Trine Games, which was most recently in the news for owing its employees lakhs in unpaid salaries, appears to have vanished, only for its management to return under a new name – Crave India.
Crave, it appears, has its own “state-of-art development studio in Mumbai” called Rebelfiction. I’ve never heard of it, neither have any of my colleagues in the industry.
Crave describes itself as a “100% management owned International business group with concentration of developing high production value products for consumers and small medium businesses”.
As you can see, they’re pretty specific about what they do.
The company’s areas of business appear diverse, from dabbling in hospitality with a chain of restaurants (none of which are actually open yet) to manufacturing electronics in its “own manufacturing facility in Shenzen, China”. Of interest to us, however, is the games.
Crave, it appears, has its own “state-of-art development studio in Mumbai” called Rebelfiction. I’ve never heard of it, neither have any of my colleagues in the industry, but it has apparently “been the consistent trend-setter in Indian gaming”.
“The studio brings together some of the biggest names in game development from around the world, creating India’s most experienced and talented team”, the website proclaims.
We searched long and hard across social media for anyone who works for Rebelficition. We found nothing.
Crave claims to have offices in Los Angeles, London, Dubai, Mumbai, Pune and Shenzen, and yet a Google search for “Crave India” shows only results for an Indian restaurant of the same name in Vancouver.
One of two things is happening here. Either Rebelfiction is just bait for naive investors in the hopes that no one will actually look into these false claims. The other, far worse, possibility is that Crave is using the legacy of Trine and the efforts of those that have worked there – many of whose salaries remain unpaid – to prop up Rebelfiction.
It has all the makings of a shell entity. The Linkedin profile of Sangam Gupta, who was the CEO of Trine, and is now CEO of Crave India, states he’s been the CEO of Crave since May 2013, when the company page for Crave itself states that it was founded in 2014. In fact, Trine was still in operation in May 2013; its studio was closed that June.
That company page also claims that Crave has offices in Los Angeles, London, Dubai, Mumbai, Pune and Shenzen, and yet a Google search for “Crave India” shows only results for an Indian restaurant of the same name in Vancouver. And across all these various offices, Gupta is the only employee of Crave India on Linkedin. That’s strange for a company that’s been around for a year.
Let’s not even get into how the Rebelfiction logo pretty much rips off the Cooler Master logo.
I could be way off the mark though, and Crave India could well be a legitimate enterprise. But if that’s the case and Gupta and co really have enough funds to launch a multi-national start-up, how about paying all those hard-working game developers that helped get you to this point what they’re owed?