Microsoft has been dangling the Xbox (Microsoft's handheld gaming device and competitor to Sony's Playstation and Nintendo's Gameboy) carrot to Indian gamers for over two years now. While Playstation is still a monopoly, an Indian company has, at last, managed to get a claw into the Xbox game developing community.
Today, a major part of the profits at the Rs 10 crore MAQ Software, Rajeev Agarwal's four year old company, comes from developing gaming engines for handheld devices.
MAQ developed the game engine for Xbox's Rallis championship "" an arcade racing game. On an average, the company, growing at 100 per cent a year, charges between $25 and $75 an hour for the job which could take months to develop .
Agarwal, an ex-Microsoft employee, set up MAQ to develop E-procurement software. "Thanks to our track record of deliverability with Microsoft, we were referred to Xbox's game development department," says Vikram Kumar, director, MAQ.
The developers of MAQ in Mumbai, helped develop multiple championships for online games for Xbox users on the website www.xsnsports.com.
The Xbox users can log on to the website and play with other real-time Xbox users. So despite the unavailability of Xbox in India, the developers were able to put together an application engine and a game management software which has, till date, handled 40,000 simultaneous users. "The realm of back-end game engine development is the niche we want to occupy," says Kumar.
Worldwide, handheld game players are expected to grow to 43 million in 2009 from 23 million last year.
