Africa’s gaming market is young, fast-growing, and mobile-first. In this episode, host Alexandra Takei, Director at Ruckus Games, is joined by Cordel Robbin-Coker, CEO of Carry1st, and Temi Afolabi, a lead on XBOX’s Global Expansion team, to examine the opportunity and hurdles of scaling games in Africa.

They break down Africa’s demographics, monetization challenges, and infrastructure gaps. Cordel highlights Carry1st’s approach — aggregating payments across nearly 80+ payment methods and pairing African talent with global veterans. Temi emphasizes Africa’s creative potential in narrative design, a rising indie class, and shares why XBOX sees the African consumer as attractive.

The group compares Africa’s market trajectory to China’s, though key differences include Africa’s fragmentation across language, infrastructure, and regulation. On the development side, they explore co-dev, creator-first pathways, and the long-term role governments may play in accelerating industry growth to build a billion-person market and capitalize on untapped potential and a growing talent base.

We’d like to thank Neon – a merchant of record with customizable webshops optimized for conversion – for making this episode possible! Neon is trusted by some of the biggest names in gaming and can help you sell direct without the typical overhead.

We’d also like to thank Levellr — the Discord community intelligence platform — for making this episode possible.

This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.

Alexandra: All right. What's up everyone? And welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, Alex, and this is the Interview and Insights segment. As we always do at Naavik, we're looking to cover the juggernauts of gaming, PC console, mobile, AAA ad networks, but also the pockets of games that don't have a light shine on them too often or might be emerging, meaning that the market isn't fully mature or has room to grow.

In my last show, we covered the global growth of China venturing into publishing into the west, and the production of high-fidelity AAA games like Blacksmith Wang, and today we're gonna set our sights on another continent where games are experiencing massive growth, albeit in a smaller market. We're talking about the Africa gaming market today, which amounted to 1.8 million last year, growing 12.4% year over year, defined the global average of 2%.

The number of African gamers rose to about 350 million, a 10% growth rate. But in breaking down this market, we're not gonna take these numbers just at face value, but really discuss what the opportunity in this market is from a consumer perspective and from a development perspective. What is hard about this market and what are some of the things that have to go right for it to become a gaming hub?

And so I'm really excited to be hosting the conversation today with two guests who live and breed this market, but from different vantage points, which I hope will give us some color on the roles at the startup side. And both AAA are playing in, propelling the space forward. My first guest is Cordel Robbin-Coker, co-founder and CEO of Carry1st a mobile games publisher located in Cape Town, South Africa, I believe. This is actually Carry1st’s second appearance on our show as Lucy, one of the other co-founders, I think appeared on our show quite some time ago. So welcome Cordel.

Cordel: Thank you for having me.

Alexandra: Exciting. And my next guest is Temi Afolabi, who is leading Xbox Global expansion for Africa in the Middle East.

Temi, of course, will share his own story, but I will succinctly call him an awakened consultant, using his strategic powers for good. And I'm very excited to have you both on today. It'll be fascinating to discuss the perspective of Africa from the AAA seat. So welcome, Temi.

Temi: Thank you, Alex. Great to be here with you. Hi Cordel. Looking forward to chatting with you guys. Awesome.

Alexandra: Alright, so I know you guys gave a talk together at HBS, so you guys already know each other, but with our standard course of things, I'd love for you to share a little bit about yourselves for our audience — your background, you know, who were you before this?

Cordel, why did you found Carry1st? Temi, why'd you join Xbox? And as a bonus question, I would love to know what your favorite game is from the African gaming market. And I guess how you classify that is up to you. So, Cordel, why don't you kick us off?

Cordel: All right, let's do it. So, I'm originally from Sierra Leone in West Africa. Left when I was about six during a war in the nineties. And, and then grew up in the States. I went to school sort of on the west coast and then started my career in finance and investing. So, somewhat unusual for someone in the gaming industry. I was first an investor for about seven years with the Carlisle Group, and had the opportunity to move back to West Africa with them and start investing in businesses across the continent.

That was a lot of fun. But ultimately, I decided that I wanted to kind of get in the action myself. And having always been a big, big gamer growing up before I started working like a hundred hour weeks on Wall Street, I thought that it would be really, really interesting to see if I could build a, a game company focused on, on Africa.

Been lots of twists and turns since, which we can talk about, but it's been a really interesting ride. And your favorite game? Favorite game? African game is Manka Adventures. I had to pick one of ours and it's African because it's built by Carry1st. And, actually, it's built originally by a two-person studio in Ethiopia called Kenny Games. But since then we've, we've been building and publishing it. So Makala s Yeah.

Alexandra: Very cool. I assume similar to mka, the board game?

Cordel: Precisely.

Alexandra: Okay. Very cool. Exactly. All right. So you too are, you're not an enlightened consultant. You're an enlightened, you're an enlightened banker. All right. Temi?

Temi: Yeah. I think, you know, that's really interesting 'cause I think it speaks to just how nascent the market is, where a lot of us in this market are sort of trans swats from other industries. But yeah, with me, I think, I was born in the UK but I was raised in Nigeria. So I'm, I have two Nigerian parents.

And then, you know, being Nigerian in uni, I got a law degree because there's a options law, finance or the, a doctor or something. So after that I moved back to Nigeria and I worked as a consultant for a few years, and then I moved to finance. I've been all over the place, and I remember during the lockdown, that was sort of an inflection point for me in terms of career and what I wanted to do.

And I sort of, I. Casually hosted a, an eSports one with my brother, which turned out to be really big. You didn't expect it to be, but everyone was stuck in the house, so it became a thing and then suddenly, you know, opportunities to work in gaming as a career sort of popped up as, you know, go leading on from that.

And then I got the chance to work at Xbox, in global expansion and here we are.

Alexandra: Alright. And your favorite game?

Temi: Yes, my favorite game from Africa currently. I'm gonna pick a game that's not out yet. It's called Legends of Orisha, but you can see all about it and hear the story just because I'm really, really interested in the law and the African history, the cultural history it brings, and it's based on a culture that I personally am a part of as well.

So to see that on a global platform that sort of, you know, shows me where this could lead. So I'm very excited about that. I also really like Anger Fit, which is from free Lives in South Africa. I played it recently and it's called a sort of a kick pad that you can kick while you play, which sounds really simple.

What is extremely fun. So yeah, those are my favorite games from Africa right now.

Alexandra: Awesome. Yeah, and we'll definitely talk a little bit about, I think that specific, that game specifically in our section about, you know, Africa as a development hub. Guys, it was great to hear a little bit about both of your backgrounds.

You know, like you both said, you know, from different industries coming to gaming and would also love to see how that informs your perspective on an emerging market like Africa. But I wanna kick off our first topic, right? And so, Cordel, when we did our kickoff call, you asked an interesting question, can Africa be the next China?

And I actually know that's a great way to strategically kick off our discussion today. As a founder of a mobile games publisher in Africa, you must certainly believe there's a big future ahead for this market. And so to, we're gonna start with the consumer perspective, but from your vantage point, what about Africa now tracks with the prior behaviors of the early premature Chinese gaming market?

Cordel: Yeah, I, I definitely think it, it can. And it really all starts with demographics, really just, just people. So Africa has one and a half billion people and it's incredibly young. So median age of like 19. And so the, the first thing is, you know, folks are coming online and it is similar to China and Southeast Asia, a mobile first market.

And so people are, when they start gaming, the first thing that they engage with is mobile free to play. And so if you think about all of the play patterns that took off as free to play, I would say really kind of was born in Asia. Players on the continent are, are really, really, I would say well adapted and engaged, to those.

And, and you don't have that transition from, let's say a traditionally console or PC market that, that then is, is adapted, I think. The sim big similarities. Highly, highly social. So you have some of the highest rates of engagement on social media. A lot of people's lives are exist online. And when you think about sort of mobile, it really is the center of people's lives when you think about things like finance, mobility, and sort of gaming and social is really no different.

So I, I think there are a lot of core similarities. I also think there will need to be certain adaptations in order to really crack the market in a similar way that, that you've had to see regional publishers in, in China and, and in Southeast Asia.

Temi: Mm mm

Alexandra: Tell me any reactions to that in terms of what's tracking and similar between the early Chinese market and Africa.

Temi: Yeah, I think, you know, the mobile dominance is a big thing. I think the main difference that sticks out to me is that China is pretty, is homogeneous the word I'm looking for? I hope I'm more using the wrong word there. Well, it's one country, one language, whereas Africa might have the market size, but then we have different languages, different cultures, you have different governments you need to work through and things like that.

But in terms of young population, mobile driven free-to-play popularity and very culturally strong themes. So there's a lot of potential for like localization and making things key for each unique to the individual markets. So I, I'm sort of hesitant to go too far into the comparison because of the big differences.

I often think about the African market as being slightly more similar to Southeast Asia, for instance, in terms of where we are because there's also a big technology gap between China and Africa as a present moment.

Alexandra: I see. Yeah, and I think that's where I was gonna go with my next question, which was, you know, what are the actual install bases like what is the co-console attach rate, the PC attach rate, and the mobile attach rate in Africa?

And I'm sure it does vary by country, but across the board. What would you, if you had to say what percent of people own a pc, a console, and a mobile device, what would that be?

Temi: I think typically, and the big thing about this market is data. So, you know, in the last few months we've gotten, Carry1st have done one, and Malia have done like reports as well to sort of consolidate information.

So it depend on who you ask. So you're gonna get, the mobile numbers are gonna be in the 90% range, so anywhere from 85, 80 to 90% is mobile, and then you have,, PCM console with around the 15% range, 10 to 15% range. And that feels very accurate in, you know, my lived experience as well. So yeah, I think the data holds up there.

So I would say it's a 85 to 90% mobile market. And then PC and console sort of split what's left.

Alexandra: Okay. So that's the split between the people who have the devices, but what is the actual, like, penetration rate of those devices across the actual population? So in the, for the Continent of Africa, does 90% of them own a phone?

Cordel: Oh. Got so on, on a mobile. So I guess smartphone penetration. Mm-hmm. Which is the important thing. 'Cause you can't play games. Well, fun games.

Temi: What stake you can play snake on.

Cordel: Feature phones. So like phone penetration is over a hundred percent because you have a bunch of people who have multiple devices, which is a weird quirk of the market.

Mobile penetra or smartphone penetration is like 40 ish percent. And so call it 600 million people. And then. And then sort of the percentage of those that are gaming is then, you know, call it 350 to 400 million folks. Got it. Yeah. So that's how it shakes out, which is pretty interesting.

It's growing, as you said, double digits every year for the last 10 to 15 years. And, but it's still really, really early, right? Right. It's in the, it's in the first quartile or whatever, you wanna sort of decide to, to choose.

Alexandra: So yeah, to some extent it's also encouraging, right? Because it's, you know, it's a, you're like growth.

It's very simple answer. Get more phones and the hands of more people. And then they will play more games. And so I think it's a different challenge for, you know, what's happening in the west, which is just a huge utter, you know, I guess concentration of content and then that content fighting for attention.

So, okay, so we talked a little bit about the console and PC attach rates. You know, obviously, Temi, as you said, 80, 95% mobile. What genres of mobile games are actually being played regularly? If you had to break down the market into that, into percentages, you know, in the, within the mobile gaming market, I mean.

Temi: Okay. Oof. That's a, that's a good question. I would say casual games would be first, in my opinion. So that would be the main genre. I'd go sports, maybe a close second. So, casual games, typically, and again, it depends on who you're coding with these numbers, but I see casual gaming range from the 30 to 40% range.

And that's typically has it at first. You have sports games, typically soccer games, but sports games typically come in second. And then you have, it varies. RPG shooters, shooters are pretty, pretty popular on the continent as well. I, I put those as the top three, uh, in my experience. And I would say I'd go 40 – 35 - 25 maybe.

Alexandra: Okay. Yeah. And for those games, I guess specifically, would you say that they're, those are games that are internationally based, that are being played? Or are there local storytelling elements or local games that are in that, in those top five to 10 games in Africa?

Temi: No. No. It's typically international games that have scaled into Africa and are doing well.

You know, we have the odd, I'm sure we'll get into African successes later on, but, you know, you have a game like the President by, which did very well on the global market. But typically, it's the other way around, right? It's, you have a Call of Duty, League of Legends, Candy Crush, FIFA. So it's usually the major global IPs.

And the ones that have mobile versions naturally can feed off that and, and continue to grow. So, yeah.

Cordel: Yeah, that's, that's typically what we see as well. There's a little bit of a divide depending on the country and how, and just the demographics. So South Africa tends to be a little bit more mature, kind of similar spend and maturity.

Even iOS to Android split as like Southern Europe. Whereas if you take the behemoths Nigeria, which has a couple hundred million people, Egypt, which has a hundred, those are young, kind of male dominated, competitive geos. And so that's where you get your shooters, your RPGs, your strategy games, and then in Southern Africa is more like your, your puzzle, your tabletop games and so on.

Interesting. And yeah, agreed. We, one of the original the things that we were doing is, is building original IP for the African continent. And, and we learned pretty quickly that most, the biggest bigger challenge was that Africans wanted to play the same games as. Folks in the States and how do we make that accessible for them based on certain challenges?

There's honestly one exception and it's a game called Nigel Ludo, which is obviously a Ludo game made by a single developer who I think is, is a government worker. We reached out to him like five years ago, one dude, and it's just always at the top of the charts and we have no idea why. But he's cracked like some clay pattern or, or social dynamic.

I actually have a, I have a thesis, I think it's local multiplayer, basically to be able to pair up with friends and play in the same place. But that's one of the few exceptions. But typically it's, it's global games that are topping the charts. Very interesting.

Temi: Speaks to culture a lot as well, because Ludo is a really popular game to play with friends and family here.

It's sort of a board game. Do you guys know Ludo? Do you know, Alex?

Alexandra: I haven’t played, but I have heard of

Temi: the game. Yeah.

Alexandra: Yeah.

Temi: Okay. So yeah, it's a board game, but you can play online as well with friends and it's a lot of fun.

Alexandra: Yeah. And that, that obviously I think it ties into a lot of what can be done to localize something to a very specific market.

What did, do you grew up playing? I grew up playing perhaps Monopoly. Go, sorry, Monopoly and Life, and I don't play Monopoly Go now, but you know, one could. See that the market has that play pattern. They're familiar with this game and therefore it's easier to get into. But, you know, Cordel, you said something that's really interesting about actually what we really wanna do is just get global IP into the hands of players, right?

And that brings us to kind of switching over from, you know, what is actually opportunity on the consumer side and what's exciting, the growth rate, the low install base of mobile phones and smartphones that could just simply grow, but now more over to the side of the, the, the challenges. Right? And when we, we talked last, you, you pointed out three, and I wanna dive into each of those three different challenges.

And I think, I believe, if I recall if from memory, a lot of that is around infrastructure payments and go to market.

Cordel: Yeah, absolutely. So the, the first we, we would call technology and, and there are a couple layers to it. One is device. So, you know, the, the, the gift of mobile is you don't have to buy a thousand dollars.

Dedicated gaming device in order to play. But the curse is that the devices have a really wide spectrum of capabilities. And so if you think your iPhone 14 or 15, whatever's the latest, versus which is basically like a supercomputer and your phone, it's probably more powerful than your laptop was seven years ago.

Versus like a $75 Chinese made Android phone from techno or fins like. The processing battery life, the, and the sort of graphics are completely different. And so one challenge is that, you know, when you have games that are built in the west, in these environments where bandwidth is essentially free, it's a utility like turning on the tap.

And devices tend to be super powerful. You tend to have games which are built in a way that don't really work for a couple billion people across Africa and, and honestly the global south. And so tech from a device standpoint is, is one piece. And then the second is broader connectivity, particularly with like competitive games where, and that's kind of easier to fix because it's just about servers and having points of presence that are closer to players on the continent, which is pretty rare for your big game companies, but is pretty easy to do with cloud now.

Temi: Hmm,

Cordel: Interesting.

Alexandra: You know, doubling down, before we move to payments and some of the stuff around go to market. But, you know, it's, you said that it's one of the biggest problems. And, um, I'm curious from a gaming, you're a game publisher, who are you reliant on to make this headwind, you know, go away?

Like you said, it's easy to stand up servers, but like why has infrastructure been challenging for so long if it's easy to stand up servers?

Cordel: I would say with regard to that, we're dependent on, on global, major global game companies to, to recognize that there is an emerging player base and, and to do the minimal work required to, to stand up servers.

So in, in that situation, you know, you have AWS, you have sort of Google Cloud, you have Azure, across all the major markets on the continent, and it's just. Convincing, you know, your, your, your major game companies that it's worth doing. And so we've, we've worked with a, a couple companies like Activision and some others to set up servers, but, so I would say that's, it's on them.

And then as far as like making games that aren't for gigabytes on download and don't require, you know, an in incredible computing, it again, kind of sits with, with the game companies to, to care enough to, to do so and to see that opportunity.

Alexandra: Hmm. Temi, are you hearing that that's a cry for help? How do you respond?

Temi: Listen, I, I mean, I respond to the extent that I can respond. I think I agree that those are definitely opportunities there. I can say those are conversations that, you know, I. We have, I'm not always a part of those conversations, but I know that they happen. And it's something that I personally would advocate for is because I think also it's one thing to see that this market has a lot of potential, but I think there's an opportunity to be proactive about creating the market, right?

I think we can project all this opportunity, but if we really put the effort into it, I think the opportunity is even larger than we tend to see. So yeah, I mean that, that's my response. I think those are the same challenges we see. So things around, even around like local currency payments, like we're having those conversations all the time, trying to solve for that.

And Africa is a really big continent as well. It's quite fragmented, so it's, yeah, there's several steps to it, but these are, these are the challenges that companies like ours are looking into.

Alexandra: Alright. And you mentioned payments. And I wanna shift over because I think that's another challenge that you've mentioned a lot because the payment system is very different from the west and potentially diversified.

But, from your guys' perspective, what is the most common like localized gain pricing model in Africa? And I mean that in the question of how do people pay and what do they typically find themselves paying for?

Cordel: It's, it's a really good question. So I believe of the three challenges that this is by far the most important because it speaks, it speaks to the unit profitability of a player.

And if a game company thinks that they can make money,, on a given cohort of players, they will do the work with regard to, tag localization, go to market in order to serve them. And so. To answer your question directly today, there are a really fragmented range of payment methods. So in any given country, you will have, you know, things like mobile money, which are wallets linked to telecom companies.

You'll have unique local wallets like Venmo, but with different names. You'll have direct instant bank transfer, which is much more seamless in many of these countries like Nigeria and South Africa than than the US like much more. And you will have different, like offline to online methods. So in North Africa you can go to a post office or a grocery store and give cash and top up a digital wallet.

So the cool thing is that the payment methods are available, people use them to buy stuff, they're ubiquitous. But the challenge is that if you wanna serve the 10 largest countries, you probably need. 80 different payment methods in order to like, have ubiquity and, and obviously that just looking at, at your eyes there.

Alexandra: Meanwhile in the US you're trying to find like a merchant of record. So you do zero payments, like you're just like, just have it go through steam, you know, like, or just Stripe. Stripe, PayPal. That's it.

Cordel: A hundred percent. Like we're in, in the West, super spoiled with, with the ubiquity of cards.

Yeah. And interoperability across every country, every bank, every network.. And so, and so that's the challenge. So, so folks have the appetite to make in-app purchases and we've found that when you make payments available for them for the right IP, that they monetize that incredibly high rates. But you gotta bridge the gap.

Alexandra: And I guess how similar to my first question of who are you reliant on to do that? Is that more of something that you are trying to solve on the carry first side or is there kind of like a large wave to consolidate payment methods to be a bit more consistent across the country? Or is it, or just a little bit too far beyond the point of return where the only solution is to basically figure out how to service the top 10 of those 80 payments?

Cordel: This is one, fortunately, where we feel like the solution is in our hands. So, part of what we do at Carry1st is work with big international game companies to help them monetize in the region. And so we've built our own payment system where we aggregate over 120 methods across the region. And we have our own sort of third party web shop where folks can distribute in-game content and leverage our payments backbone to be able to have players be able to pay for stuff.

So, that's one place where we feel like we can double down and actually solve the problem without having to wait for other folks basically.

Alexandra: I see. Okay. And I guess Temi, any re reactions to that? Maybe from the Xbox perspective? You know, a place that absolutely is the merchant of record in a lot of different places.

How are you guys seeing the presence of Xbox payments in Africa?

Temi: Yeah. It's interesting because, you know, my role, primarily I work with game developers to bring games to Xbox, but as soon as someone hears I work at Xbox, they're talking to me about payments, about how, oh, I can't do this on the store.

I can't, like, and I'm like, guys, I wish I could put you in touch with you to speak to. So yes, I would say by far and away it's the biggest opportunity in the industry. From my point of view, like I said, we've had talks with companies as well at a Microsoft level. Some of that is public. We've had talks with companies like flood Wave and so on and so forth.

And I think in Nigeria specifically, if you saw the matrix for fintechs, financial tech companies in Nigeria, there's gotta be like. 600 of them. It's, it's really moving money and how to move money in efficient ways of moving money. It's just an endless opportunity. And it's, it's really interesting because if I was to try and transfer money to you, I could get it from my bank to your bank in less than a minute right here.

So you would think that would translate to consumer things like gaming and Netflix and so on and so forth. So I think, you know, things like carry first and pay first, I think it's really smart for people to get ahead of this, but for the creative industries. So again, like, like I said, there's 600 of 'em, so they, you need some that are differentiating and are sort of looking to serve the market, the gaming market, the, you know, the specificities of this market, how people can do in-app purchases and so on and so forth.

So yes, I think that's, that's a, that's a great problem to be solving right now. And from an Xbox point of view, it. It would be the key to unlocking significant revenue from the continent.

Alexandra: Hmm, okay.

Temi: More so than anything else.

Alexandra: , And I guess I, I guess, you know, it's, we talked about the struggles with payment and, you know, Cordel you mentioned that if people can pay, they generally, generally do actually maybe monetize the same kind of clip as, as someone would in the west.

But, I wanna kind of ask maybe a, you know, if I had to pitch my weakest part of the market, it's probably here, you know, a small market can be great if there's a lot of purchasing power, but, you know, gaming is expensive. And in that actual, that research article that you guys did with Semaphore, they highlighted that although many African gamers purchase games, you know, less than a third of them spend up to $5 monthly versus, you know.

The Asia's pride of having spent, you know, $33,000 on loot boxes. And so I guess I'm just curious, right, like, and this is probably rather complex, but when I try to answer the question about whether or not Africa will be the next China, there may be some fundamental things that need to change about the economy as a whole.

You know, Africa's GDP per capita is three times lower than it is in China. And obviously I know that that's hard to calculate given the number of countries, but do you think that behavior would change over time? And I guess again, you probably are riding back seat to a lot of GDP growth and things like that.

So I guess, how do you guys react to, you know, just Africa being a lower spend market?

Cordel: I have a thought. So I, I, I think a couple of things. One, there are different dynamics in different markets. I think the, the prevailing benefit of the continent is that there are a lot of people, right? So it's 20% of the global population.

By 2050, it's gonna be a quarter of the global population. So even if they're spending relatively less than global average, you can still build a business on the continent. So that's the first piece. The second piece that I actually think is more proximal, which is like Africa today is a $2 billion market.

Out of, call it a $200 billion market by player spend, which is 1%. Right. But it's like three and a half percent of global GDP. So the issue to me between, you know, 1%, three point a half percent is access and, and the ability for folks to actually pay. So yes, is it relatively sort of less wealthy than many places?

Sure. But could it be a seven to $10 billion market without actually changing anything about player behavior or income per capita or anything like that? Yes. As well. And to me that's like an opportunity worth going after right now. Makes sense.

Alexandra: Temi, I guess from your, from the Xbox perspective, you know, what does the AAA side, you know, why does the AAA side see the African consumer as attractive?

Temi: Why? So one, it's the very young population. I think 50% of the continents on the 20 years old. So you have a long time to monetize this audience mobile first. So, which means, in my mind anyway, you can build for the specific market without having to sort of translate other things. It's, we're very.

Mobile adoptive is technology, adoptive is the word I'm looking for. So that's the main thing. And I think there's also scope for new stories. So like I said, I personally look at it from an Africa creator's point of view. And I think the creators is what brings the consumers. And I think in terms of African law and stories, like I said, there's this game legends of Orisha, but then there's also a hero from Kenya and there's a lot of like locally relevant but in globally interesting material coming out of Africa.

So I think from a consumer's point of view and from a creator point of view, I just think it's the next frontier. And then also I think there's potential for growth. Like a nascent market is always good. So like the math Cordel just did makes perfect sense. You could get from 2 billion to 7 billion just by unlocking what we already have here.

Yeah. Because a lot of people talk about the African market and I think I. The gap there is we need to stop talking about how many of those people are there and talk about how many of them we can actually monetize and how we can monetize them. If not, you're just, people love to save the 50% under 20, but if you can't get their money, then it's just numbers.

So I think the fact that with a few infrastructure or changes, you could triple sort of your market profits and all that. If you get the servers in, if you solve the payments problem and then you have more localized content and you create things for the region sort of like League of Legends have done in Southeast Asia where they proactively sort of created a market for themselves and now they have like, I think it's 1.5 million monthly active users in the region.

But that was like, we're gonna make, we're gonna create this demand by investing in the ecosystem. And I think that's, that's a huge opportunity on the continent for AAA studios. Got it. And lastly, it's also a big opportunity for the, from the creative point of view, it's the co-development opportunity as well, right?

So I know a few AAA studios that we work with, and they've reached out to me more than once to, all right, what are some African studios that are doing well? How much external development can we do with them? And we've already started exploring those opportunities. So, and I think that's only going to grow.

Alexandra: Fantastic. Yeah. And that actually leads us into our next topic, which is discussing this market from the developer's perspective. And you know, right now, you know, I, you just mentioned actually co-development and that's actually think something that we'll discuss a bit later on. But, if you had to make a, a call, you know, who are the biggest market leaders in terms of development on the continent?

Like countries, I would say, where are like the hubs of gaming in Africa from the development perspective?

Temi: Ooh. I think the first and obvious one would be South Africa. And then after South Africa it would be some combination of Nigeria, Kenya, and Egypt. Depending on who you ask, I think Egypt, from a market point of view is up there with South Africa as well.

But from a creative's point of view, I would definitely say South Africa would be the leader. And then those three, rounding up the top four.

Alexandra: And I guess like, where are we at? I think, maybe business count wise, how many studios would you say there actually are in Africa right now? In Africa? Founded, founded in Africa.

Temi: Okay. This is interesting 'cause this is another one where. Every number you look at is different. So for Nigeria, I've seen reports that say 80, and I've seen reports that say 130. So to give you an idea, so if I was to average that out to a hundred Nigeria and Nigeria's, one of the more populous nations, I would say maybe we had about maybe 700 studios.

Okay. But then if I was to say studios that, you know, have reached a level of sophistication that, you know, you wanna be working with them where they might release something for a global audience soon in the near future, I would then put that number a lot lower to the, honestly 70 to a hundred on the continent.

Alexandra: I see. Okay. And I guess maybe that's sort of, you know, I'm as answering that question because I wanna start talking about doing development in Africa and potentially what the advantages are and what the challenges are. , And so, you know, I watched your interview with the Legends of Orisha team.

And you know, as with many art forms, you know, the West and Japan have kind of dominated a lot of the lore. For a long time Hollywood, it's just like Hollywood and anime, and maybe some stuff from Europe. But now we've got China, China's IP growing, obviously with K-Pop and a lot of Korean dramas that, that kind of cultural, I guess like legacy is also growing and becoming popular in the west, but.

I wanted to ask you, you know, in my recent episode with about China going global, we discussed China's kind of competitive advantage. And from one, this was from, again, one guy's perspective. It doesn't stand for all of China, but it was the speed of iteration and the processes that teams have adopted to effectively prototype.

And so I'm curious from your perspective, what do you think is Africa's, you know, gaming edge? And I would love actually Cordel and Temi for you to both gimme what your perspective is, and then also what the biggest technical and specified skill gaps are that are absent on the continent.

Temi: Okay. So wait, the first one was, what is the biggest opportunity Yeah. Advantage. Yeah.

Alexandra: What, what is the biggest, like what is this thing that makes Africa development have an edge over another country's development or s development?

Temi: So one, I think fortunately or unfortunately, it's cost effective. So I think in Africa at the moment, you can get real quality for a fraction of what you can get it elsewhere. And I think that's highlighted more in animation recently, but it's going to, we're gonna see that more in gaming. So like, you know, you could get something on Disney, like Oju and so on and so forth. So that, that is one main thing. The fact that a lot of African developers will be mobile native, which means they can serve this market and other markets with skills that are sort of designed for that.

And then I think it's also adaptability, right? So a lot of African developers have to do other things because of the lack of investment in gaming. And that leads to new skills. So a lot of developers I work with on the side are, you know, creating. An app or a video training simulation for an oil and gas company to train their staff and things like that.

So you get really hands-on people that are cost effective, but very driven. And I think also the African gaming industry attracts a very certain specific type of person at this stage of the industry. If someone is in this industry now. They're in it because this is their passion. They don't wanna do anything else.

They're not interested in doing anything else, and they're gonna keep doing this so they get good at it. So I think it's just the first move advantage, right? It's if you are a AAA studio or your global company is you want to take advantage of that first. You want to build that brand equity and that loyalty, and then you also wanna take advantage of the upskilling that's been happening gradually.

So like the studios I speak to that work with African studios, when they start off, they give them the most simple things to do. And I'm like, really guys? But then it's like, you know what? Just knock this out of the park and there'll be something else. And that's typically what the experience is. And I.

And I think a lot of African devs look at the market like that. They, they literally just, you know, give us a foot into the door. So like at Xbox we do a prototype fund and we do a porting fund. And the prototype fund is really for like developers who have just started. And you want help creating a prototype that you can then take to other people.

And in my three and a half years here, the way the quality has jumped up every year is honestly, it's mind boggling. Like it's not, it's exponential growth that we're seeing. So the earlier you tap into that, the better I think.

Alexandra: Hmm.

Temi: And then you about gaps, right?

Alexandra: Yeah. The gaps. Yeah.

Temi: Right. The skills gap is, I do think we need more mentorship, in the sense that there's the gap in a lot of the people haven't worked on world class IP or worked with.

International studios and are as aware of the best practices. So a lot of them are building the plane as they're flying it, right? They're learning things on the fly, and a lot of times when they come into our programs, you know, they get a mentor for a few months and you can see the difference, right?

It's just availability of information. So I, I think it's that, and then it's just the opportunities to hone your skills, working on, you know, top IP that is well funded. A lot of times funding is a gap, so people are working on things part-time that takes away from efficiency as well and how much you can iterate till you get it right.

Alexandra: Hmm, I see. Cordel, any responses, uh, differences and potentially opinions on strength and weaknesses of development?

Cordel: I, I would say similar observations, but our approach to how we look to sort of solve the problems and work and sort of capture the opportunity are, we're on. I'd say different sides. Not to be adversarial, but Okay.

You know, you, you, I do see, and I, and I do say to folks occasionally that I, that I do believe that Africa can be the next sort of scaled, high quality, low cost developer of games in the way that China was, has been for a number of years. And now they're just the best developer of games, right? Like, if you look at where mid-core games are coming from, they're just, they're China.

But if you, if you, if you roll back to prior stages of development, it's basically really, really large young, well skilled and low cost talent base across engineering, art, and animation. And so our, our approach is to try and be like the Tencent right, to be the big company, that has the, the commercial projects where you can hire the folks out of engineering programs, train them up, have them work on, on things which will ship and, and build the ecosystem that way.

If you, if you ship some successful games, obviously there'll be folks who will wanna spin off and leave your company and start their own studios, but they'll do that from, I would say, a base of strength, having learned sort of the craft. So, so that's, that's one thing. And then the second piece is that we do pair up our, like art animation and engineering, which is on the continent with.

Product management, game design and, and data and economy from top game companies in Europe, the Middle East, and Europe and the Middle East. And again, it's an opportunity for some of that like knowledge transfer. And in the meantime, you know, you try and make money. And so I think we, yeah, it's very, very important for me.

So I, I think generally speaking, there is a lot of lore around the indie developer and, and I think that ecosystem, that grassroots ecosystem is super, super important. But I also think there's a place for the, like scaled corporate, dare I say that, that is like putting the infrastructure in, hiring people, training them up and, and shipping stuff globally.

Hmm. So that's, that's kind of the, the nuance that we bring.

Alexandra: Yeah, that's really interesting because I think actually that does exemplify a pattern that China showed on, showed very early. And it was a lot of collaboration with studios in the West to learn from studios in the West about how to do things best in class.

Adopt them, integrate them, and then, you know, figure out, okay, this is what everybody else is doing and this is what works for us. And then. Kind of getting that knowledge sharing done that way through Temi, which you've had as you mentioned, like through co-development. And so I was actually gonna ask you guys what you thought is the right path for knowledge sharing, which, you know, Cordel, you kind of already mentioned that.

And Temi Yu as well from the co-development side with Xbox, you know, putting studios in Africa in partnership with big AAA studios in the west. Cordel basically building up like a corporate Tencent empire inside Africa. You know, having people and recruiting talent to, to, to games., You know, I think one of the interesting things is that, you know, labor obviously writes itself by access to education and lucrative functions.

And so if you can be a company that can pay people a lot to work in games, well then people will study game making and tech and, and actually be invested in that discipline. , But I was curious, like, I think you guys mentioned something about the government's role in all of this and Africa being so fragmented that I presume it varies widely across the country, but.

You know, Dubai, for example, providing incentives for talent from global markets to move to Dubai to do development there. Are you guys seeing that kind of activity where not only are you growing talent inside, from Africa's native talent pool, but recruitment of global talent to move and relocate and start studios in Africa?

Temi: Okay, I'll say that, so relocating global talent. Short answer is no. I haven't seen a lot of that happen yet. I do see that happen in different countries in the Middle East. But from a government support perspective, I think African governments are becoming quite awake to the potential of gaming.

I will say they haven't quite figured out how to support, but the intention is there. And, you know, we sort of work with them to find the best ways to support these studios. So, for instance, in Nigeria recently, I think it was last year, we started a new ministry called the Federal Ministry of Arts Culture and The Creative Economy.

And one of their first events was to attend a developer hangout that we had. And the minister came to hear more about the industry, say what they sought. Thought they could do from a policy advocacy standpoint to, you know, ease of doing business. So, but things like that, it will take time to see what the results actually are South African government, the, you know, local government in Cape Town, but even the national government, you know, there's tax breaks for some gaming events. Little things like that to sort of plant the seeds of encouraging the industry. I know in places like Morocco, they've reached out. We signed an NDA with the American Ministry of, I think it was information, on just like training, upskilling, some developers there, running some Xbox programs there.

In Kenya you have a lot of tech hubs that are funded by the government as well. So I'd say overall everyone's looking at gaming's potential for, especially for employment as a cultural export. We've got Lagos Games week next month. There's a lot of the Lagos State government will be supporting that as well, and so on and so forth.

So I think there's a lot of government awareness that this is an industry that we should be supporting that has a lot of opportunity to scale. In terms of how well that is going so far, I think I'm gonna give it a couple more years before I start giving out report cards, but, I'm, I'm very pleased that the intentionality is there and you know that because only if, in fact, I'll give you a quick story.

Just a couple days ago with the Legos Games Week team, we had to speak to some government officials about being involved with the events and coming to it and so on and so forth. And a lady at the ministry told us, honestly. I hate gaming. My son is up till 3:00 AM every day. We literally had a fight this morning about this.

He's got exams coming up. And then, so we had to spend the whole time sort of defending the industry. Like, look, first of all, that's amazing by anything., And so on and so forth. But by the time we were done and we explained, so I showed them legends of Isha. Like this exports our culture and we're employing people in an actress.

We have a historian working on the game to make sure it's culturally accurate, and so on and so forth. And by the time we left the meeting, she was like, oh, I absolutely have to attend this. Just make sure you talk to people about the dangers of gaming as well. Right? So that just shows you like you're dealing with a market where there's a bit of suspicion, but it's trending in the right, right.

They're willing to listen and come on board.

Alexandra: I had a mom like that too. So I think there's suspicion. I think it might be an age thing as well.

Temi: She's like, was talking to his computer at all hours of the night. I'm like, he's talking to people. He's not talking to them.

Alexandra: That's amazing. Okay. Yeah, I mean I think it's just interesting just because it is, you know, a I think the government typically does play obviously a big role in access infrastructure.

All the things that kind of like, as we mentioned, need to go right to help this continent really become a burgeoning gaming hub. But before we move on to our final conclusion topic about sort of the future of Africa, I wanna briefly touch upon, The games themselves. Right. And so what sort of games do you see African developers making today?

If are there any genre platform or trends or patterns? You know, we talked about multiplayer being challenging, and I guess kind of where I'm going with this is there might be some genres and types of games that Africa would have the best edge at making. Just like in China, we started with mid core RPGs on mobile because that was something that was not being made somewhere else.

And the country had the unique capability of doing it very, very well. So what is that, what is like the game that you think is, has the best chance of being made successfully and going global in Africa?

Cordel: It's a good question. Like when we were doing more ecosystem building, we launched a program with crazy ala Crazy Labs, called Crazy Hubs.

And it was an incubator and one of the, I would say most successful games spun out of it, called the President. At the time, our thinking was basically that hyper casual or hybrid casual was the place to, to do so because you had studios that were small, right? Couple folks that the ecosystem was pretty fragmented.

The bar as far as like learning the craft and the repeatability was relatively low. And so. Originally, I think that that was our thinking. Today, I still think sort of hyper casual, hybrid casual where you need lots of new interesting ideas from a really wide range of folks to find the ones which are gonna pop and hit the KPIs so that you can scale.

I think, I think that's an interesting play. We're, we're not doing it, but, but I could see it, uh, being successful.

Temi: Hmm. Alright, so I think. It's interesting because I think there's a slight difference between like, what games would be most successful from African developers and what games would they be best at make and write.

So I think most successful on the continent would be something that's, you know, data light, social things like that. Mobile native. But what I think we're best at making right now is narrative driven games. And that's because Africa is very rich on like oral traditions and mythology and it's like very casually.

A lot of the sort of TV series that are local to like Africa and Nigeria are great stories. That could be games, right? They're really, there's a lot of mysticism in Africa as well. There's a lot of, so like you could get into that. There's a lot of. Africa is as a continent, is obsessed with the concept of family.

So there's so many different things you can play with. There's so many different ways you can play with that. And then Africa also has a recent history that leads to so many story potentials. Like, so for instance, teams in Kenya. I've seen a few games around, what's it called when you hunt, animals for their tusk again.

Poaching. Poaching, poaching right around poaching and messiah warriors and stopping poaching. A team I worked with Kte content, they literally went and lived with some messiah,, warriors for a few weeks to learn how they made their homes, how they moved around, things of that nature. That's an originality and it's new to the rest of the world in a way that could be really interesting.

Yeah, 10 years now the games about like colonial times, but you know. In a way that's also interesting without just being heavy. So it's like, there's a game about colonial Kenya, but it's from the POV of a 7-year-old girl that's lost in trying to find her family. And it's called, you know, local buildings and local texts and music and all that.

And I think all that is so rich and would bring something new to global audiences in a way that's, that would do really well. So I think those would be the games that Africans would be best at making.

Alexandra: Wow. Yeah, I think, and I think that really resonates. I think there are just so many stories that are, have not been told.

And it would be, and it would be new from the perspective of the West, and probably really enjoyable also from, you know, I've always enjoyed playing like Go Tima, you know, to some extent I'm half Japanese, but it was very wonderful to play that kind of game and experience and think about, you know, a culture and a regime and, and the Shogun era about what, what it used to be like and to the cultural ministries of, I it was Morocco or something that you said that she didn't like games.

But I think I personally learned a lot about history and culture through video games. So we can tell her that. But I wanna close out today with some questions about the future of investing and development on the continent. And so Cardis is gonna go to you first, but, you know, where does money and investment into Africa come from for games?

And you've done so much of this, but how have global investor perceptions of Africa as a gaming market evolved over the past decade?

Cordel: I think they've changed a ton. So for context, our company is about seven years old. And when we launched saying we were building an African gaming company, we were at just a really unfortunate intersection of, you know, folks didn't wanna invest in African startups and gaming wasn't really considered an investible asset class.

And we were like in the middle of that Venn diagram. And what we've seen over in the years thereafter is I would say a lot of international VC and family office money begin to look at Africa as an investment destination. Now, originally it was. All FinTech and then logistics, and we've been coaxing them to, to the consumer side, because there is this big opportunity and, and then obviously post COVID, the market for sort of gaming investment just completely blew open and people realized that there was this massive sleeping giant.

So today, I would say I don't get weird looks when I tell investors that, that we're building an, an African gaming company and, and that we're looking to build sort of the 10 cent of Africa. So I would say over time, I, you know, perceptions have improved and there's more access to capital. With that said, I think it's still pretty hard to raise money for, for consumer businesses and gaming businesses in the region.

Mm-hmm. And I think honestly, we just need some, we just need a couple wins, right? It's like if you were a Turkish game, indie game studio 10 years ago, you probably couldn't raise any money. But today, if, if you are, you just show them your deck and you get, you know, 50 bucks. So you, success kind of breeds, subsequent demand.

And, and that's how I think about it. We just need to win.

Alexandra: That's awesome. Yeah. It's a really good way to put it. Thanks to the dreams of the world leading the way., Tell me, a, a kind of a question about the future of Africa. Do you see a future where AAA studios exist natively in Africa, or do you think it will be comprised of smaller indie developers for the next decade?

Temi: Oh, next decade. I think it's quite fragmented, so put it this way, in the next decade, I'm almost certain that there will be a couple on the continent, most likely from South Africa. I think the trending you, depending on who you are, we might already have one in South Africa actually. But I think will it be dominated by indies?

I think that's more likely. I think we might have a few like big headline studios that sort of consolidate some of the talent. But I also think, I was just at in Dubai for the games expo and I think the way AI is gonna open up this industry really soon, I think all bets are off. I think we might actually have that because then you need a lot less people to do really great work, which depending on who you ask, that might be a good thing, might be a bad thing, I don't know.

But I do know that. That has sort of changed my perception of how quickly things are gonna move and how soon we can get AAA studio from Africa. But I think in the, in the sort of short term, it's gonna be African studios getting co-development on AAA titles and getting those expertise, getting that mentorship.

And who knows, some people from aas might come to Africa to set up studios based on what they're seeing. I can see that happening soon. So if you say a decade, I would say yes, a handful. Not like I think they're gonna explode to be like 25 or anything like that, but I do think we could get a good number in the next 10 years based on how things are trending.

Maybe about a dozen. I, I think that's possible, but I do think the indie scene is gonna rise the floor of the indie developer in Africa is gonna rise significantly. Especially with international exposure and just the more AI tools that are dedicated to gaming. We're gonna see a lot of change.

Alexandra: Got it. That's good perspective. And then kind of in in line with that, you know, I guess for the both of you, Pete, for me, your, the ideal leadership background that you think is necessary to found a Gabe development studio of kind of any capacity in Africa. And I'm asking this question because I think especially in the west ship is very important.

And I wonder, you know, who are the leaders that you would recommend Africa to choose, given that it doesn't have that robust catalog of, I did game development starting in 1980s and worked on like shareware, cohort and demo demographic. Right. You literally mentioned that actually one of the strengths of Africa is that it's, you know, sub, a lot of it is sub 25.

And so since it's skewed towards the youth, what are you guys looking for when you're looking for a studio that you think is upcoming and talented and has an ability to execute and get that win? Cordel, as you mentioned,

Cordel: You wanna go first? Temi.

Temi: Oh, okay. Oh, right. Oh, he said Cordel. So yeah, so what am I looking for when I meet a studio head?

In Africa? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, like most things in life, I'm just looking at how determined is this person to get this done. How innovative are their ideas? And I think, I really believe in how you do anything is how you do everything. So I judge. A deck really seriously, right? If you gimme a deck or a trailer, I, it lets me know the sort of person I'm dealing with.

Then we can get into the nitty gritty of what the game's actually like and so on and so forth. , I'm a huge fan of proactivity, just in the sense that, so when I speak to the studio head and, and they're bootstrapping, but he's just been at Africa Games Week and he's going to this thing at Kenya, you know, it's important not to go around, just to go around.

But when I see like, okay, you are proactive, you get team, you get things done. And I think also in Africa, anyone who can keep a team together for prolonged period is doing a great job. Because it's not like everyone's getting paid a lot. It's not like, so if you come to me like, all right, we've got these five developers we met in college or whatever, and we're still working on this game, then I'm like, okay, this is a team that's gonna see this through to the end, right?

Mm-hmm. This is, these guys are gonna keep going. They're not gonna be bored of this next year. So I think that's a big thing for me, really is do I see the persistence? Do I see, and then also. How good they are. Collaboration, right? So when I meet a studio and you say, oh, I've got this guy on my board of advisors and he's from EA sports, well then that has me thinking, okay, so you're proactive.

You found this person and you convince them to believe in your project enough to come on board. Well then you'll probably do well on our platform as well and handle those relationships properly and so on and so forth. And then lastly, just have something out already. Like I, I really kind of get frustrated when I'm constantly talking to people and they've got something really cool, but they just refuse to release it because they're gonna keep working on, it's like, I want to talk to someone who's tried and failed and now they're doing a new one, and so on and so forth.

So yeah, tho those are the things I typically look for in the studio.

Cordel: Alright. I, I, I would say I think about someone who can a, build any kind of business, So, or any kind of startup. I, I think we have tons and tons of creative talent, tons of energy, um, tons of sort of skilled and emerging technical talent.

But the big challenge is like. Can you go from creating a work of art to shipping something that makes money and moving and then, and then shipping your next thing. And so I think storytelling is important, but the different kind of storytelling, which is like, can you talk to a Temi or an international VC or someone from a top gaming company and tell the story of why they should invest in what you're doing so that you can have your team work full-time and not have three side hustles.

And so that you can sort of, you know, push things through to the other side is, I think we have a lot of hustle, a lot of scrappers, but I think we, we need some like core resources to be able to ship games and, and that, that's, so that's what I would think.

Alexandra: All right.

Cordel: Business builder and then

Alexandra: Yeah, business builder.

Excellent. Alright. I mean, basically founding qualities for any entrepreneur is what you guys essentially summarized, but alright. And then I guess final question, you know, and this is actually for Cordel, you know, you found Carry1st, as you said earlier, almost seven years ago at this point.

And I'd love to know from your perspective, what has been the largest, you know, recalibration shift to your priors. You know, something that you thought would come true. But it hasn't, and it, you know, things hadn't, didn't exactly go as planned over the past seven years that have surprised you.

Cordel: It's been a long journey and I would say generally speaking, we, we felt like we would be much further along. I thought I would be, exited and laying on a beach right now with, with lots of mom.

Alexandra: Wow. It's,,.

Cordel: Yeah, re reality reality hits all, all of us startup founders. Look, I, I would say I. The biggest delta from where we were thinking at one point is we did think that you could do sort of Chinese style third party publishing where you control the IP, you do all the live ops and, and the go to market and, and all of that stuff.

Mm-hmm. And what we have found is that today those, those big IP holders are like 70 to a hundred billion dollars conglomerates. So a, you're not publishing Call of Duty mobile because they're just not. Right. Like, like C Limited grew up basically publishing League of Legends, but League of Legends was a, was a startup.

That'd be like me going to another like series B stage startup and saying, can we work together? As opposed to going to a $70 billion company. Right. So that's one, that's probably the biggest one. And so what it's led us to is more of like a, a dumbbell approach where on one side you work with the big folks to solve like a specific issue, which is monetization and like community building around games.

And then on the other side, you build your own IP earlier probably than we thought we would. Whereas we thought we could just be a third party publisher and, and adapt and ship other people's games. It, it just hasn't played out that way.

Alexandra: Really interesting. Yeah. Yeah, it is interesting 'cause it's like it again, they began, they grew together, right?

And so you're kind of looking for that pocket partner, and you have to identify potentially who would be your regal of legends early on. Fascinating. Well guys, I think we're, we're, we're over time here and I just want to say that this has been such an interesting conversation. There are actually so many things I wanted to ask about, like discovery and go to market that we weren't able to discuss today.

But thank you both so much for coming on the show and it's been really awesome to learn about the opportunity in Africa and your journeys along the way. So that's it for us. Cornel and Temi, thank you very much.

Temi: Thank you, Alex. Thank you. A great pleasure. It's been fun. Thank you.

Alexandra: Awesome as always, friends, if you've got feedback or ideas, hit me up at [email protected]. I am always open. And with that, we're out. That's our episode. See you next time.

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