Six People, One Basement, and 175 AAA Games at Lakshya Digital

In 2004, six people in a basement studio in Gurgaon set out to convince the world’s game publishers that an Indian team could make their art. 22 years later, Lakshya Digital has nearly 1K employees across Gurgaon, Pune, and Bangalore, with teams in Seattle, the U.K., Manila, and Tokyo. It has credits on more than 175 AAA games, including Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Alan Wake II, and Starfield.

On Oct 30, 2026, founder Manvendra Shukul was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the 18th India Game Developer Conference (IGDC) in Chennai. He co-founded the NASSCOM Gaming Forum and IGDC, sits on the board of the Game Developers Association of India (GDAI), and is a founding board member of the Indian Institute of Creative Technologies. Outlook Respawn spoke to him about how the studio started and where he thinks India’s industry still falls short. He has stepped back from the CEO role, but not stepped away.

Lakshya Digital’s Early Days

Shukul did not start with outsourcing in mind. He began as a player who wanted to build games, and he wrote his own game engine. Around 1999, he started travelling to the U.S., U.K., Europe, and Japan to find publishers who would use it. What he found was a math problem.

A game cost roughly $1M - $2M to make back then. By 2003, that had climbed to $4M - $5M. As consoles grew more powerful, teams grew from four or five people to dozens and eventually well over a hundred. He walked through it from a publisher’s seat. With production costs assumed to be $2M, you make 50 games, and if about 10% do well, you profit handsomely. At $50M a game, you make two with the same budget. If none of them do well, it’s a massive blow. 

His conclusion was that art and animation took 60 - 65% of a project’s effort and cost, and Western labor was the priciest part. Publishers would have to outsource, and nobody would accept worse quality in exchange for savings. He also saw no reason to take the gamble himself. He said, “Making a game is a risky business. It may succeed, it may not succeed. Chances are, it will not succeed.” Building the ecosystem that supported developers looked like the better bet.

The first six hires were senior artists and animators from an animation studio he already ran. Then, for the first year and a half, Lakshya mostly trained. Shukul raised angel funding and brought in senior art and animation directors from the U.S., who stayed with the team for a month or two at a time. He said, “I did not rush into doing something. We need(ed) to prepare ourselves.”

The Chicken-and-Egg Years

The first proof point came in the studio’s second year, from a San Francisco client called Tradewinds. Lakshya did the art for an unnamed 2D game that, by Shukul’s account, was named the best-looking game online on Yahoo’s platform. 

He insists the studio was never close to failing, but it was stuck at certain stages. Clients wanted to see finished work before handing over projects, and Lakshya had no finished work to show. That loop lasted three to four years. His definition of growth shaped how he escaped it: “Growth is in aspirations. I want to work on the next big game.”

Lakshya became part of Keywords Studios in 2014, and Shukul calls the deal a turning point. The first thing it paid for was a Seattle studio the company could not have funded alone. Having veterans in clients’ time zones, who spoke their language and could sit down with them, changed the magnitude and complexity of what Lakshya could take on.

The Gap Art Cannot Close

Asked why India has so many game artists and so few globally recognized studios, Shukul did not hedge. He said, “We don’t have talent to make those games. The industry is producing talent, but is not benchmarking the quality of that talent.”

According to him, “We don’t have design skills. It’s not taught anywhere.” Art and animation, he said, are not a problem, and technology will stop being one.  The West has had roughly 40 years of trial and error to build that sensibility, and he does not expect India to match it quickly. His proposed bridge is incentives that bring global veterans onto Indian teams so the experience transfers directly.

AI is another hot topic that the industry is worried about. He compares the current fear to the ones that greeted calculators, computers, and the internet. Each time, some work disappeared but more opened up. He revealed, “I am not scared of AI. I am just scared of not knowing fast enough how I can use it as my tool.”

The task he says is still unfinished is the one Lakshya was never built to do. India has not yet made its own games at global quality. His focus now is raising that bar and making sure Indian developers have “the same seat that everybody else has at the table.”

There is a pattern in his story. The industry he helped build has largely solved the art problem, and its next stage is design and ownership of its own IP. Shukul got there by planning the foundation carefully before chasing the next project, and his advice for the industry follows the same approach.