By Patrick Garratt

India's relationship with videogames differs greatly from countries in the west. Its mobile game consumption is enormous, with roughly eight billion downloads in 2025 making it one of the world's largest markets for phone play, while PC and console game creation and consumption is still largely undeveloped. Ravi Mantena and Deepak Gurijala, the founders of 1312 Interactive, purportedly the first indie publisher in India, are leading a market of one. 1312 was founded in 2024, launched in February 2025, and announced a $1 million seed round in September.

While grants have been offered to encourage Indian development – including the PlayStation India Hero Project and the Krafton India Gaming Incubator, both of which launched in 2023 – "all of them were development funds and development grants, primarily without support in publishing," says Mantena.

Looking back further into the history of India's development industry, Gurijala says that "back in 2005, 2010, there were distributors, but there were no publishers. People used to come to companies to sell the games into India and Southeast Asia, but there were no dedicated global publishing firms."

When funding started to flow towards development, though, the industry started to change.

"There was a huge shift in the Indian development space, with more young people setting up studios and a lot of startups coming in," says Mantena of the moment the pair spotted the obvious gap, founding 1312 Interactive in Hyderabad in 2024 and launching publicly in February 2025. Gurijala, a long-time mobile game developer, provided the Indian ecosystem knowledge and Mantena the western experience, having spent around five years as VP of products at Pole To Win, the Japanese game services group. Gurijala is a founder of Street Lamp Games, the Hyderabad studio where he made more than 150 games, almost all hyper-casual mobile titles. Having worked with more than 35 publishers, in 2021 he co-founded the CrazyHubs accelerator with CrazyLabs, partly to learn how publishing works.

1312's mission is simple: profit by disrupting the global game industry's focus on the west.

"There are so many great games coming from emerging markets," says Gurijala, that are "dying" because of "zero discoverability". By "emerging markets," he means India, Southeast Asia, the LatAm region and parts of Eastern Europe: "If the player doesn't know the game exists, that means they never buy the game. That's what's happening with every indie studio in emerging markets."

Mantena and Gurijala are aiming to change that, at least in India, by offering deals for those making PC and console games that include both development and publishing support. 1312 can also help with art, audio, and even design play systems, not just marketing and promotion.

"If it's required, we make sure the game gets fine-tuned," says Mantena, "because for most of the folks we're working with, it's probably the first time they're building a PC or console game… We help them with all aspects of the game development journey wherever they need it."

When it comes to marketing, they "try to make sure the game gets visibility at a global scale," Mantena adds, noting that 1312 offers "PR, building communities on Reddit, Discord, other social channels, or [creating] long- or short-form content." 

1312 was responsible for publishing Bangalore-based Brewed Games' Wings Of Arcana: Ruination at the end of 2025, which was signed by Microsoft for distribution via Game Pass. A later release was Mono Tusk Studios' Palm Sugar: A Village Story, developed in Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh by a tiny team led by Kartheek Raj.

"He was running the studio with zero budget and we loved the game," says Gurijala. "So we signed it."

1312's involvement allowed the title, a pixel-art action RPG set in an Indian village under threat from a drug cartel, to become "important" enough to be released for the global market. The publisher's localisation efforts put it into 16 different languages, making it, according to Gurijala, the world's first PC game in Tamil and Telugu.

"It's not only the game that has to become big," he says. "We also want the studio to become big."

Min-max investment

While the services 1312 offers to developers may seem normal to western publishers and developers, the fact that Mantena and Gurijala are currently the only team offering them in India makes them people to watch. There is, of course, another factor that could mean the founders are already on the path to serious success: game development in India, at least by western standards, is inexpensive.

"Their core team is four or five people, but they're contracting six or seven people… paying $200,000–300,000 to them over a span of a year," says Mantena, speaking of a hypothetical western indie developer.

"We can do all of that in India for $30,000-40,000, to the exact same level or better."

The range of funding 1312 offers goes up to around $150,000 for an exceptional title, but for the publisher to spend in that range would require a strong indication, such as a high level of wishlists, that the final product is going to perform well. 

Speaking of Palm Sugar, Gurijala says that 1312's outlay has been "very, very minimal… I’m not giving the numbers because of confidentiality, but it’s very minimal." 

The key to 1312's continued growth is selling outside of India, whose PC game consumer space has yet to develop. India itself accounts for only between five and ten per cent of the publisher's sales. Breakout hits in the wider global market are real possibilities given the low costs, "but everything has to click," says Mantena. 

1312 appears to be in the right place at the right time. Of the next three years, Mantena hopes "we'll have 15 to 18 games launched in our portfolio," which currently contains five. "Hopefully at least three to five of those games perform well for us from an economic perspective." 

Because in reality that's all that's needed, and the company fits easily into the currently favoured model of keeping costs to a minimum while carefully eyeing low-spend titles that could achieve virality. The next release is We Are So Cooked, for example, scheduled for the first quarter of next year and already sitting at over 600,000 wishlists on Steam. The four-player game, developed in Tenkasi, a small town in southern Tamil Nadu, is based on the idea that you and your friends have accidentally killed someone and need to dispose of the body.

It's the sort of game that could easily go viral, and from the maths offered by Mantena and Gurijala, any kind of hit will ensure these are two names you're going to be hearing for a long time to come. If 1312's about making sure Indian indie developers get seen, then there's every chance Mantena and Gurijala will succeed. 

A final note on the name of the publisher, 1312. Mantena and Gurijala laugh when asked if they know what it means in the west. 

"It was basically our kids' birthdays," says Gurijala. "Ravi's daughter was born on 13th of June, and my son was born on 12th of November. It's as simple as that. 

"1312 rhymed really well for us. It was a no-brainer. We went with it. We didn't do any history check."