The death of Trine: a cautionary tale about game development in India

Trine (not to be confused with the awesome game series of the same name) was one of India’s first console studios. It got mainstream public attention in India for its announcement of the interesting-looking racer Streets of Mumbai, and while that was only a ploy for attention, since then Trine has made ten games ranging from RPGs like Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods to cricket titles such as Street Cricket Champions. It was arguably one of India’s most prolific studios.

Now, almost a year after apparently going defunct, Trine is in the news again. With some Trine employee salaries still unpaid since last year, the folks behind Trine have started a new company anyway.

I managed to speak to then-CEO Sangam Gupta (who, if Google is to be believed, hasn’t been interviewed in six years). The ex-CEO and erstwhile owner of Trine now runs Rebelfiction. I wanted to know where it all went wrong for one of India’s brighter studios. He boils it down to himself:

It was my personal managerial mistake. We had overestimated ourselves, to be very frank. For […] the resources we had available, we should have got rid of [some other resources] to keep the payments going.

Though this sounds like a rather simple error, it’s not the only thing that torpedoed Trine. Prying further, it seems like mismanagement was just one of the many problems the company had.

Passion and publishers

Gupta was trying to build a studio that was different. His vision wasn’t to create a pure service- driven business similar to the IT sector, nor was it to be as frugally-run as some of his competitors.

I didn’t want to run this like an IT business. That’s not gaming. We’re gamers. We’re doing this out passion. We’re doing what we love. Sure, we’re an entertainment company, but we have to deliver. And I banked on my team delivering. That’s where I found my position to be the worst. Not only am I getting heat from employees for not getting paid but I’m getting heat from clients. Publishers would get upset.

Specifically, publishers got upset with Trine missing milestones and release dates. Teams at Trine were given the liberty to set their own milestones, but that didn’t work as smoothly as Gupta had hoped. They sometimes missed by as much as five months. Naturally that had an adverse effect on the balance sheet.

My vision for Trine was to give all the guys a platform to perform. Every milestone given to a publisher was [set] by the team. With Move Street Cricket 2, my own team said that they’d submit the gold master by November. That didn’t happen until April. I clearly told every single guy that if this happens there will be payment issues. During the production phase there were no payment issues because we were delivering on time and we were getting paid on time. It’s not like I was running away with the money.

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