The incubator programme will enrol between six to ten “teams” every year, and offer between $50,000 and $150,000 as funding support, with “exceptional” teams getting up to $250,000, the firm said in a statement. It will be open to early-stage startups, as well as students and independent developers.
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On August 10, Krafton had announced investments worth about $150 million into Indian startups over the next two to three years. It has already invested about $140 million in 11 Indian gaming and content-driven ventures including Nazara Technologies’ unit Nodwin Gaming, audiobook portal Pratilipi, audio platform KukuFM, and streaming site Loco.
The South Korean developer owns the extremely popular online mobile game BattleGrounds Mobile India (BGMI), which in August completed a three-month review period after it was blocked by the government for about 10 months till May this year.
Participants in the newly-announced incubator programme will also receive mentorship from “renowned gaming industry executives, game builders and industry experts from South Korea… as well as from India”, Krafton said in the statement. They would also have access to Krafton’s data analytics and market research resources, it added.
Krafton will be open to follow-on investments in games incubated by the programme, or even in publishing them. “But we want to emphasise that we won’t restrict them from working with any other investor or publisher if they want to… we want to attract good talent and help them consider gaming as a career. We don’t really mean to pluck them up for ourselves… that is not the spirit of the incubator,” Sean Hyunil Sohn, chief executive of Krafton India, told ET in an interaction.
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The programme will be open to developers of games across formats like smartphones, PCs and consoles like the Playstation, said Anuj Sahani, Krafton’s India publishing advisor and the head of the incubator programme. All genres of games will be acceptable except real money games, he added. “We don’t have much clarity on what the quality or quantity of applications will be in this year’s programme, given this is our first time. We also don’t have many examples of global developers running gaming-focused incubators in India… there is the Sony incubator, but even that is very new,” said Sahani.
Earlier this year, Japanese media conglomerate Sony launched its own gaming-focused incubator programme called the India Hero Project in the country, offering “at least” $100,000 in funding.
The Indian game development ecosystem has seen increased activity over the past few months, with listed gaming and media firm Nazara Technologies saying it will launch a publishing arm in India, after it raised Rs 510 crore from SBI Mutual fund and Zerodha cofounder Nikhil Kamath.