KRAFTON India Selects Six studios For Its Second Incubation Program

KRAFTON announced today that six new studios selected for the second cohort of its game startup mentoring program 'the KRAFTON India Gaming Incubator (KIGI).'

Launched in October 2023, KIGI aims to support India’s game development ecosystem and help local studios become globally competitive. Chosen startups will receive expert mentoring for 6–12 months and funding of up to $150,000.

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Over 350 companies from across India applied. The new cohort includes Kleanup Games and Singular Scheme (Mumbai), Advaita Interactive (Kolkata), Smash Head Studio (Bengaluru), Unwind Games (Hyderabad) and Ginger Games (New Delhi). With these additions, KIGI is now reaching emerging gaming hubs like Kolkata and Madurai.

The program also aims to solve common problems Indian game studios face, based on learnings from the first group of startups announced in March 2024.

To support game development, KIGI has partnered with AWS, AccelByte, App Magic and GameRefinery by Liftoff.

“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.

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.

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