LILA Games builds in Bengaluru.

An office in Bengaluru, a build server humming, a deadline.

On any given Tuesday at LILA Games' studio in Bengaluru, the morning starts with a build. Engineers in Bengaluru push, designers in three time zones pull, and somewhere in the middle a Unity project that has been growing for the better part of five years compiles itself into another playable slice. The game is called Project Black. It is the only game LILA has shipped, will ship, or talks about. That is on purpose.

LILA Games occupies a curious patch of the gaming world. India has more than half a billion gamers and almost no AAA-grade mobile shooters made for them by a homegrown studio. The country exports software the way some countries export oil. It does not, yet, export shooters. LILA is built around the suspicion that this is about to change, and the rougher suspicion that someone has to be first.

Free-to-play stopped being a craft.

Somewhere in the late 2010s, the free-to-play mobile shooter went from a genre to a recipe. Copy the loop, tune the monetisation, A/B the timers, exit through the gift shop. The result was a market crowded with games that felt like spreadsheets with skins. Players noticed. Retention got harder. The good studios got tired.

LILA's founders had watched this from inside the machine. Joseph Kim was Chief Product Officer at SEGA and a studio lead at FunPlus. Paul Leydon was lead designer at FunPlus and MZ. Avinash Pandey had co-founded the Y Combinator-backed JUNE Gaming. They had each, in their own way, helped build the recipe. They were each, in their own way, done with it.

Three people, one principle, an unfashionable bet on India.

LILA was incorporated in 2020 - which, if you were starting a venture-backed studio, was an inadvisable year to do so. The founders went anyway. They raised a $2.8M seed in 2021 from BITKRAFT, Galaxy Interactive, and Sequoia's Surge program. They picked Bengaluru as headquarters - not as a cost play, but because they believed the talent pool was already there and the rest of the industry just had not bothered looking.

The studio's founding principle, written into the values document and worn down by repetition, is three words: people can change. It is the kind of sentence that can sound either trite or radical depending on the room. Inside LILA, where the rest of the values include "Radical Truth and Debate" and the unsubtle "Character and Cruelty", it lands closer to radical.

Project Black: a single-minded answer.

Project Black is what LILA calls its first and, for now, only game. It is an extraction shooter built for mobile, in Unity, with social and competitive systems at its core. The genre is not new. The execution intends to be.

The studio describes the game as "one of the most ambitious shooter games in the market." This is the kind of sentence you should ordinarily discount by 60%, except LILA has spent five years and roughly $19M of investor money refusing to ship until the game meets the line in its own brief. That is either discipline or stubbornness, and both are useful in shooters.

The cap table is the receipt.

It is fair to ask, of any unlaunched studio, whether anyone serious has signed on. LILA's answer is the room.

Rainfall Ventures led the Series A. KRAFTON - the South Korean publisher behind PUBG, a property that arguably defined the mobile shooter category - participated. Sequoia, BITKRAFT, and Galaxy Interactive participated. The angel list includes Ryan Wyatt (former head of YouTube Gaming, then Polygon Studios CEO), Tanay Tayal (Moonfrog Labs), and Thomas Vu, the producer of Netflix's Arcane.

This is not a crowd that writes checks for vibes. They write checks because they have read the deck, played the build, and decided the unit economics and the gameplay both clear the bar. KRAFTON, in particular, did not need a second shooter studio in its portfolio. It backed one anyway.

"People can change." Including, occasionally, countries.

The phrase is doing more work than it looks. LILA's eight values - direct communication, radical truth and debate, clear areas of responsibility, character and cruelty, common sense rules, taking initiative, focus on solutions, determined optimism - all hang off it. The studio's internal hiring filter is built on it. The decision to base the company in Bengaluru, in a market that has historically been outsourced to rather than originated from, is built on it.

You can read the mission cynically. Most missions deserve it. This one is harder to dismiss because LILA spent five years refusing to ship a worse game in order to test it. The market will eventually decide whether the test was honest. The team has already decided to take the question seriously.

If Project Black lands, it lands a few things at once. It lands a mobile shooter that did not come out of San Mateo, Helsinki, or Seoul. It lands a piece of evidence for every Indian gaming founder who has been told their market is for porting, not originating. It lands a question for the next round of investors looking at Indian studios: not "can they build it" but "why aren't more of them building it".

If it does not land, LILA still shipped something rarer than a shooter: a working argument that a studio in Bengaluru can attract Joseph Kim, Paul Leydon, Avinash Pandey, $19M of capital, and 160 of the better people in the industry, and keep them. That argument does not unship.

Back to that Tuesday morning.

The build finishes. Someone in QA pings the design channel about a hit-reg edge case in the third zone. Someone in art uploads a new pass on a helmet that will be argued about for another two weeks. The studio's eight values are on a wall somewhere. Project Black is closer than it was yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that.

LILA Games has not yet launched its first title. By the time it does, the company will have spent more than five years answering a question the rest of the industry mostly stopped asking: whether a free-to-play shooter, built carefully, in a city no one expected, could be worth the wait. The market will get a vote. The build server already has.

Links, channels, watering holes.