Gaming has been a part of the entertainment ecosystem for quite sometime now around the globe. India too has recently picked up the pace and is poised to become one of the major hubs for the gaming industry in the world.
As more players across the globe open shops in India and the indigenous audiences’ acceptability and hunger increases for games the demand for talent across the sector.
We caught up with one of the known colleges from the country which provides courses in the game development sector.
Backstage Pass Institute of Gaming and Technology has been around for a decade now.
“In the beginning, the parents did not believe that the industry even existed or had any future. Initial couple of years were very tough. We hardly had around 12 students in the first year in all the courses put together. After a couple of years, our students started getting jobs in top companies like EA games and some of them even won awards in the game design competition held by Microsoft and others. That’s when people started believing that this could be an interesting career to choose and may have a good potential. Only after that, we started seeing more students interested in joining our courses. Today, we have close to 350 students. We are expecting around 500 students in total by August / September 2020.” says founder Surya P.
The FICCI-EY report ‘The era of consumer A.R.T. – Acquisition Retention and Transaction,’ that was recently launched found that Media and Entertainment (M&E) sector reached $25.7 billion in 2019, a growth of about nine per cent over 2018 and the online gaming segment retained its position as the fastest growing segment on the back of transaction-based games mainly fantasy sports, increased in-app purchases and a 31 per cent growth in the number of online gamers to reach around 365 million. This represents a 14x growth since 2010, when there were 25 million gamers. The online gaming segment grew 40 per cent in 2019 to reach Rs. 65 billion and is expected to reach Rs. 187 billion by 2022 at a CAGR of 43 per cent.
The gaming scene has come a long way and cemented its position as a standalone industry rather than being dependent on other aspects. Hence it might be better for students who want to get into game development to choose a college that offers explicitly gaming courses rather than colleges that offer it along with their other courses, where quality of mentors, education and concepts will be focused only on gaming.
We learnt that Backstage Pass offers a demo class wherein a potential student can take part in one of their usual classes to understand the kind of mentorship the institute provides. In the same way, taking a demo class and analysing whether the institute is laying emphasis on the fundamentals of the concepts can be critical for students as it would help them in the long run.
Just like the aforementioned institute provides, fee discounts and scholarships to students and low to zero interest loans can be a lucrative option for students when they are opting for an institute.
Finding the right job after finishing the course can be often perplexing for freshers in the industry. It is therefore of utmost importance for a student to check with the management and sources if the placement facilities are up to the mark.
Says Surya, “Our mentors help students build an impressive portfolio by guiding their work quality. Our placement officer is actively on the lookout for any internship or job opportunities from our associated game companies and sends in our students with relevant profiles whenever necessary.”
Concludes he, “Backstage Pass has always been student friendly and strives to provide a relaxed and nurturing environment for our students to enable a mutual exchange of ideas and learning amongst them. In our decade long journey, we have interacted and built a network with the top game companies in India due to which, we provide our students with excellent paid internships and job opportunities in such esteemed companies. We follow a mentorship approach which allows us to offer our students personalised supervision in their course of study by our experienced mentors.
We strongly believe in teaching the fundamentals to each concept, whether big or small, as that builds the students’ foundation of knowledge and enhances their skill set.”