Sun, Feb 02, 2025 page6

• Gaming studios in Nigeria draw on native culture

  • AFP, LAGOS
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  In a dream, a mysterious voice calls out in the night to King Alantako, warning of “chaos” ahead for the young Nigerian sovereign.

  He wakes with a start and sets out on an adventure that will lead him to his destiny and save the kingdom of Ile Kaaro Oojiire.

  So begins The Wild Kingdoms — a Nigerian-made video game for mobile phones, published in 2022 by Nigerian studio Kucheza.

  

  Maliyo Games founder Hugo Obi poses for a photograph in his office in Lagos on Jan. 20.

  Photo: AFP

  In a gaming world dominated by US and Asian giants, it is distinguished by its setting: west Africa’s Yoruba ethnic culture.

  To develop their nascent industry, Nigerian studios are drawing on their native traditions and “natural creativity,” said Hugo Obi, the Lagos-based founder of another maker, Maliyo Games.

  “That ability to tell stories and to tell unique stories and to build characters and to build worlds is something that Nigeria has done very well,” Obi said.

  The sector is still in its infancy, but they see great potential in a country where 70 percent of people are aged under 30 and with one of the fastest-growing populations in the world.

  “If you look at the diversity of food as an example, the diversity of languages, once you then start to blend those together, you start to create new forms and new styles,” Obi said.

  Maliyo has grown to 36 employees from three in five years, providing its own online training program to assemble a team of developers and designers in five African countries.

  An Africa-wide team of 14 people worked for 14 months to bring out its mobile-phone cooking game Iwaju Rising Chef, adapted from an animated series broadcast on Disney last year.

  In it, the player cooks up Nigerian specialties such as jollof rice and deep-fried dough balls known as puff puffs.

  A survey by Maliyo found that Nigeria was the fastest-growing out of the five leading African countries in the video game sector — the others being Algeria, Egypt, South Africa and Tunisia.

  Nigerian gaming revenues were “surging,” the report said, from US$11 million in 2019 to more than US$60 million last year.

  Nigeria was home to nearly one-quarter of all the studios on the continent, it said.

  Besides the challenge of finding trained developers, Nigerian studios also struggle to secure funding, studios say.

  “Nigerians invest in real estate, Nigerians invest in oil and gas, Nigerians invest in anything tangible,” Obi said. “This idea of intellectual property is something that is still very new and seen as high-risk.”

  As well as the funding battle, developers also face patchy power and Internet networks, said Ewere Ekpenisi-Igumbor, co-founder of the studio Dimension 11.

  His studio is developing a game in partnership with Microsoft for its Xbox console: Legends of Orisha, another title drawing on Yoruba legends.

  Yet Ekpenisi-Igumbor believes the country is beginning to take notice, hailing the creation in 2023 of a new ministry for culture and the “creative economy.”

  “Historically, the government wasn’t as involved or even aware of the industry, but things are changing now,” he said.

  “Nigeria is arguably the second or third-largest country for game development” on the continent, said Vic Bassey, founder of the specialist Web site Games Industry Africa.

  However, its share of global production is “less than 0.5 percent,” he added — and although it makes a lot of games, relatively few people in the country can afford to buy them.

  The Wild Kingdoms has seen its biggest share of downloads in Brazil, said Bukola Akingbade, founder of Kucheza, the studio that developed it.

  The Latin American nation is home to a Yoruba spiritual tradition dating back centuries.

  David Tomide, a 29-year-old who calls himself “the first gamer influencer in Nigeria,” looks to youngsters as a source of hope for the sector, with “Generation Alpha” teenagers “always wanting to be on their phone.”

  “Most of the games that we play here in Nigeria are not Nigerian-made,” he said.

  However, “if I see a good Nigerian game that tells a good story, I’ll play it on stream,” he added.
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