Future of Work: A cheat code for playing a long-term tech game in India by the evangelist of Fortnite-maker Epic Games

“You need to know that gaming is a business, and you have got to treat it as one,” said Arvind Neelakantan, Evangelist- India/ASEAN, Epic Games, the makers behind the famous Fortnite game.

In his talk on Day 2 of YourStory MediaFuture of Work event, an all-virtual, two-day product-tech-design summit, Arvind insisted that game developers, or anyone who's working on gaming technology, not create a game just because he or she is passionate about it.

He said that in order to build a prominent gaming brand, it is important to understand the technology; how the gaming business is done; how to grow a team; how to talk to investors or how to get tips, and everything else around the game.

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Sharing a few best practices for technology at scale, and what successful gaming companies follow, he said that they are built on top of real-time technologies. 

Arvind is sure that gaming and game technology are here to stay, and it is important to think about gaming as a long-term investment.

Gaming in automotive, architecture, films, healthcare, and more

Arvind is of the opinion that gaming is one of the biggest opportunities in India today. How? One of the cool things is that the gaming technology is not just powering games, but also covering industries outside of games.  These industries include automotive engineering, architecture engineering, construction, film and animation, simulation, retail, healthcare, and “even areas that we haven't really had exposure to because the technology provides real-time imagery” he said.

“You no longer have to wait several days, several minutes, or even several seconds to see a high-quality image showing up in your stream,” said Arvind.

He advises techies and youth to understand and learn real-time technology. Arvind predicts that knowing real-time technologies is going to be similar to how we expect every student to know Microsoft Word or art students to know something like Photoshop.

Arvind said that after being in the industry for more than a decade, he is seeing that India is maturing when it comes to the gaming space. Arvind highlighted that the mobile space is huge, and unlike earlier, where there were a lot of copycat games, we are now really seeing a lot of high-quality original content made from India.

“We are seeing gamers and game developers being a lot more aware of gaming technology. India is running well-optimised games at great scale; businesses are taking notice of this; venture capitalists are also investing in gaming companies and believing in the kind of games that are being made in India,” he said.

Hence, he said that gaming technology is the future of work, and a lot more creators are required to get into this. 

SPONSOR SHOUTOUT: A big shout-out to our Future of Work 2021 Co-presenting Sponsors Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Unique Solutions; Digital Excellence Partner Google Cloud; Associate Sponsors HP and Intel; and Sponsors Atlassian, Freight Tiger, Archon I Cohesity, TeamViewer, and Pocket Aces.