India's Oldest Game Studio, Dhruva Interactive Gets Acquired By Rockstar Games For Rs 55 Crore
Rockstar Games, the game studio behind global hits like 'Grand Theft Auto', And 'Red Dead Redemption', has now decided to invest in development in India.
The company just acquired an Indian game studio, one of the oldest in the country in fact.
Rockstar Games acquired Dhruva Interactive, headquartered in Bangalore, back in December, though it was only just announced. Founded in 1997 by Rajesh Rao, it claims to be the first game development studio ever to be set up in India. According to reports, Rajesh Rao will work with Rockstar Games to smoothen the transition, as well as to continue to advise them later on how to strengthen the game dev community in the country.
Right now, Dhruva Interactive employs about 300 developers and game art designers. When the company was founded more than 20 years ago, they first started out by providing code for the game rendering engine on the Pentium II for Intel. They eventually went on to make contributions to major titles like the 'Forza' series, 'Prey', and more recently, 'Days Gone'. They even churned out a few original games of their own.
Though Dhruva Interactive will continue to work on current projects uninterrupted, the announcement specifies they will work as part of the Rockstar India team alongside about 500 other developers also in Bangalore.
"Dhruva Interactive has been a beacon of Indian game development for decades and we are excited to bring them into the Rockstar family," said Daniel Smith, Studio Manager of Rockstar India. "The addition of the Dhruva team to the existing talent at Rockstar India will expand the studio's capabilities and reinforces our belief in and commitment to the local development community."
"Rockstar Games are the undisputed leaders of innovation and creativity in modern game development, said Dhruva CEO and Founder Rajesh Rao. "Dhruva Interactive was founded with the aim of creating a world-class game development community in India, and so bringing the Dhruva team under the Rockstar Games label is further proof that we have succeeded in creating a talented team that can contribute to the best games in the world while helping to create a thriving local game developer community in India."