DES 2025: Gaming firms and startups in embrace AI to gain an edge
Indian gaming startups are turning to generative AI to streamline production, enhance gameplay, and compete globally as the industry evolves.
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Generative artificial intelligence and gaming may appear to have little in common. But in India, these two fast-growing sectors are finding common ground, as gaming companies increasingly turn to GenAI to optimize production, enhance user experiences, and scale operations.
At Storyboard18’s Digital Entertainment Summit 2025, Deepak MV, chief executive of Openplay Technologies, a Nazara group company, said the company set up a task force a year ago to study how GenAI could impact both user experiences and internal workflows. Nazara, he noted, has partnered with global technology companies and AI startups to identify relevant use cases while assembling teams with GenAI expertise.
“AI is a co-pilot for the UX, QA team, playtesting, and design teams,” Deepak said at the summit. He added that Nazara is extensively training data sets on art, design, and Q&A to build customized in-house use cases.
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For SuperGaming, GenAI is helping smaller teams punch above their weight. Roby John, founder and chief executive of SuperGaming and creator of the game Indus, said that GenAI has raised the ambitions of young studios often constrained by limited funding. India’s rich trove of mythology, folklore, and stories of valor remains largely untapped by the gaming sector, he noted, but AI has enabled these narratives to be transformed into engaging games.
Talking about the Indus Battle Royale mobile game, John explained that his team fed all art concepts into AI to train it to help create the game.
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“AI is a great leveler because teams that have produced similar games either have a 25-year culture of game production or have teams of 500 people. So, AI is kind of best bet for competing on these big dimensions,” John said.
GenAI is now enabling small teams to tackle production, concept art, level design, procedural world-building, and dynamic environment creation, John added.
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Anurag Choudhary, founder of Felicity Games, is also tapping AI for what he calls “casual gaming.” For Choudhary, gaming is an interactive medium that stays with players even when they are not actively playing, and success hinges on design, experience, and calibrated difficulty rather than on art alone. While GenAI can ease the creation of games, monetization still demands rigorous strategy and execution.
He said that the key pillars of game design, monetization strategies, and cost-effective customer acquisition will remain critical for studios aiming to differentiate themselves.
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Deepak of Openplay noted that studios are increasingly leveraging AI for user experience creatives and user acquisition. “On the onboarding journey, we do personalization in terms of gameplay, offers, IAP, and so on, using ML,” he said. AI companions are also gaining popularity across gaming platforms. “AI is a leveler that is going to redefine the gaming sector,” he added.
Yet as GenAI permeates the gaming ecosystem, concerns are emerging about its potential to outpace human creators. Choudhary cautioned that if AI begins to understand humans better than they understand themselves, “everyone in the industry will be out of business.”
On the other hand, Abhishek Ravi, chief information officer at Dream Sports, said GenAI has brought renewed energy to the sector. “We have adopted AI from the top-down to bottom-up, where every team is freely experimenting. Henceforth, the company is also releasing the features at a much faster pace than the year ago, leading to more internal excitement.”
Deepak added that AI has become deeply integrated into his personal workflow as well. “It has become an assistant to build plans, and fast-tracks decision-making,” he said.
