Cofounder and Community Lead of Africacomicade, Ogunyebi Oluwatosin, has said that more grants will allow African Game developers make better games even though Game development has seen a vast growth in Africa with many developers sprouting up all over the continent.
He said this on the special edition of EAN’s weekly twitter space held in collaboration with GAMR Africa. He also added that the business aspect of the game development scene has to be worked on. ” When it comes to the financials and business, it’s quite tricky in this part of the world currently. The games industry in Africa is worth about $590 million, but the money is not with the local developers. There’s a lot of work that needs to be put into the financial space. For game development, it’s quite difficult for developers here to actually raise funds because of the monetisation strategies that currently available here.”
Ogunyebi further stated that getting investments isn’t the easiest thing for the developers, so they feel a lot of pressure to ensure the games are a success. But he believes that the more prototype grants are invested it will allow developers to “fail” in order to make better games.
“Getting publishers to actually invest in your game is a little difficult. And these are some things we are trying to drive in conversations at Africacomicade. One thing I can say for sure is we need more prototype grants in the game development space to actually allow people “fail” more at creating games. What I mean is it will allow more people to explore different game development genres or different marketing strategies for games without having the pressure to ensure the game sells to this certain amount behind them. So having more prototype grants that can help with this would be very much profitable and very much you know good for the African game development space.”
EAN holds twitter spaces every Tuesday at 5pm for Francophone Africa and on Thursdays at 5pm for Anglophone Africa.