Over the past few years, the Indian game dev scene has been popping off, with Mumbai Gullies being arguably the most notorious name yet. First revealed in 2020, it gained popularity due to essentially being “GTA in Mumbai”. A brainchild of GameEon Studios’ CEO Nikhil Malankar, it was no doubt aiming for lofty heights by trying to be one of the most ambitious genre competitors in the indie market.
The stakes were especially high due to the team being from a country with a pretty small game development scene. Unfortunately, with plenty of missed deadlines and unfulfilled promises, the game is nowhere to be found. So what really happened? Let’s break it all down.
Why Mumbai Gullies may never see the light of day again
Not long after it was announced, GameEon released a teaser trailer for Mumbai Gullies; it looked decent enough, albeit choppy, which fans took to mean that this must be a build in progress. Well, it turns out that the game did not even start serious development until 2021. Any subsequent demos that were showcased to the public looked drastically different from what the teaser suggested.
The last demo for the game was seen at Comic Con 2025, which I had the opportunity to attend. Excited to see how the game has been shaping up, I made my way to their booth, wondering what kind of open-world mechanics were in store for me to discover. Unfortunately, I was shocked to learn that the demo contained no open world.
Instead, I was met with a mini-game where the goal was to drive a car through checkpoints. Poor visuals aside, the car handling was quite poor; I’m still unsure to this day why the team thought gameplay slice this was in any way a good look for their project. Regardless, this is where I learned that Mumbai Gullies had recently switched engines, which does explain why they had basically nothing to show for their work all these years.
Sadly, this is where all the red flags started to make sense. Malankar has spent the past 3-4 years marketing the game, from promises of a Prologue demo to detailing the open-world map for the game. GameEon even unveiled a development roadmap, where the game would be split into several chunks. This would include an alpha, beta, and Console launch all in 2023.
This would be followed by a PC and DLC launch in 2024, and finally, Mumbai Gullies: Final Chapter in 2025. Of course, none of these plans came to fruition. As if that wasn’t enough, they also announced a separate racing game called FML: Fast Motor Lunatics last year and suggested that the team would churn out smaller games utilizing Mumbai Gullies’ mechanics in the meantime to tide fans over – all of this is while the main project hasn’t even landed its boots on the ground.
If reading all of that gave you whiplash, then rest assured, the feeling is mutual. But let’s take a step back – surely the final game will live up to the teaser’s vision? Alas, we may never know. In his recent I Need Your Help. I Can’t Finish Mumbai Gullies. video on YouTube, Malankar reveals that while the project was initially self-funded, he misjudged just how expensive game development is, much less the development of a super ambitious game. In other words, Mumbai Gullies has officially been canceled or at least put on hold indefinitely.
While he did eventually get some investors on his side as well as a $25,000 USD grant from Epic Games, none of it was enough. The game switched engines several times throughout development; initially built atop Unreal Engine 4, the team switched to Unreal Engine 5 for improved visual fidelity. However, this also meant rising costs that the team did not anticipate.
In the end, they decided to switch again to Unity (as seen in the Comic Con 2025 demo), and then back to Unreal. Malankar claimed this shift severely downgraded the visuals of their game, which does not sound right; game engines are tools at the end of the day, and Unity is one of the most popular indie picks, even for 3D games. Key examples include Escape from Tarkov and Sons of the Forest. So it seems like the artists and technical team fell short in this regard.
In his recent video, Malankar accepts the blame for being too ambitious, which should have been a no-brainer from the get-go; after all, there is a reason why GTA clones in the indie scene are MUCH smaller in scope and size, such as Retro City Rampage or Rustler (Grand Theft Horse), both of which are isometric games.
Then there’s the question of cost. Pune-based Nodding Head Games co-founder Shruti Ghosh had to mortgage her apartment to keep funding going for their debut project, Raji: An Ancient Epic. This was also a smaller-scope, isometric project as a debut title, which should paint a clear picture of just how difficult game development is as a small team of software developers.
With development costs ballooning into the hundreds of millions, making a game like this today by an inexperienced indie team seems irrational, especially when Mumbai Gullies team members left mid-development due to being unpaid. As if the latter wasn’t bad enough, GameEon also has no prior experience making console or PC quality games; Malankar and his team have only made apps and games in the smartphone space for Android and iOS.
So, taking everything into consideration, it is easy to see why this project was doomed from the start. All in all, Mumbai Gullies is a classic case of project mismanagement and trying to chew more than humanly possible. Despite all of this, however, Malankar wants a second chance to make Mumbai Gullies, as he is adamant that he could get the game off the ground with another year of funding and work.
The final question is: who is ready to back this lost cause of a project at this point? Fans who donated to his cause won’t be getting their money back, so a Kickstarter would probably be dead-on-arrival. Not to mention a year will likely not be enough to accomplish anything, when the past 5 years have been largely fruitless. On the bright side, this does paint a vibrant picture of how not to do things for other current and budding Indian game developers.
Since Mumbai Gullies’ announcement, plenty of new competitors have stepped into the ring. These range from history-inspired epics like Son of Thanjai and the mythologically influenced Unleash The Avatar, to the wholly unique DMC-like Null New Order. Each is as ambitious as Malankar’s Indian GTA effort, and we hope they do not make the same mistakes in the end.
Are you stuck on today’s Wordle? Our Wordle Solver will help you find the answer.
Edited by Siddharth Patil