Nigerian Startups Enter Video Game Market

Feature Image: Nigerian animator Ekene Nkenchor designs a video game at the Lagos offices of Kuluya, a video game company that is winning fans across the continent. [AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE]

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

It’s a common challenge in Nigeria and across Africa: how to get rid of pesky mosquitoes whose buzzing disturbs sleep and whose bites can carry malaria and other diseases.

Two Nigerian startups have tapped this and other quirks of daily life in Africa to create online and mobile phone video games that are winning fans around the world.

It’s easy to see why Mosquito Smasher, which has earned comparisons to the mobile app Angry Birds, might be a hit. The graphics are simple, the aim clear and the reward immediate: Users electronically squash as many of the blood-sucking parasites as possible under a thumb with a satisfying “splat!”

Another, the highly popular Okada Ride, has players guide a motorcycle-taxi driver around roadside street vendors, roadblocks and police in the notorious traffic of Lagos, a sprawling metropolis of nearly 20 million people. “What I like about Nigerian video games, it’s one: the local content, because it tends to give you that everyday feel,” said fan Chucks Olloh, 32.

The worldwide video gaming industry, worth more than $63 billion in 2012, is expected to reach nearly $87 billion in 2017, PricewaterhouseCoopers said in a recent study.

Although the African market has not figured prominently on game developers’ radar, the founders of Maliyo — the makers of Mosquito Smasher and Okada Ride — are hoping to change that.

Another company, Kuluya, which means “action” in the Igbo language of southern Nigeria, already has created 70 games.

It was hoping to reach 1 million mobile telephone users by the end of June 2014 and has fans well beyond Nigeria. “In Africa, we have a lot of downloads from Ghana, Kenya and South Africa,” said Lakunle Ogungbamila, who runs Kuluya.

“There was a particular game that a lot of people downloaded in Ethiopia; I’m not sure why. It’s called Ma Hauchi: It’s a hunter who is shooting vultures. A very simple game. … Also, we get a lot of downloads from China, India, Thailand, Taiwan.”

Hugh Obi, who invented Mosquito Smasher, spent 10 years in Britain running a recruitment company before returning home in 2012 to set up his online games company. To share Nigeria’s high operating costs, with daily power cuts the norm and investment in diesel-powered generators a must, his five-member company shares workspace with eight other companies.

From an office in the Lagos suburb of Yaba, Maliyo offers 10 free online games to 20,000 users across Nigeria, as well as in Britain and the United States. It is preparing to launch smartphone versions of its most popular games.