KRAFTON India Gaming Incubator expands cohort size, onboards six new studios
The new cohort aims to address the gaps in the gaming ecosystem to expand on KIGI’s learnings from its inaugural cohort that was launched in March last year.
KRAFTON India Gaming Incubator (KIGI) on Monday expanded its cohort size from four to six studios and unveiled the new startups onboarded as it looks to build on the learnings from its first cohort.
The new cohort includes Mumbai-based indie studio Kleanup Games and Singular Scheme, Kolkata-based Advaita Interactive, Bengaluru-based Smash Head Studio, Hyderabad-based Unwind Games, and New Delhi-based Ginger Games.
With the new set of game studios, KIGI expands its reach in the country to emerging gaming hubs like Kolkata and Madurai, among others.
The initiative also hopes to address some of the common challenges gaming studios in India face—issues that the company worked towards while closely monitoring its inaugural cohort of startups that was announced in March 2024.
Like its previous cohort, KIGI will provide mentorship programmes spanning six months to a year and financial assistance of up to $150,000.
KIGI has struck partnerships with AWS, AccelByte, App Magic and Liftoff's GameRefinery to respond to unique requirements of designing a game and the journey studios embark on while building their product.
“We saw there were gaps in actually understanding the market you're getting into. Each one has its own market, each game has its own market. So that's why we added GameRefinery and App Magic so that one can get those details. There were also gaps in running the user campaigns, like how to acquire users, how to grow the game. So we included more intensity in our marketing mentorship,” said Anuj Sahani, Head of KRAFTON India Incubator Program and India Publishing Advisor.
AccelByte will help provide back-end support to build games and include multiple features into the game. The cohort will also get AWS credits to help integrate and develop the back-end systems.
GameRefinery, on the other hand, will provide teams with insights into their competitors in the market to help teams build on this while crafting their game while App Magic will help teams gain access to data.
Additionally, the cohort is also expanding in terms of game genres. “We will still have casual games, but we have one game from Kolkata, which is a detective game, that is using AI intensively to solve murder mysteries. So it will be quite interesting to see how we use AI in that. We are also building one PC game in this cohort”, Sahani added.
KIGI is a mentorship-focused incubation programme that was launched in 2023 by South Korea-based KRAFTON which is home to developers including PUBG STUDIOS and Unknown Worlds, among others.