Console and PC games are big video games made for a games console, such as a PlayStation or an Xbox, or for a personal computer. They are usually sold once, at a fixed price, and then updated for years. A large one is built by hundreds of engineers and artists over three to five years, and it can cost hundreds of crores of rupees to make.
Two kinds of company make these games. A studio builds the game. A publisher pays for it, markets it and sells it. The largest companies do both. Most studios build their games on a game engine, ready-made software that draws the graphics, runs the physics and plays the sound, instead of writing all of that themselves.
Take, for example, a football fan in Kolkata who buys the new edition of a popular football game for his console, for about ₹5,000. He downloads it from the console's online store. The price pays for the game itself. But the game is also a live service game. Every week, the publisher updates the players' ratings to match their real form, and adds new events. Inside the game, he can also build a team of star players by buying packs of player cards with real money. Many big games now earn more from such purchases than from the price of the game.
Before release, the studio runs playtesting, in which real players try the game and report problems. Its quality assurance teams also test the game for bugs, the faults in its code, before and after every update. Quality assurance is the name for this testing work. After launch, analytics show the studio where players struggle or stop playing.
PC players care a great deal about smoothness. It is measured in frames per second: the number of pictures the screen shows each second. Some players use game booster software to raise it. Many also watch other people play, or stream their own games, on a game streaming platform.
How is this different from a free-to-play mobile game? A console or PC game is paid for before anyone plays it, and every buyer pays the same price. A free-to-play game costs nothing to download and earns later, mostly from a few players who spend a lot.
Console and PC games are a small market in India, because consoles and gaming PCs are expensive and most Indians play on phones. But India is an important place where these games are built. Some of the world's biggest publishers run large engineering centres in Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Delhi. They work on game engineering, online services and quality assurance. One team in Delhi rebuilds classic games to look and play better on today's devices, which is called a remaster.