There’s being in tech and then there’s being in games, to be specific mobile games and to be more specific mobile games in Africa.
Making games in Africa is probably one of the toughest entrepreneurial or career choices one can make. This is because on this side of the planet, the masses mainly focus on products that generally lead to food on the table or money in the pocket.
If your product tries to mainly take money out of the pocket like most games do in the West, it automatically becomes a very hard sell. Over the years, we have also gotten used to accessing entertainment for free online (pirated or otherwise) so it becomes hard to monetize and profit from ventures such as mobile games in this market.
That being said, people still pay for entertainment, even the pirated kind and the numbers keep going up, pricing is usually the biggest factor and motivator in this case even when the value is clearly there. Mobile game makers and publishers such as Carry1st have also been trying to find better more creative ways of monetizing games in Africa besides using third party in app Ads.
Carrt1st started by making and putting out their own games such as a play to earn trivia game that did pretty well. They have gone on to build an all-encompassing platform that is aimed at helping other game developers and studios both in Africa and outside the continent tap into the ever growing market composed mainly of a young population willing to try out games.
Carry1st offers game developers an avenue for publishing their games to access the African player base, payments integration to help with monetization and revenue generation for their games, as well as access to the Carry1st ecommerce shop that enables both game makers and other willing parties sell digital products such as vouchers, gift cards and other digital in app products to gamers across the continent.
Carry1st has been able to partner with big game development studios such as Supercell, Riot Games and Activision to bring their renowned games such as Valorant and Call of Duty to the African Market. All of this has been as a result of the company’s ability to raise funding with the latest being a $27M funding round from Bitkraft Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.
The funding was also aimed at helping the company further develop and expand Pay1st, its monetization-as-a-service solution. Carry1st aims to make it easier for game developers in Africa and beyond, make, publish and generate revenue from their games on the continent with less difficulty.
Even so, most mobile games are still free to play and depend on Ads as a source of revenue.
One such game that I have been playing is Ugali Sosa, a simple casual arcade game from Asili Entertainment in Kenya. It’s simple to play and helps pass the time when design becomes a bit too much.
Game developers may have to start thinking like betting companies in order for them to really be able to monetize their games in Africa. Give to receive might be the way to go. Betting companies receive a whole lot more than they give but the philosophy does work to their advantage.
Besides the gaming experience, what is something tangible that a developer can give to the player to ensure that they keep playing for longer periods and find more value in the game besides entertainment.
Monthly rewards? Play to win? Partnerships with retail or other entities to provide vouchers in exchange for marketing? Revenue share?
This is something that developers should think about even before building a game that they hope to monetize. How to attach something tangible to a game as part of the rewards for playing.
“Pesa mkononi, chakula kwa meza” for the player kind of thinking, Swahili for “Money at hand, food on the table for the player”. A play to win approach.
To monetize via Ads a game has to also target an audience outside of Africa and be marketable to that audience as well. Returns from Ads are usually much higher from European countries and America even with a lower download count as compared to African countries.
It might also be time for the more established African studios to put their heads and resources together, collaborate and work on AA/AAA games that can challenge the likes of PUBG, Call of Duty to mention a few.
In 2015 Andrew Kaggia released Nairobi X, a pretty decent game. It could have been even better if a few heads had collaborated on the project. Today it is very possible.
Last year, 2023, according to Newzoo, Kenyans spent almost Ksh 5 Billion on mobile games. From a Post that I put out on X, it seems most if not all of this money went to the more established game studios outside of Africa. If the studios in Africa collaborate to make great AA/AAA games, they could begin to get a slice of this pie.
