India to focus on homegrown games, technologies and characters to promote Indian culture in a new initiative

India is now focusing on the gaming industry as a viable sector for promoting homegrown talent, technologies, as well as the Indian culture, through a focus on research and development in the sector.

Gaming has seen an unprecedented boom the world over. The Indian government has realised that and now eyes it as a viable sector for the country to have a stronghold in. For this, India will soon launch a digital gaming research initiative, focused on developing new homegrown technologies in gaming.

The initiative will be spearheaded by the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), as mentioned by SERB Secretary Sandeep Verma on Twitter recently. The core of the initiative will be to establish strong research and development in gaming. SERB plans to do this by connecting academia and start-ups to the mainstream industry, so as to enable an exchange of ideas and resources and target breakthroughs in game development.

Some of the aims of the initiative, as listed by Verma's tweet, involve the development of homegrown game engines and content generators. In addition, it will also look to come up with more games and characters which can then be patented.

The report mentions that SERB will establish a total of three verticals for the digital gaming research initiative. The first one will focus on R&D in Learning and Leisure Gaming Platforms, so we can expect to see some virtual worlds, possibly metaverses in the coming years. Another vertical will be called Collaborative Technical Design Process: SERB Game Labs. The last one will be Immersive Game Prototypes with a focus on Indian Culture and Values.

The last vertical brings to light another purpose of the program. It will seek to promote and popularise Indian culture through homegrown games and the associated technologies and content. Not many doubts can be raised about whether this will prove to be beneficial to the country's gaming industry and the economy in general.

We have seen indigenous companies come up with India's own versions of popular titles. FAU-G is a recent example, meant to provide a battle royale experience to mobile gamers after the segment saw a monumental boost thanks to titles like PUBG: Mobile and Call of Duty: Mobile.

There have not been many success stories so far though. Indian gamers still largely rely on games produced either in the US or a few other countries, as does most of the world. To have a homegrown production, with a focus on an Indian setup and characters will be a refreshing change.