Gameshastra has launched an advanced game services facility in India for global game publishers and developers. The 25,000 square foot facility will house project teams that will focus on providing full range of game development, game art/animation and QA services for console, PC and mobile game platforms.

The facility was inaugurated by Brian Ward, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Studios, Activision. Activision announced that it is looking forward to work closely with Gameshastra on some of its forthcoming projects.

The console game market is the fastest growing business opportunity for game publishers. "Game publishers continuously publish and bring new experiences within the game industry, taking players to a whole new level of play," says Prakash Ahuja, Chief Executive Officer, Gameshastra Inc. "Gameshastra's high quality game services capability and state of the art infrastructure in Hyderabad will enable both the performance and flexibility that is critical to meet a game publishers' rising creative challenges and first-to-market demands."

"The creation of Gameshastra Game Services facility in India is an important step for complementing game publishers' strategy to partner with highly talented game services providers in order to meet increasing demand for new products and features," says Brian Ward. "It allows publishers to focus on new product research while taking full advantage of Gameshastra's end to end game services capabilities".

Mohan Bhupatiraju, Director, Gameshastra, says, "Today, game publishers put game services [sic] providers under rigorous scrutiny in areas such as security, infrastructure, and the ability to provide efficient and expert game services at all levels." Commenting on the newest facility in Hyderabad, Mohan said, "The Gameshastra facility is a fully certified testing facility incorporating advanced game testing and debugging tools and has highly skilled gaming and testing experts with real-time testing experience on all of the latest game consoles, including the Nintendo WII, Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360. The testing facility also incorporates some of the world's most demanding security systems".

With the increasing size and complexity of new generation console and PC games, the demand for large quantities of high quality art and animation for games has grown several times over.

Gameshastra extends functionality, gameplay and certification testing on console, mobile, handheld and online platforms. The company also offers hardware compatibility testing to assure that its customers' applications work with most common hardware available today. The company plans to invest over US$5 million in the facility and will invest another 20 million over the next two years. The company plans to reach a headcount of over 1000 people in the coming 18 months.