Africa switches on to mobile gaming boom

An army of humans laid waste to an alien colony as South African video game maker Simon Spreckley enthusiastically controlled the action using his phone’s touch screen.

“The penetration of mobile devices in Africa is huge. People often have two or three phones, which is pretty crazy,” said Spreckley, 40, who wore a T-shirt emblazoned with “Brute,” a fourarmed muscled alien from the game.

“So that is one of the big pluses and why we are trying to do this,” he said, promoting “Invasion Day,” which will likely launch on Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play platform in 2019.

The multi-player tactics game, set in the 1950s, is the brainchild of Spreckley’s eight-strong team at VSUS, a Cape Town-based game developer.

Many other African developers are also opting to tailor games for mobile devices instead of traditional consoles like PlayStation or desktop computers, leading to a surge of handheld innovation on the continent.

“There is enormous potential in Africa because the continent is primarily mobile,” said Sidick Bakayoko, 34, the founder of Paradise Games, an umbrella group for developers in Ivory Coast.

“We have done a jump and instead of first going with PC, we’ve gone directly to mobile,” he told AFP at last week’s Africa Games Week convention in Cape Town which brought together African games coders, developers and artists with top executives from Sony and other industry giants.

“With the emergence of a number of low-cost smartphones, it is now easy to purchase a mobile phone,” he said while games enthusiasts tried out the continent’s latest digital offerings on screens nearby.

Part of mobile gaming’s appeal over other platforms in Africa is that it consumes less data, which can be slow or costly.

“In Nigeria they even get games pre-loaded on the phones because data is so expensive,” said Evan Greenwood, 37, the director of South Africa’s leading computer game studio Free Lives.

“There is the potential (in Africa) — but data has to get cheaper and the right games have to be made.”

“Invasion Day” will be free to download, but players must purchase upgrades from within the game.

Spreckley hopes “Invasion Day” will catch the eye of a major investor, but many African mobile games developers have struggled to turn their creations into cash.

Ivory Coast’s Point Point, based on a traditional children’s game played using paper, and Madagascar’s Gazkar, a racing game featuring the island’s ubiquitous Citroen 2CV, have proved popular — though not readily profitable.

But Google’s decision in June to allow games developers from African countries to make money from their creations sold on its Play store could revolutionize the sector. “Most people use (Google) Android here,” said Sithe Ncube, 24, the founder of Zambia’s Ubongo Game Lab.

In 2017, accountants PwC said “revenues for console and PC games will lose market share to social ( and) casual gaming” like that offered on handheld devices.

Africa’s video game industry, now worth $310 million, would be worth $642 million by 2021, the firm added.