is to be solved via following Data Oriented Design in which we separate logic from visual operations and further divide operation part by cutting everything away outside player view and simply make changes against time and do batch processing of visual changes based on smart priority system and much more, but this should give idea about this system. And btw Logic data itself is very expansive for CPU in this case, so it is much harder to implement efficiently as DOD framework itself is not very widely used yet in games. But this is the future to do some really cool stuff. 2. Managing Data -> To make above point possible is to find a way to manage such gigantic data efficiently and algorithm to make sense of it and then use that to run operations in real time. it will be painful. 3. NPC Feedback - This is the heart of living world and the final boss of Real time simulation life game and in short audio and even dynamic dialogue text is impossible to implement, LLM etc. are not going to solve this, anybody backing or funding such ventures are out of their mind and wasting money. If you still want to back such startups than actual evaluation should be based on leap on hardware innovation which can run LLM like smartphone apps and their affordability to masses, for now we do not have any eta or estimation of this tech. However, for the mean time we can solve it via simple visual ques about player's relationship to NPC and possible traits of NPC so player can make decisions on how to interact to roughly estimate outcome not accurately. This will require complex behavioral algorithm which can make human like behavioral decisions for NPC based on interaction with player and world. Getting long so I will stop, hopefully You have gained something from this. I shared this to work with more people on this. My current priority is commercial live service game and this system for long term innovation project without worrying about timeline and possible commercial product using this and evaluating monetization in general. Really not pitching this to investors as well as they will expect commercial timeline fairly. Sunday Post.

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From a dream to beta: Elev8 is live. India's first self-developed full-body motion gaming platform is finally here. What started 16 months ago with just an idea, a whiteboard, and a burning curiosity… has now become something we truly believe feels like magic. We tried everything — IMU sensors, wearables, Nintendo Joycons, you name it. But our goal was clear: Make motion gaming accessible, magical, and available to everyone, everywhere. So, we built our own Camera Vision AI system — no controllers, no extra devices. Just you and the camera on your mobile, TV, or PC. This is our beta launch, and here’s what you can expect: - Powered by Vision AI for real-time, full-body motion tracking - Works on Android and Windows (iOS and Linux coming soon) - No controller needed — your body is your controller - 5 fun, self-developed games to get you moving - Coming soon: motion-based Yoga, Kickboxing, Math Quests, World Geography explorers, and more - Built for Fun. Fitness. Learning. We’re obsessed with seamless innovations like Kinect, Nintendo, VR headsets — but let’s face it, they’ve always been out of reach for most of us. So we built Elev8 to work on what you already have — your phone, laptop, or smart TV. Low bandwidth, high impact. Simple. There are only two other companies in the world doing what we’re doing — both based in the US. And just like Mangalyaan, we’ve reached orbit at a fraction of the cost and time. We're proud. We're grateful. And we're just getting started. We’d love for you to try it out and tell us how it makes you feel. 👉 https://www.elev8.games/ This is still a work in progress. We know that. And your feedback means everything to us. Lastly — none of this would’ve been possible without my amazing team: Dipendra kumar, Vishesh Gupta, Ayush Asrekar, and Prakhar Sharma — A huge pat on the back to my fellow warriors. Let’s move the world, one game at a time. #Elev8 #MotionGaming #MadeInIndia #AI #ComputerVision #GamingRevolution #Innovation #BetaLaunch

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Gaming in India just crossed a point of no return 🎮🇮🇳 When the Prime Minister of India speaks about gaming on a national stage, this industry is no longer on the sidelines. It is now part of India’s policy and future vision. Just days earlier, the government officially separated esports and video games from money gaming. This may sound technical, but it is historic. For the first time, our industry has its own identity. I was featured in ET Edge Insights to share why this moment matters. Here is my perspective: 1. Esports should be treated like sport, with the same seriousness and safeguards 2. Esports athletes athletes need visa assistance in place and a stable support system along with global opportunities 3. India needs one dedicated authority that understands esports, regulates it fairly, and fuels its growth, understanding all perspectives in an unbiased manner 4. If done right, this can unlock jobs, education pathways, and global recognition for Indian talent propelling India as a gaming power house and leveraging on the fact that India is going all in on Gaming The fact that the PM himself is on video talking about gaming tells us one thing. The conversation has shifted forever. This is our inflection point. Now the responsibility is on us, the ecosystem, to build the right structures, collaborate with policymakers, and make sure India does not miss this window to become a global esports powerhouse. Thank you to ET Edge Insights for capturing this moment and to everyone building every single day in this space. 🔗 ET Edge Insights – https://lnkd.in/dJfjaX_n 🎥 Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Gaming - https://lnkd.in/deeW4Ym7 What do you think is the single biggest policy step that would unlock India’s gaming industry? #Gaming #Esports #India #DigitalIndia #Innovation #Leadership

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When your neighbourhood cricket scorecard becomes the launchpad for a global platform, you know someone was paying attention to missing pieces. That someone is Abhishek Desai, and CricHeroes is the answer he built for millions of players who never stopped loving the game. Abhishek didn’t start with headlines or a grand plan to “disrupt sports.” He and his co-founders began by solving a tiny, stubborn problem: how grassroots cricketers could reliably score, stream and expose their games in a world built for elite cricket. What began as a better scorekeeping app turned into a network that now organises grassroots cricket across countries. Today CricHeroes claims millions of players and scores hundreds of thousands of matches every month, and recently closed a $1M bridge round to scale that vision. This is a founder story that reads like a playbook: spot a real friction, obsess over the user, scale the network, then productise the data and community. From ball-by-ball scoring to AI highlights, CricHeroes turned a functional tool into an ecosystem, recognition, performance analytics, live streaming and merchant opportunities for local cricket economies. If you’re building something, two lessons from Abhishek’s journey stand out: 1. Start with the smallest, most visible pain your user feels every week. Fix that first. 2. Built for the long tail, networks and communities are product-market fit on steroids. If this story inspires you, drop “Grassroots” and I’ll share a short thread on the product moves that turned a scorecard into a sports platform. #CricHeroes #AbhishekDesai #SportsTech #GrassrootsCricket #IndiaStartups #FounderJourney #ProductThinking #NetworkEffects

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The industry job spreadsheets are NOT helping you get a job, so here is what to do instead. These documents originate from good intentions, but the problem is simple : EVERYONE AND THEIR MOM USES THE SAME. And when a job offer hits the spreadsheets, it's already too late. So whenever a job offer appears on the market, the whole world applies to it and you end up fighting against hundreds of applicants. - ❌ You arrive at the same time as everyone else. - ❌ You have no control over who posts it, who applies, what the requirements are, or even where you land in the pile. - ❌ You’re one name among thousands. - ❌ Studios don't even know who you are so they will test you even harder Let’s remind everyone about it : studios hate posting job offers, a job post is very often a LAST RESORT for them. Before they post anything, they’ll always try to find someone internally, get a recommendation, or hire someone already in their network. And the reason is simple : a lot of studios lost a lot of money by over-hiring in the last years, and now they need to find the exact right talent for their exact need and they are super duper careful to not repeat the same mistakes they did a few years ago. Visions Interactive recently shared they got 2,500 applications in 8 days for one 3D artist position. They said 90% didn’t even survive the 10-second scan. So sure, offers being scarce is an extra layer of difficulty. But the real issue is relying solely on those to find a job, because it just feels like playing the lottery where every odds are stacked against you. No wonder why artists relying only on job posts are depressed and feel powerless. So what to do instead? If you want to stand a chance, you need to show up before everyone else. That means: - ✅ Doing cold emails with a portfolio that actually fits what the studio needs (there is ZERO limit to how many you can send) - ✅ Building relationships with pros without asking for a job right away (honest question : when is the last time you really networked and built genuine relationships with someone in the industry?) - ✅ When you get feedback, reach back to those who gave them to you with a significant update (nobody does that) All of that : - is 100% in your control - will compound positively over time - do not require any company to post an offer before you can contact them - will not get you to face hundreds of competitors - allow you to not be a stranger anymore to studios. Of course All of this only works if your portfolio match what they do and proves you understand the production pipeline. Otherwise...no amount cold email or networking effort will make up for it. 👉This is why I made a free video to explain exactly how to build that kind of portfolio: https://lnkd.in/dhP9F8-M

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Something big is happening in India, and it starts with how we play! The digital gaming market is exploding, from $3.8B in FY24 to a projected $9.2B by FY29. But the real shift isn’t just growth. It’s who’s playing, how, and why. At the heart of this evolution is Real Money Gaming (RMG), where skill, strategy, and digital fluency collide. It already accounts for $2.4B, or 63% of the market’s revenue. And the new face of India’s gamer?  ➤ 44% are women  ➤ 66% come from non-metros  ➤ 43% are first-time earners  ➤ 148M+ are paying users This isn’t just entertainment. It’s empowerment. As access, payments, and awareness improve, gaming is becoming a serious, skill-driven lifestyle—and RMG is setting the tone. The game has changed. And so has the player. Source: https://bit.ly/4leMGF7 (Lumikai Fund) #SportsBaazi #DilDimagData

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