Nobody in Bongaon is building a mobile game studio. I know, because for a while, I was fairly sure I was the only person trying.
Bongaon isn’t on anyone’s map of Indian tech. It’s not Bangalore, it’s not Mumbai, it’s not even a tier-2 city with a coworking space and a founder meetup every other Thursday. When I tell people here that I co-founded a game studio, the first question usually isn’t “how’s it going” — it’s “wait, from here?”
That question used to bother me. Now I think it’s the most useful thing anyone’s ever asked me, because answering it honestly taught me something I didn’t expect: the hub was never the point.
The myth I believed for longer than I should have
For a long time, I assumed serious company-building needed proximity — to investors, to other founders, to the kind of casual hallway conversation that turns into a deal. That belief is everywhere in how startup culture talks about itself. Hubs get the press. Hubs get the “ecosystem.” Everyone else gets told to move.
We didn’t move. Quantam Core exists because three of us decided the studio would run on whatever infrastructure actually mattered — and none of that infrastructure cared what city was on our address.
What actually makes a studio run
Look at what our entire pipeline is built on: Unity for the engine, GitHub so three people can work on the same codebase without stepping on each other, Google Play Console to ship, AdMob to monetize, Google AI Studio and Canva for the parts that used to need a bigger team. Every one of those is a browser tab. Not one of them asks where you’re sitting when you open it.
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That’s not a workaround for not being in a hub. That is the industry now. The bottleneck was never geography. It was whether you actually opened the tab.
What you don’t get, and have to build yourself
I want to be honest about the part that doesn’t get easier: there’s no ambient network here. No founder down the street to grab coffee with when a decision is eating at you. No investor event to wander into. Every relationship we have with anyone outside the three of us, we built on purpose, over the internet, from zero. That takes more deliberate effort than it would if we could just show up somewhere and be in the room.
And there’s a smaller, quieter cost: the loneliness of doing something nobody around you has a frame of reference for. Most people in a hub are surrounded by other people doing something adjacent to what they’re doing. We’re surrounded by people who are, reasonably, a little confused about what a “finance lead for a game studio” even does for a living.
What you get instead
What we got in exchange was a runway that stretches further, because the cost of living here isn’t fighting us the way it would in a metro. As the person who watches our budget line by line, that’s not a small thing — it’s the difference between having six more months to get a game right and not having them.
We also got forced self-reliance early, which turned out to be a strength disguised as a disadvantage. When there’s no ecosystem to lean on, you learn to answer your own questions instead of asking around for who already knows. You get comfortable being the first person in the room who’s tried something, because there was never a room to begin with.
The actual lesson
Carrom King Classic is live on the Play Store right now. It got built by three people, none of us in a hub, using tools any founder anywhere in the world has access to. The lesson I keep coming back to isn’t “small towns are secretly great for startups” — some days they genuinely aren’t. It’s simpler than that: the map of where you’re allowed to be ambitious is a lot smaller than the map of where you actually can be. Most of the difference between the two was never about location. It was about whether you were willing to be the first person from where you’re from to try.
If you’re building something from somewhere that isn’t supposed to produce people who build things — I’d like to hear about it. And if you want to follow along as we ship the next few titles out of Bongaon, I’ll be writing more of this as it happens.
Quantam Core is an indie mobile game studio based in Bongaon, West Bengal, India. Carrom King Classic is live now on the Google Play Store.
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