MENA rising – The Arabic mobile gamer

[Music] [Music] hello everyone my name is Bassam and I would like to tell you about the arabic-speaking market pomato is the leading mobile games publisher for the Arabic speaking market but I will start by telling you more information about the manor the Middle East and North Africa region in general the Manor market is the fastest growing market in the world the market size is around four point four billion dollars in 2021 and there is around 500 million smartphones the top regions in the market are number one is Turkey then comes out the Arabia

Iran and United Arab Emirates then all the Arab countries come later after that my focus is on the Arabic speaking market there is a huge untapped opportunity in this market that most of the people who although I don't know anything about Arabic is the fourth most spoken language worldwide there is a hundred million Arabic smartphone users yet less than 1% of all content available online is available in Arabic and the region has a country like Saudi Arabia which has the highest average revenue per paying user in the entire world if you compare Saudi Arabia to China Saudi Arabia is five times bigger than China in terms of an RPP you per user the reason why I'm focusing on Saudi Arabia because it has most data and we are really focusing in our company on Saudi Arabia in specific then comes the

other Gulf countries and the rest of the Arabic market seventy-five percent of the population in Saudi Arabia are actually active online it is the second most profitable country in the region after Turkey and just this year it got into the top 20 charts worldwide and profitability let me tell you a little bit about the behavior of the Arabic consumer so the Arabic language is the main language if you go to Saudi Arabia most of the people will choose to speak in Arabic even if you even so many of them will speak in English but they would prefer Arabic as a language there is plenty of free time between their hands and so much money definitely this is a good benefit of this market this is a very young population 50% of the population is under 25 years old they are very attached to their culture in

the Gulf countries in general if you compare it to countries like Jordan and Egypt and other countries you will find that the people living in the Gulf area are more attached to their culture and their habits and they will need and still needing a lot of online interaction so you will find the top of the grossing charts in the region our chart applications video chatting anything that has charting on it also let me tell you about the female consumer in Saudi Arabia the Saudi Arabian women are considered the highest spenders worldwide the reason behind that they have also plenty of free time most of them are unemployed and they play games and a good amount of them will actually spend good amount of money on playing games every month the top of the charts and the region and I wanted to explain to everyone so you can understand the

type of games that are actually very successful in the region the top three games are always dominated by racing and drifting games we have published so many racing and drifting games and whenever you launch a racing title in the region it will go to the top of the charts with minimal marketing efforts board games are gaining so much popularity recently casual games are good but not excellent in the region I will tell you later the top grossing titles are SLG games cards RPG and sports I would say that paid games or premium games are not a good idea and the region and the reason behind that is the region is still small if you compare it to worldwide so the amount of people that will buy the title will be small so it will not really cut

it for you I will explain more about the translation and localization so because so many people think localizing a title to Arabic is just throwing the text at Google Translate and put the Arabic text and then a disaster will happen so whenever we start with localizing a game we focus on the text translation at the beginning you will need someone who will really understand the game itself so he can take the text from any language to Arabic the graphics have to be modified a little bit and you don't need to really exaggerate with the graphic changes the story has to be changed you will need to really understand the cultural elements and to remove some stuff from the game to make it culturally relevant now Arabic language is a very complicated language most of the languages worldwide

are left to right Arabic is right-to-left so whenever you do the flip you will see the text like going crazy so this needs to also be considered whenever you do localization to Arabic and of course adopting culture also Arabic is a very lengthy language if you compare Arabic to any other languages it is 25% longer than English for example so if you want to speak or like say a sentence in English you will need to consider giving it more space 25% more space so that Arabic can actually fit inside the block that you drew for also the Arabic market is unlike for example the Chinese market it's a it's a vast region but it has 21 countries so it has different dialects it has different cultures and so many

people ask us which dialect should I focus on and I would say that focus on traditional Arabic so this like the the Arabic that you can read in the newspaper this is unified across the whole region everyone understands it and it is so much better and easier than going for dialects also the Arabic numbers are different than the English ones you don't need to put Arabic letters or Arabic numbers so stick to the English numbers it will be easier also a male or female because you know when you speak to a male it's different than speaking to a female and pay special attention to special characters this image is very very popular that you will see it in every ad or everyone who tries to localize a game to Arabic you will see that the Arabic text is actually connected but in most of the people that try you will see that the

are separated and it should not be it should be like the first one not the second one so pay attention to that if you see an Arabic text that looks like each letter alone it is absolutely wrong also this is a good example to show you how people localize graphics so you start by the left picture this is not socially acceptable especially that you will need to differentiate if the game inside the game this might be okay no one will really care inside the game if you are playing an RPG game and this character shows up it's totally fine but in the previews and the icon this is where you should really care because you know that most of the people you will come and see the preview and then maybe they will not download it but they will start bad-mouthing you so you need to really pay extra attention to that but when most of the foreign developers try

to localize to Arabic they will take like then extreme measure of how they will localize a character so this is wrong and I would say that this is wrong something moderate something in between is definitely a better way to deal like treat the Arabic users as like any normal user but with some covering up for females to give you more perspective about the market and how its segmented most of the region is dependent on app purchases not ads and the reason behind that is again it's a small market so the payout from advertising companies is is really small so don't depend on having so huge volume and then depending on advertising and at the beginning of the site's I said that it has the highest average revenue per paying user as a

market so really tap into the in-app purchases also similar to any other market in the world Android is dominating the region but whenever we tell the story I feel that there is something wrong with telling people that it is dominated by androids and the reason behind that is it is actually maybe 70% of the region has Android phones but most of them are very low-end phones so you won't really depend on that so if you have if we want to have a more realistic view of the segmentation or the separation in the market I would say it's very similar because most of the iPhones are of a higher quality and better built I will share with you some case studies some of the games that we have published and some other companies that published in the region and this will be focusing now on racing and drifting titles we have published for

racing and drifting titles all of these titles made it to number one across the whole region and free and they were like amazing major successes but at the same time you will not see these titles on the top grossing charts because in the region top grossing charts are not for racing and drifting you would really see anything embarrassing and drifting and the top grossing charts so many people ask us what is there in a in a game that has racing or drifting to localize it's just a racing game you will go and just drift or steer or play with your phone and there is no actual need for localization and I would say that this is correct and at the same time it's not correct you will say that in the games that we have published for racing we have focused on three different things so when you ever think about racing game you will think about the Lamborghinis

the Ferrari is like a CSR type of game people in the Gulf countries and Saudi Arabia they actually love the everyday cars they want to race and drift with the Toyota Corolla and they want like the simple everyday type of cars the maps are driven direct from where they live and everything around them and the special thing about music the type of music that these people want to listen to is different so we are introducing a different type of of music that has body sounds rather than instruments because in some cultures and the region they would they don't like instrumental music they like this type of music so look it up another case study of a card game that we have published in the region and so an amazing success so this is a game -

taken from a Bulgarian studio called casually no the game is called balute and it's very popular in France and Bulgaria and some other countries and for some odd reason it's also very popular in Saudi Arabia the thing is when we try to localize this game because also there is not much to localize we focused on different things the rules have to be local and culturally relevant we focused in the title of the of the game to use VIP so people feel that this is a privilege to play this game and everything around the region is articulated about being a VIP or being someone with the status we also used an emphasis on traditional clothes and traditional music and everything music and that true the a great success in this game and maybe ten months it became number one across the whole

region in the board and card games it's showing always on the top grossing charts and month by month it's increasing in successful another good example in the region that is a phenomenal success it's called a game called revenge of the Sultan's this game actually put the main region on the map so many different companies supercell drove you so many different companies started focusing or seeing the region after seeing this game this is a Chinese game from a company called 1mt it has been number one top grossing game for the past two years continuous and this shows you that it is possible to really localize a game and make it look like if it's very local this game is generating 10 million dollars in revenue per month although I'm saying that this is a very small market but this is like a huge step for anyone to get into the market

and I would say that the localization of the game is not really excellent it's just good it can't be done so much better if the people who worked on the title are actually from the region and from our local so we are looking at an amazing amazing opportunity to get into this market this was a glimpse of the main a market and the Manor region if you are interested in getting into the market talk to me I can give you advice and let me know if you have any plans thank you so much thank you very much thank you Sam thank you if you have any questions nope any questions Topher first I'm here about the Middle Eastern North African market hope is well actually - one at the back and one at the front so perhaps you could take a mic to the gentleman back

there thank you thank you I'm really sorry I just knew that the the conference was now I came in a little bit late but you have locally localization for games to Arabic regions how about you say which are the you a media platform you use to acquire use users in the media region MENA region sorry sure so there is a combination of things on how to do you a the best way of doing user acquisition in the region is social media influencers and we have been really dependent on social media influencers in Saudi Arabia in Kuwait in different countries to speak highly of your game especially on YouTube so YouTube Instagram snapchat people start talking about your title and this will

drive so many different high quality users in some of the games that we have done this we had a CPI cost of around 1 cent USD so this is a great opportunity another quick question if I may do you do you focus on specific games I saw you have racing games and strategy 1 is there an emphasis on for example the top grossing titles or SLG RPG MMO in general and board games these are the most successful titles across the reach thank you appreciate you are welcome thank you I think just maybe I have time just so did you have a question as well [Music] I was just curious if the MENA region has a healthy eSports scene if there isn't a is is that something that you

guys are looking at or you know anything that you can input about eSports in the MENA region good question I believe that this is still a virgin markets for eSports I think that no one still touch that market there is a huge opportunity for people to come in and establish eSports especially for localized games so you will have like all the Counter Strike Dungeons and Dragons all of these like big big titles at industry area sports actually this year the the one that won the global competition was a Jordanian young guy who won like globally I'm not sure but he was like all over the news and became a celebrity out of he won like three million dollars but there is a huge huge would love to touch that after all right thank you very much well a big round of applause

please for some reason thank you very much [Applause] [Music] [Music]