3 African Gaming Companies You Should Know
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3 African Gaming Companies You Should Know
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By Liviya David, Business Development & Research Analyst, Botho Emerging Markets Group
August 12, 2020
Are video games, a $159 billion global industry, Africa’s next booming industry? With increasing disposable incomes (particularly in the continent’s largest consumer markets), household consumption across the region is expected to reach $2.5 trillion by 2030 and more people are looking to the Internet for shopping and leisure. The answer may very well be ‘yes.’ As Africa’s technology ecosystem continues to mature, investors and consumers alike can look towards less-explored, tech-enabled industries like gaming for prospective investments and leisure and education opportunities. Here are 3 African gaming companies working across the market to put a new spin on homegrown fun.
LETI ARTS (GHANA)
Founded through a friendship between East and West (Africa that is), Leti Arts lets Africans tell African stories through video games. Eyram Tawia from Ghana and Wesley Kirinya from Kenya - two self-taught game developers - founded Leti Arts in 2009 to share the continent’s rich cultural histories and folklores through video games. Leti Arts doubles as a gaming and video and comics company. In 2013 and 2018, respectively, the company released its two flagship games, Africa’s Legends, and Reawakening, which focused on heroes from Mali to South Sudan to Somalia fighting modern-day issues across the continent. These characters’ stories are chronicled in AfroComix, an app available on Android phones that features comics from African creators.
Tawia and Kirinya are graduates of Ghana’s MEST tech incubator and winners of a World Summit Award, which ‘selects and promotes local digital innovation with high impact on improving society.’ These two young entrepreneurs are passionate about African creatives and see Leti Arts as a pan-African platform to create high-quality content for Africans, by Africans.
ACE PRO GAMING INC. (KENYA)
Kenya’s Ace Pro Gaming works on the demand side of gaming by organizing and sponsoring electronic sports (e-sports) tournaments across East Africa. E-sports tournaments are held as multi-player competitions between professional and amateur teams across the world. And, if you win, they pay. E-sports players can have sponsorships and team deals and enormous prizes for winning competitions: the Fortnite World Cup, for example, had a total prize pool of over $30 million, split between single-player and team winners.
Backed by HEVA Fund’s first gaming and e-sport support facility in 2018, Ace Pro is working at the nexus of the creative industries and experiential entertainment. Although not in the business of game development itself, the company’s creators and team are passionate gaming enthusiasts. They want to show players across the region that playing video games can be a career. While its tournaments typically take place in-person, the company has pivoted by going online due to COVID-19 gathering restrictions. Ace Pro Gaming creates a community of like-minded gamers that can connect and play their favorite games during their free time and potentially make money doing so.
CARRY1ST (SOUTH AFRICA)
Founded in Cape Town by a Sierra Leonean-Zimbabwean-American trio, Carry1st describes itself as a “mobile games publishing platform.” Others may focus on their impressive fundraising and user acquisition abilities, with a $2.5 million seed round raised and 1.3 million downloads of their live trivia game, Carry1st Trivia. Going forward, they hope to be the go-to partner for game developers looking to create content and games for consumers across Africa.
Carry1st released two games that users can download on their smartphones, Hyper! and Carry1st Trivia, the latter of which was the number one downloaded game in Nigeria and Kenya for most of 2020, according to the Carry1st team. The company has generated much buzz in the past several years, with the top advertisements for Carry1st Trivia on the company’s Youtube channel charting millions of views. Carry1st founders Cordel Robbin-Coker, Lucy Parry, and Tinotenda Mundangepfupfu are banking on rising mobile phone penetration across the continent and consumers’ desire for activities that take little data and phone storage. They are gunning for "super-app” status, with a plan for Carry1st to provide games, airtime and data, marketing and payments, and “original content.”
Gaming is just one creative industry with major potential across sub-Saharan Africa. To read more about trends and opportunities in Africa’s creative space, including fashion, film, and music, explore Botho’s latest brief on the cultural and creative industries in Africa.