India has no dearth of gamers, or even engineers who can build games. What it lacks is enough developers who know how to take a game from idea to execution.

 

That gap has brought South Korayushiean gaming major Krafton Inc’s India arm, Krafton India, and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras together, with Krafton India partnering the institute to launch KIGI Academy — the first such game-development talent programme by a global gaming giant in India.

 

The Battlegrounds Mobile India maker is investing ₹3-5 crore in the programme, which will start with 30 IIT Madras students. The first 16 weeks will be spent at the IIT Madras campus, followed by an eight-week immersive phase at Krafton India’s Bengaluru headquarters.

  

But the programme is not being built around the assumption that India needs more programmers. Krafton’s assessment, after three years of engaging with IIT Madras and other institutes, is that the bigger gap is experience. “We have a lot of skilled developers in India. It will be wrong to say that we don’t. The gap is that they don’t have enough experience,” Anuj Sahani, head of the Krafton incubator programme and director of publishing at Krafton India, told Business Standard.

 

Sahani said students can have strong technical skills without having worked on a gaming project end to end or understanding how the development pipeline comes together. KIGI is intended to give them that experience.

 

That also marks a change from how gaming talent has traditionally developed. Sahani said many developers entered the industry through passion and were largely self-taught. Prof Richa Agrawal, chairperson of the Career Pathway Centre at IIT Madras, said the industry had similarly relied on people passionate enough to develop the required skills themselves.

 

As gaming has moved from the fringes into the mainstream, however, that approach is no longer enough. “Passion alone will not do it,” Richa said, pointing to the need to identify the skills the industry requires and develop them systematically.

 

That does not mean IIT Madras plans to change its engineering curriculum for gaming. Instead, the institute is looking at industry-led programmes as an additional layer to existing degrees, while reaching out to companies to understand their requirements.

 

For Krafton, the ₹3-5 crore investment is not simply a hiring spend. Sahani said the company wants to build talent at the grassroots level that can find careers across gaming, while identifying people who could eventually build their own companies. Students will work on their own game ideas and original intellectual property, with Krafton providing expertise and mentorship.

 

At the same time, Saurabh Shah, head of people operations at Krafton India, said the programme involves “very focused hiring”, with Krafton investing time, effort, and money to identify people who could build a career within gaming rather than simply take up a job.

 

KIGI is also being designed specifically for India’s mobile-first market, rather than directly replicating Krafton Jungle, its developer training programme in South Korea. Students will learn to develop and optimise games across a wide range of devices, including low-end smartphones.

 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is another part of the changing skills equation. Krafton employees have had enterprise access to generative AI tools for about two years, Shah said, but the company is focusing on where AI should actually be used. KIGI will first build fundamentals such as game logic, team and resource management, user experience, and the psychology of interactive products before AI is introduced to accelerate development.

 

Krafton said gaming is the largest segment of the animation, visual effects, gaming, and comics (AVGC) sector by revenue and active users. While India could require close to 2 million AVGC-XR (Extended Reality) professionals by 2030, it is difficult to quantify how much of that demand will come from gaming. Krafton wants to expand KIGI over the next three to five years. Its Krafton Jungle programme in Korea has trained more than 1,000 developers, a scale KIGI could eventually approach.

 

But Krafton does not see expansion simply as training more people. Shah said the company may not be able to absorb all the talent it creates after three or four years, but wants KIGI to establish gaming as a career avenue across Krafton and the wider industry. “We will churn what we can consume. We cannot … create a pool of talent who will have no opportunities,” Shah said. “This is about career preparation. It’s not about an assignment from a subject that you’re specialising in.”