Highlights
- Abir Aich, Executive Vice President at Aptech, says the biggest gap in India's game development education is professional readiness.
- Aich argues AI should be treated as a creative tool rather than a substitute.
- With India's expanding AVGC sector, he says the country has the potential to be a global source of creative talent if education keeps pace.
Abir Aich has spent enough years watching India's creative education landscape to know the difference between a trend and a structural shift. He is Executive Vice President for Technical Media and Entertainment at Aptech, the company behind Arena Animation and MAAC. For four decades, Aptech has had a front-row seat to how game design, animation, and VFX have moved from niche vocational options to something now sitting at the centre of what the government calls the Orange Economy.
Aich spoke to Outlook Respawn about how student profiles have changed and where education still falls short of studio expectations. He also touched upon what India needs to fix to actually become the animation, visual effects, gaming, comics and extended reality (AVGC-XR) talent capital.
Why Aptech Moved Into Gaming
Aptech is undergoing an expansion into gaming and AVGC-XR. What drove the decision, according to Aich, was the convergence of the underlying technologies between industries. He explained, "Gaming today is much more than entertainment. The technologies powering games are now transforming filmmaking, virtual production, immersive experiences, simulation, architecture and even industrial training."
Unreal Engine runs virtual production stages on major film sets. Real-time rendering pipelines built for games are being adopted across architecture, automotive design, and XR training. Game engine skills are increasingly transferable outside the games industry itself, which changes the calculus around who should be learning them and why.
He also noticed a shift in aspiring professionals, stating, "Learners were no longer looking only for software training. They wanted to build games, create immersive experiences and work with emerging creative technologies." That demand signal was as important as the technology convergence in confirming that the move was the right one.
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Aich draws a clear distinction between the student who walked into an Aptech center 20 years ago and the one who walks in today. When the animation and gaming industry was in its nascent stages in India, many came out of curiosity to know more about it. With the industry proving itself and the Orange Economy growing rapidly, students are actively interested in pursuing animation and game development as career options.
According to Aich, "The most significant shift has come in the last five years. The current generation is digitally native, already experimenting with AI tools, creating content, following global creators and understanding emerging career opportunities."
He added, "Teaching software is no longer enough. We must nurture creative thinking, storytelling, collaboration, problem-solving and adaptability because these are the capabilities that outlast any technology.
The Gap Between Education and Studios
India's gaming and AVGC education still falls short of what studios actually need. According to Aich, “Studios expect individuals who can collaborate, communicate ideas, accept feedback, solve problems creatively, and deliver consistently within production timelines. Those capabilities are often harder to develop than learning a tool or software.”
Aptech is trying to address this by focusing on portfolio development and project-based learning. However, Aich admits that a portfolio may open the first door, but attitude, adaptability, and professionalism determine long-term career growth. Students have to take the initiative and prepare themselves to thrive in professional environments.
A game artist who has no understanding of how the development pipeline works will struggle to collaborate effectively with engineers. A game designer with no awareness of animation constraints will create problems for the teams implementing their designs.
Deep specialization is still important, but students need understanding of adjacent disciplines to function in a team environment. Aich revealed, "We are not trying to create professionals who do everything. We are developing specialists who understand the larger ecosystem."
Where AI Helps and Where it Does Not
Aich's position on AI is neither dismissive of the technology nor uncritically enthusiastic about it. According to him, "AI can accelerate execution, automate repetitive tasks and expand creative possibilities. But it cannot replace imagination, storytelling, design thinking or artistic judgment."
The principle he articulates is that people respond to creative work because of its emotional and narrative impact, not because of the specific tools used to produce it. The practical implication for education is that AI tools need to be integrated into the curriculum without displacing the fundamentals they are being used to accelerate. He added, "Students learn to use emerging tools responsibly while strengthening the principles of storytelling, visual design, animation, cinematography and creative problem-solving."
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An AI tool in the hands of someone with no underlying craft knowledge produces mediocre work more quickly. In the hands of someone with strong fundamentals, it genuinely extends what they can create.
Students at Aptech learn how to use the tools responsibly while strengthening their creative skills. Aich is confident that the craft will remain the biggest differentiator when it comes to producing quality work. Only time will tell how quickly AI compresses the value of certain entry-level skills. Preparing students for that reality requires being honest about which skills are becoming more fungible and which are becoming more valuable.
What India’s AVGC Sector Needs
Aich thinks that the AVGC sector jobs will continue to grow, but questions whether enough industry-ready talent is being produced to take them. He said, "I believe the conversation should move beyond whether enough jobs exist. The bigger question is whether we are creating enough industry-ready talent to meet the opportunities emerging across the AVGC-XR ecosystem."
He addressed what the industry could look like in five years, stating, "Success shouldn't be measured by how many students complete a course. It should be measured by how many creators build meaningful careers, create their own intellectual property, launch ventures and contribute to the global creative economy."
Completion rates and placement numbers are the metrics that education institutions are reported in abundance. Career trajectories, original IP creation, and entrepreneurial outcomes are much harder to measure and take much longer to appear. If India's AVGC education sector starts optimizing for those outcomes rather than enrollment figures, the pipeline it produces will look substantially different from what it produces today. The role the education sector plays in the coming years will determine how credible India’s Orange Economy ambition turns out to be.
