What Does a Serious Games Workshop Cost in India?
"Nobody in L&D publishes prices. So here's mine, what moves it, and how to work out whether it's worth it."
I should be fair to my own industry for a second. The reason "get in touch for a quote" is everywhere is not mystery pricing strategy. It's that a discovery call is much harder to walk away from than a number on a page.
Which is fine for the vendor and annoying for you, because you just want to know if this category is even in your ballpark before you give up forty minutes of your Thursday.
So. Numbers.
The Band: What to Expect
A day in the room runs between ₹60,000 and ₹1,00,000, plus taxes as applicable.
Half a day is half of that. So ₹30,000 to ₹50,000, plus taxes as applicable, on the same terms.
Both of those are ranges rather than a price list, and I do mean that. A short session with a lot built into it can land above a longer one with very little, so the clock is only part of it.
I put the range here because you should not have to sit through a call just to find out whether we are in the same ballpark. If that number is nowhere near your budget, you have saved yourself a fortnight and I would still rather you wrote to me and said so.
Where you land inside either of them comes down to five things, and none of them are a mystery:
- How long we are in the room. Half a day with one game and its debrief is one thing. A two-day programme is another.
- How many people are in the room, and how senior they are. Fifteen managers and sixty leaders are not the same day's work.
- How much I build from scratch. Running a game I already own costs less than designing your world, your constraints and your data into a new one.
- Whether I am leaving Bengaluru. Travel and stay are quoted separately, up front, so nothing appears on the invoice we did not talk about first.
- Whether it is one session or a series. Four batches of the same programme do not cost four times a single batch, because the design is built once.
A bespoke senior day, built from nothing, in another city, sits at the top of the band. A game I already run, one batch, here in Bengaluru, sits at the bottom. Most work lands somewhere in the middle, and I will tell you which end you are at in the first conversation rather than the third.
One honest thing about the calendar while we are being straight with each other. I take two or three engagements a month, mostly because I run every one of them myself, so dates go three or four weeks out. I would rather say that now than when you already have a date in mind.
Tell me roughly what you are trying to fix and you will have a real number, not a range, within a day of us speaking.
What Every Day Includes
Wherever you land in the band, the day covers a discovery call and brief beforehand, the session itself, an EPPA debrief, a written summary of the behaviour that showed up, and a committed action plan out of every participant.
None of those are add-ons and I won't sell them separately. A game without a proper debrief is an afternoon of fun that produces nothing, and I'd rather not take the money for it.
And if you run the same programme across several batches, it gets better as it goes. By batch three I know your business, and the sessions get sharper because of it.
What Is Not in the Band
Venue, food and equipment. I bring the game, you bring the room, the tables and the coffee. That's standard, and it keeps my fee from carrying costs that swing wildly depending on which hotel you like.
Follow-up coaching and post-session measurement design aren't in the day rate either. Some organisations want a proper framework to check behaviour at 60 or 90 days. Some want coaching for a specific person the debrief surfaced. Both available, both quoted separately.
How to Think About the Investment
The first question is always the same: how does this compare to a normal workshop of the same length? Per day, per head, a serious game costs more. Yes.
But per day is the wrong unit. The unit is cost per unit of behaviour that actually changed.
A standard leadership workshop at ₹30,000 for a full day with 25 people is ₹1,200 a head. Lovely number. If the day produces high engagement and no lasting change - which is what most content-led days produce - then your cost per unit of change is the entire ₹30,000, because you bought zero units.
The comparisons that actually matter are less comfortable. What does it cost you when a difficult conversation doesn't happen? When a headcount decision gets settled by whoever argued hardest rather than whoever was right? When a senior manager avoids a conflict until it lands on a director's desk three weeks later?
Those costs are real and recurring. They're invisible only because they get absorbed into the ordinary cost of being a company, and nobody ever writes them on an invoice.
I'm not going to claim a game makes them disappear. It makes the pattern underneath them visible and nameable, which is the part you can't do without. What you do in the six months after is the bit that decides the return.
What a Day in the Band Actually Buys
Let's make it concrete. Anywhere in the band, you get a discovery conversation to work out the real challenge and pick the right game, a fully facilitated day, an EPPA debrief that names what came out, a written summary of what the group showed about itself, and an action plan from every person in the room.
Here is an example, and only an example. A full day at the bottom of the band, ₹60,000 plus taxes as applicable, across 20 people, is ₹3,000 a head. The same 20 people at the top of the band, ₹1,00,000 plus taxes as applicable, is ₹5,000 a head.
For comparison, one hour of executive coaching runs ₹5,000 to ₹15,000, and works on one person. The game works on the individual and the team at the same time, which matters, because leadership behaviour is a team-shaped problem living in individual-shaped bodies.
Getting a Specific Quote
Everything gets scoped individually, because all the factors above move the number. Tell me the group, the challenge, the city and what you want out of it.
Quote comes back within 24 hours of that conversation. No hidden costs, no licensing fee, no "implementation charge". My fee covers everything I bring. You bring the room and the people.
Come and start the conversation. Or have a look at the games first and see if one of them already looks like your problem.
With love from Bengaluru, this is Arvindh saying over and out.