tAt long last, the city has seen one concrete step towards setting up of an animation and gaming hub with Industries and IT Minister K.T. Rama Rao laying the foundation stone for a facility to be developed on a sprawling 16 lakh sq. ft built-up area.
Coming up as a one-stop shop for services and solutions, the integrated facility had remained elusive so far in spite of promises made by the successive governments. The previous government headed by N. Kiran Kumar Reddy had offered to construct an incubation centre called GAME Towers with the state-of-the-art “walk to work” and “plug and play” built-up office space provided at subsidised prices.
The much-publicised Gaming, Animation, Media and Entertainment Policy, however, remained a non-starter. The city contributed to some of the blockbuster movies like Life of Pi , Arundhati , Eega and Magadheera , but games like Farm Villa and Escape from Madagascar saw a down trend in the previous years with several firms downing their shutters.
French developer Gameloft shut down its office at Kondapur leaving close to 250 employees in the lurch while another online gaming firm, Gameshastra, which was acquired by the Disney, too closed its Hyderabad Studios.
The Telangana government announced a host of incentives and subsidies to support the gaming and animation industry ever since it took over the reins with Mr. Rama Rao being given the portfolio of IT and Industries. Incentives like capital investment subsidy, recruitment assistance, entertainment tax exemption, reimbursement of stamp duty, lease rental subsidy, reimbursement of production cost and internet charges as well as patent filing expenditure were announced by the government to give a fillip to the sector.
The government also set up an incubation centre spread over 27,000 sq. ft to handhold the industry and these initiatives culminated in laying of the foundation stone for the animation and gaming hub in Telangana.
“I am confident that ours [IT incentives and policy] can easily be considered the best package in totality. Our government is prepared to design a tailor-made package for marquee names and mega investors if need be,” Mr. Rama Rao said.
