Highlights
- A mid-size Indian studio of 30 people working on an original IP title can burn through crores before a single rupee of revenue arrives.
- The cost advantage India holds over Western studios is real but narrowing, and is being offset by longer development timelines.
- India also lacks quality original IP projects compared to other emerging markets like Turkey and Poland.
When people talk about the cost of making AAA video games, the conversation almost always starts about high-end salaries in cities like San Francisco or Seattle. Studios sometimes have workforces of hundreds of people with a burn rate of $15K to $20K a month. If it takes five years to develop a game, the math gets to $300M really quickly. The numbers feel so large and so distant from the Indian context. Salaries here are significantly lower, which should make developing games in the country much more affordable.
Game production costs are still high, given that the Indian market is still in its early stages when it comes to game development. And for a generation of Indian developers who are now attempting something more ambitious than mobile games and outsourcing work, understanding the actual economics of what they are building is the difference between a plan and a wish.
The Human Resource Cost in Development
The biggest misconception about game development budgets, in India as much as anywhere else, is that the money goes towards hardware, expensive licenses, and studio space. These things cost money, but they are not where budgets go. Most of the budgets go to salaries. In India's game development ecosystem, the salary data is actually quite well documented and varies enormously depending on where you are, who you are working for, and what you are building.
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Entry-level roles at AAA international studio offices in India, including EA Hyderabad, Ubisoft Pune, and Rockstar India, offer INR 5 to 9 lakh per year at the junior level. Mobile game studios, which dominate raw hiring volume, pay INR 3.5 to 6L per year for most fresher positions. These are the numbers that make Indian game development look inexpensive from the outside, and they are real for the entry level.
But entry-level is not where a mid-size studio building an original IP actually sits. Senior graphics engineers with eight or more years of experience and console expertise are commanding INR 30L per year and above at multinational studios. Lead architects and studio heads at the top of the experience curve are earning INR 25 to 50L or more annually. A studio attempting a three-to-four-year original IP project needs experienced people. The salary band widens considerably once you factor in the talent you actually need to ship something at a competitive level.
American journalist and author Jason Schreier posted a video on May 28, talking about why game development is so expensive. He talked about some of the biggest challenges developers face. A point Schreier's napkin math made clear in the video, and that most first-time Indian founders underestimate: the salary number is not the burn rate number. The actual per-person monthly cost to a studio includes more than just the salary.
You have to include things like equipment costs, software licenses, office rent amortized across headcount, infrastructure, and the various administrative and legal costs of running a company. A reasonable rule of thumb is that the true cost of an employee runs between 1.3 and 1.5 times their gross salary, and it can be even higher.
A mid-experience game developer in Bengaluru earning INR 12L per year can accrue a true monthly cost somewhere between INR 1.3L and INR 1.5L. Call it INR 1.4L per person per month as a working estimate for a mid-tier studio in one of India's major development cities.
Hiring the Right Talent is Expensive
Let's build a scenario that reflects what a genuinely ambitious Indian indie studio is attempting right now; not a mobile game, not a hyper-casual title, but a mid-scale original IP targeting PC and console. Something like what Nodding Heads was doing with Raji, or what GameEon was attempting with Mumbai Gullies, or what Tentworks is building with Becoming Pablo.
GameEon Studios
A studio of this kind, doing serious original work, might have between 20 and 30 people at its productive peak. Some are mid-level artists. Some are programmers with console or Unreal Engine experience. There are senior employees, a producer, a quality assurance team, and at least one person dealing with business and legal matters. Let's use 30 people as our team size, which is on the smaller end for this kind of project, but not unrealistic.
At INR 1.4L per person per month, 30 people cost INR 42L per month. Annualized, that is INR 5.04 Cr ($524K at $96.27) just in human cost. A three-year development timeline, which is tight for an original IP but achievable with discipline, multiplies that to INR 15.12 Cr in total staff cost before a single rupee of revenue.
Then, we have to factor in the non-staff costs. Unreal Engine is free until a game earns $1M in lifetime revenue, which helps. Unity Pro costs approximately INR 1.95L per year per developer beyond certain revenue thresholds. Platform submission fees, marketing spend, sound design, voice acting, legal costs around IP registration, and pre-release localization all add layers on top of the base staff burn. A conservative estimate for these non-staff costs on a project of this scale over three years might be INR 2 to 3 Cr more.
So a 30-person Indian studio, building an original mid-scale PC and console game over three years, is looking at a total cost in the range of INR 17 to 18 Cr ($1.77 to $1.87M). That is not a small number for an Indian startup without publisher backing. It is, by most Indian venture capital standards, a large ask for a category that most investors still do not fully understand.
Why India's Cost Advantage is Real but Narrowing
The comparison to Western development costs does look significantly favorable. A 30-person studio doing the same work in Seattle or London would be burning through the equivalent of INR 3 to 4 Cr per month at $15K to $20K per person. India's equivalent is INR 42L per month. The ratio is roughly six to eight times cheaper, which is substantial and is the real reason that major international publishers have been expanding co-development and outsourcing relationships with Indian studios for years.
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But the gap is narrowing in one important way, as games are getting more complex to develop due to evolving technologies. Development timelines have been extending steadily, and first-time developers routinely underestimate how long a project will take by between 50% and 100%, according to Schreier. A project planned for two years that takes three adds around INR 5 Cr to the budget at the 30-person scale we were working with.
There is also the experience gap problem. India has a large talent pool of game developers, but the talent supply from AVGC programmes has outpaced the number of studios capable of absorbing developers at rates that reflect the value being created. Finding experienced console developers, senior rendering programmers, or veteran narrative designers in India is considerably harder than finding them in the US or Europe. The salary curve at the senior end is steepening, which narrows the cost advantage at precisely the level of talent that original IP projects most need.
What This Means for the People Building Games in India
The Mumbai Gullies collapse earlier this year is instructive in this context. GameEon's five-year total spend of INR 10.4 Cr across a team that peaked at 55 people is not a story of waste or extravagance. It is a story of what it actually costs to attempt something of that ambition over that timeline, even in India, even with Indian salaries. The per-person monthly cost implied by those figures is roughly INR 32K per person per month across the full five years. That is below even conservative Indian estimates, suggesting the team was running lean throughout, possibly leaner than was sustainable.
The lesson is not that Indian studios cannot afford to build original IP. The lesson is that the budget conversation needs to happen with the same seriousness in Mumbai and Bengaluru as it does in San Francisco. While India’s development costs are more favorable than those of the West, it is not free or small. Pretending otherwise is how projects run out of runway three years into a five-year idea.
The opportunity for Indian game development is real, and there is talent in the country. But the studios that will actually ship original games and build lasting businesses are going to be the ones that sit down with a spreadsheet before they sit down with a game design document and ask themselves honestly: how many people, for how many months, and where is that money coming from? And until more Indian studios find ways to answer it with original IP rather than outsourcing contracts, the country's game development ecosystem will remain what it largely is today. India is simply one of the world's most valuable back offices, doing skilled work for someone else's creative vision.
Studios need to ship smaller things first, build financial track records that investors can evaluate, and use the revenue from those smaller things to fund progressively more ambitious projects. The outsourcing work that sustains most Indian studios today is not the enemy of original IP. It is, if managed correctly, the funding mechanism for it. Studios need to start treating it that way rather than as the destination.
