Honesty is the best policy

By Nikhil Malankar on January 8, 2015 Comments Closed / 2098 views

Hello Rodinhooders,

So well first of all I feel very sad that I could not be a part of The Rodinhoods Open House in December 2014 since me and my team were pretty busy with development of our upcoming game “Special Ops”. Also I’d like to start this post by an apology to Asha ma’am for not being able to reply to the last email conversation between us since I had mailed her regarding presenting our game at the Open House but then it skipped my mind to reply back. And Alok Sir, please read this. I’ve mentioned you in a lot of places in this post.

And yet again its been an awfully long time since I last wrote on Rodinhoods and had decided to write after our game was launched but in the last few days some incidents happened that I would love to share here with you all. The title of this post is a very popular saying which I’m sure most of you readers would agree with. Anyways I’ll share what happened which strengthened my belief in the same but before that I’d like to give you people a quick look at what we’re working on currently. So in the last 3 months we had been working on a first person shooter game and have given our 200% to the development of this game. Till now, based on feedback from many people we’ve developed a really awesome game but then as they say, every coin has two sides, we’re also improvising on our game based on the criticism we have gotten from the feedback as well. You can find the screenshots of the game at the end of this post. We’ve been working on the development of this game since October 2014 and are pretty excited to launch it since this is our best effort till now.

Phew, so that was about our game. Now coming to the incident what happened. So a few days back I was interviewed on a website wherein I didn’t hold back with my views on gaming industry in India and replied to all questions with utmost honesty. I was so honest in my opinion that I made a statement, “we observed that Indian game developers are anyways developing clones or shit games.” I posted this in NASSCOM Gaming Forum group and then was flooded with hate comments. Here’s a screenshot of the same.

I know the statement comes off as a direct insult to many game developers in India including Alok Sir too but hello! Thats my personal opinion and I’m a 20 year old trying to speak out whats on my mind. I really think its time that this scenario changes and the top games from India are something really ground smashing in terms of innovation. And its not something that most gamers don’t feel. I’ve had talks with many of my friends who call Indian games shit. Come on, they even call my own games shit and I agree with them because they are. I’ve grown up playing games like Grand Theft Auto, Road Rash, Call Of Duty and all these amazing game titles which made me relate every phase of my life with a game. When I first met Alok Sir this is what I told him, “Sir if companies from outside India can make amazing games like Need for Speed then why not us Indians?”

If there’s anything that I learnt from the last 2 years of my life, its to be honest with what you feel. If you read each and every comment there you’ll come to know that I’ve been as nice as possible and tried to take in criticism where it held true. But after a certain point of time even I lost my cool and wrote “Screw you’ll” in one of the comments. I tried to explain my views that the statement was not meant for the ones that were innovating and was only for the ones which held true to the line. But mere mann mein jo tha woh maine waise ka waisa bol diya 🙁 I meant no disrespect to anyone and was just posting my personal opinion on the state of gaming Industry in today’s times in India.

India is progressing greatly in terms of gaming and I think that if ALL big studios with lots of money resources would start developing great IPs India would dominate the gaming market and even beat. Alok Sir, as an honest gamer I’ll say Parking Frenzy did its job and instead of launching multiple clones of your games it’d be really great to see some original and fresh new game play elements in games of Games2win. I’m sure people here are at least sensible enough to see my intentions behind that statement.

And during this time it was not all negativity as well. I was praised by many for being courageous to say such a bold statement. Rodinhooder Mukesh Dube Sir was kind enough to motivate me for being truthful about my opinion and standing my ground even after getting so many negative comments. Anyways, I deleted the post from that group because I realized that it’ll be a big time waste to continue to give explanation to people who just aren’t ready to understand my point of view.

I really hope that this post does make a difference. So help me rodinhooders, did I do the right thing by being honest about my opinions?