Xbox Gaming’s Arjun Varma Talks About Growing the Brand’s Presence in India as a Platform for Games and More at IGDC 2022

Following years of nominal presence, Xbox has finally began making inroads into the Indian gaming scene over the past few months. While mobile gaming has ruled the roost over the last decade, the tides will soon shift with the arrival of AAA games for PC and consoles in the future.

With the console and PC gaming market expected to grow rapidly in India within the next few years, we picked the brain of Arjun Varma, Global Expansion Incubator (GXI) Manager at Xbox Gaming during IGDC 2022 in Hyderabad, Telangana to know more about this future. The conversation spanned topics such as developer outreach, Xbox Game Pass and more.

Let’s begin with IGDC 2022 itself. How has the showcase been for you over the course of three days?

It’s been really great. This is actually my first time attending IGDC, and it’s overwhelming and really exciting to be in a festival for game developers. And I’ve had the pleasure to interact with some great developers at the event.

Have you ever tried any of the games? Anything that caught your eye?

I tried a bunch of different games. I also connected in-person with a lot of the developers who I’ve been speaking to on call for the last few months and years. Some of the games that caught my eye were Mumbai Gullies by GameEon Studios. There were a bunch of games that I made a note of, but I can’t remember their names right now. But a lot of the Unreal Engine games lineup looks really exciting.

Console gaming has never really been the big thing in India. But that’s evolving and changing a bit right now. What are the first few plans for Xbox in India right now that has you excited?

I joined Microsoft as a Global Expansion Incubator manager, or what we commonly call a GXI manager. And the whole objective and mission of my role and my team here is that we want to engage with the local developer community in India, who are active in the space of PC and console game development.

As you may know, India is a mobile first gaming market. It has a 90% market share, with PC and console still at a very nascent early stage. But the whole idea for us is to tap into this community and connect with these developers. and see how Microsoft and Xbox can provide the tools, resources, support, mentorship, guidance, etcetera, and enable this ecosystem for them to grow and thrive. So that’s the essence of my team’s role here in India.

I’m the first person who’s part of the Xbox India team right now for this particular initiative. And the whole idea is to kind of really see how we go from here, and how we can develop this ecosystem together.

If you had to describe what the current state of gaming in India is, when it comes to console, PC, and mobile gaming, where do you think India currently stands on, as we head to the future?

Currently, it’s a very mobile driven market, and for obvious reasons, I think accessibility with everybody in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities owning Android mobile phones, and cheap data plans providing low latency for gaming, it’s become very easy for people to be able to play games on mobile.

However, having said that, what I have observed in my professional capacity over the last few months is that there’s tremendous potential for PC/console games to really come up in India and thrive as well. There are people who are incredibly passionate about creating cinematic and story-driven games that can play well on console/PC and do really well on a global platform. It’s just that they need the right kind of guidance and path to succeed, because it’s a longer process.

An average console/PC title takes about one and a half to two years of development. It takes a lot of effort, time and money to create these games. So. from an economic and creative standpoint, all that needs to fall in place and that’s where companies like Microsoft and Xbox can really help them to stabilize and chart out their entire path to success.

In conclusion, I think there is a lot of potential for PC and mobile gaming to thrive together. It’s just that it’ll take some time, and it probably won’t happen in the next two years.

You touched upon the growing pains of being a game developer in this country. At the moment, India is still very indie-centric when it comes to games. How is Xbox and Microsoft planning on promoting these developers in India?

The GXI team I am part of is to really support developers in whatever way we can. So, the first thing that we do when we reach out to developers is to understand what it is that they require, and then how can Microsoft and Xbox help them with that.

Microsoft and Xbox have enormous tools and resources at its disposal, including content education that can be leveraged by this developer community. And that’s where somebody like me comes in, where I act as a liaison between this developer community and the larger Xbox ecosystem. We make sure that we connect these developers to the right team members, whether it’s tech support, publishing, marketing, or even if they need some seed capital to get them across the finishing line.

We also help them explore existing export programs or Microsoft programs like ID@Xbox, which is a free registration process, where indie developers can publish their games on their own. At the moment, I’m trying to get that out there whenever I speak to indie developers. And if you do need to follow up, you can always reach out to me. If you’re stuck at something, you will always have somebody in India to connect with. Then of course, there’s programs like ID@Azure, where developers can register to get access to Azure Credits, which can help them in development.

Obviously, corporations like Microsoft and Xbox are helping out developers and the gaming space in India. But are you satisfied with the way the authorities have promoted gaming in India? And if not, what do you want to see from the governments in India right now?

I’ve had limited interaction with government initiatives so far, and we want to interact more on that front as well. But so far, from whatever interactions I’ve had, I feel that the government bodies and initiatives have been extremely supportive and encouraging of PC/console game development or just game development as a career in general.

From Microsoft and Xbox’s perspective, we are looking at incubation, providing space to developers, leveraging Microsoft campuses in India, and more, when it comes to our initiatives. And despite the limited interactions we have had with governments, they’ve been extremely, extremely supportive. If you take the example of the Telangana government, you can see their support for IGDC and the gaming community here as well. It’s at a very encouraging path right now, and I can only see it getting better going forward.

Console gaming has always been an expensive affair in India compared to other nations. And with the recent price hikes for Xbox consoles and accessories, do you think it’s moving in the wrong direction when it comes to promoting console gaming in India right now?

I think from a larger industry point of view, even the folks at Microsoft and Xbox would know that markets like India, Africa or parts of Southeast Asia may not be the right markets to look at mass community or scale in terms of the console space. Console gaming is a very niche market in places like India, because of various factors like price and accessibility.

So, I think they also understand that and that’s one of the reasons why the focus is on the games that are being developed in India. First and foremost, we are looking at how we can support cross platform games. All the developers that I’ve been meeting, are making sure that the games they’re developing have integrated mechanisms to port their games on different platforms. So, I think the focus is going to be more on PC gaming publishing, and even console games publishing as well. And going forward, as and when I think hopefully, when we announce Xbox Cloud Gaming in India, I think that’s also going to be a huge sort of push for the Indian gaming community, because I think the console is not the key factor here.

You mentioned console gaming not being the focal point as of right now for Xbox in India. So how are you planning on increasing your presence?

Xbox as a brand is looking to position itself as a company that is a platform for gaming, rather than just a retail device, which is a console. It wants to move away from that, and that’s something that we want to establish in a market like India as well.

If you think Xbox, you think of a console, right? But the idea is that we want others to think about Xbox right now as a platform. A platform where games are published and accessed. So, when you go to xbox.com, you have all these different mechanisms and platforms that you can access like, Xbox Live, Game Pass, or even ID@Xbox. These are the different mechanisms through which people can play or publish games.

Xbox wants to create an ecosystem or platform where games can be published. Think of it as Netflix for games. That’s what I think is worth targeting right now.

If I may presume, retail expansion isn’t really the main agenda for Xbox in India?

Well, it would be, it’s parallel, right? There are different business verticals, and they all have their own strategy for different markets in place. So, I may not be able to comment on what the Xbox retail division or the Xbox console marketing strategy would be, because they’ll have their own plans. And I’m sure they have a particular strategy in mind for a country like India. But from a business development perspective for developer partnerships in India, I would say that when I speak to developers, I tell them that the main idea and the goal is for them to create beautiful, interesting games that we can publish on the Xbox platform for a global audience.

Xbox Game Pass hasn’t really taken off in India compared to other regions. So, when it comes to launching AAA titles from the popular developers, is there a major challenge in India right now, especially with regional pricing causing these games to be priced much higher?

No, I don’t see that as a challenge. There hasn’t really been an official marketing push or announcements for Xbox Game Pass. Despite that, it remains to be one of the most popular subscription services for games in India. Whenever I reach out to the community, everybody’s aware of Game Pass, and not just the developer community, but the gaming community at large. And they’re also very keen on understanding how they can get the games on it. So, that is a conversation that we keep having, and I think it is a very popular service, and it will grow multifold in the months to come, when we start making more efforts towards building the entire developer community in India.

But in terms of pricing, from a strategy perspective, I think there are things that drives the pricing with localization. So, it needs to be competitive, and it needs to be reasonably priced. And I think that is something that will keep adjusting as market forces determine.

We can talk back and forth about the way consoles have been priced in India. But one of the major challenges that the community has faced over the years is a lack of access when it comes to payments, with the lack of UPI integration. Is there any future plans on that side of things?

Totally. I mean, I’m with you on that page. That is something that has been highlighted. So, I can share that, the larger teams are very aware of this fact, and I’m sure that they are working towards making sure that this gap is filled as soon as possible. But, as of now, that’s all I can say about that, and as and when more concrete plans are made, I think the industry in large will know about it. But it is something that everybody is aware of internally.

You touched upon growing the presence of Xbox in India. So, are there any plans on collaborating and partnering with some of the major Indian brands and elements like, Cricket, Bollywood and more, on that side of things?

Well, from a branding and marketing perspective, it’s not the immediate focus for our team compared to engaging with the developer community, because as I said, it’s a very new team.

So, the place where we are at currently, is to just let people know that there is an Xbox presence in India, because people are not even aware of that., When they think of Xbox, they don’t know that there is somebody that they can connect to in India as well. So, that’s what I’ve been doing over the last few months through engagements and events like IGDC 2022, where we’ve let people know, “Hey, we are here to help. Please connect with us and let us know what it is it that you’re working on?” And our whole mission is to do proactive outreach, as well as engage with incoming requests.

Other partnerships, collaborations and activities will definitely happen, but probably at a very later stage. Having said that, I am also keen on one thing, and we’ve been discussing as an industry, when I speak to my colleagues, which is that there are pretty well-established Bollywood studios and content producers who are creating amazing work in the in the web series space. And it would be good to kind of connect with them and understand if they would like to expand their IPs to a gaming vertical.

So, that is one thing that is definitely on my mind, which I would want to explore in the coming months. I want to reach out to some of these studios and have some discussions on how we can leverage some of their existing IPs and see if we can explore a gaming vertical on that.