Session: A Year Of Growth Dubai’s Rise In Gaming & Web3 - Belal Jassoma, DMCC.

Heat. [Music] [Music] Heat. Our first speaker for the afternoon is none other than Balo from DMCC and uh he will be talking about uh unlocking a year of growth Dubai's rise in uh in gaming. So please welcome Balo. Good afternoon everybody. It's great to be at the game expo. Every year for the past few years, we've been the main sponsor here and it's always good to see the buzz and the engagement and great gaming companies that we meet uh at our booth. So today, I'm going to give you a a

small recap of what's been happening in the game of in the world of gaming as well as web 3 and AI a little bit. But before that, we always like to look at the global games hub. And it's good to see that the UAE is becoming a more interesting place for gaming companies similar to the other countries that have been giving a lot of subsidies and incentives to the gaming world. And why is that some may ask? Well, there are some generic benefits that benefit all the companies and not just gaming. One of them is that people view Dubai as a strategic business hub giving access to Asia and Africa and having a very centralized time zone that helps companies manage businesses and connect east to west. With a great flight connections at at Dubai, you can reach more than 5 billion of the world population between 4 to 8 hours flight. But also Dubai stands out when it comes to a number of key areas both in the world and also in the region such

as the global economic competitiveness and ease of doing business as well as the status as a great place to work and do business and live. The ease of doing business is also very good and at the same time Dubai is a very cosmopolitan place. People from all over the world can find a home away from home and English is the business language here. So you don't have to learn Arabic in order to get by and work. But most importantly is that Dubai is a great destination for business events. As you can see, we have back-to-back events from AI to crypto to gaming. Me personally, I have been at more events than I've been at my own house or office. And I think it's going to continue being that way for the next few weeks. Now, we've also seen a very good influx of high netw worth individuals in the past few years, and the UAE tops the charts when it comes to the number of high net worth individuals that moved here in 2024. And I think this number is going to continue to be big to reach 8,200 new high net worth individuals,

topping the chart compared to the other key countries. So, why is this important for you guys here? Is that more money is coming into the UAE and more investment for gaming companies hopefully. Now, some of this is because of the attractive tax benefits in the UAE and especially corporate uh the personal income tax as well as the corporate income tax being 0% for wealth management and uh family offices, but also the visa programs that are attractive here. Visa is a very easy thing to get in the UAE and you can almost take it for granted. You can have it either as being employed by a company or a shareholder, but there's also the golden visa program for the talent and investors. But a lot of what drives the growth here in the UAE is the strategies that are developed by the UAE government. The UAE has always been very quick to respond when it comes to disruptive technologies. And normally that comes in a form of strategies and those strategies very quickly translate into projects and initiatives and incentives by Dubai government. And after that you

start seeing more public private partnerships take place. And this is really what creates the opportunity and businesses for companies that are coming here and looking uh to grow. Now, talking about crypto in the UAE, for those who are in the web 3 space, uh last year we've seen over a third of the UAE population either transact or own crypto with transactions reaching $30 billion US. And the average number of daily users has reached over 500,000 users. And that number is expected to grow even further as we spend more than sorry the slides keep moving for some reason. more than 3.5 million crypto app downloads in the UAE just in the month of Jan of this year. Now the funding landscape is also looking very good as we have $3.7 billion of web3 specific funds but also institutional investors have injected more than 24 billion into crypto companies within a

period of one year and we're glad to have a regulator that is specific and dedicated to the crypto space. VA has managed to license over 30 companies since they are incepted and there's a lot more in the pipeline. Now the AI is also growing in the UAE with big push from the government on AI adoption and we have some ambitious targets set by the UAE government with 335 billion in revenue generated from AI by 2031. So for the organizers here, by the way, the screen is no longer reflecting what's showing over there. Anyways, we keep moving. Okay, now we're back, I think. Good. So there's a lot of AI adoption that is taking place now as a result of the government push and the targets and we also see increase in the job postings in the AI space in

particular. But more interestingly is there's a lot of interest in investment. There's a $30 billion fund dedicated to investing in AI which was done in partnership between MGX, BlackRock and Microsoft and that is expected to grow from 30 billion to hundred billion dollars. Now gaming in the UAE is also growing and we're seeing if you talk about the Mina region first there has been $7.7 billion of gaming revenue and that grew about 9% from the previous year and we're seeing a lot of interesting gaming deals in the MINA. Within five years, there are more than almost $400 million of investment in gaming that took place. And that's mostly because the UAE's contribution to it in terms of the interest from the government, the push from the government, as well as having a young population who's very passionate about gaming and the gaming spend per capita is also very high. And the population is also techsavvy and very digitally connected.

Now going back to web 3, we're seeing as I mentioned a lot of public private partnerships that took place and some very exciting projects such as Dubai Customs building a supply chain uh project on web 3 as well as as well as Dubai police using Cardano for the scans of bullets and sharing that with different law enforcement agencies. But we've also seen metaverse adoption between Ajan police and ADGM using blockchain for different use cases and also as DMCC we have launched our own metaverse environment which we'll show you also shortly. Now we also have a lot of trends in the gaming space with Dubai program for gaming that was launched uh last year and DMCC is an active member of that and you're going to hear later on from FEL who's going to tell you more about the program itself but also on the met metaverse side uh the ministry of economy have launched also a space in

the metaverse and there's a lot of education uh activities and initiatives uh Dubai police is also doing a lot we have Dubai police as an active player also here in the gaming face and this is a quick glimpse of DMCC's metaverse environment. Basically, we built a digital twin of our crypto center and that basically gives a chance to our members and clients to interact with us even if they can't make it here. They can meet our partners. They can host events and attend events also virtually and they can learn about the different ecosystems that we have. We also have Diamond and others and we plan to grow that space even further. I'm sorry the clicker is not my best friend today but hopefully things will move. So what is DMCC and what is the role that we play in this? So for those who don't know DMCC is a Dubai

government authority. We were established back in 2002 with a mandate to grow trade. We were given a land which is 200 hectare or 2 million uh square meters to build and develop and achieve that objective. And this land is today home to 87 towers between commercial, residential and hotels. And it's home to more than 25,000 companies from all sectors and all nationalities. So we started with commodities trade and we have a very mature uh commodities ecosystems. But like many organizations about 10 years ago we realized that technology is really the driving force behind many sectors and we started introducing ecosystems for the different technologies starting with the crypto center which today grew to be the largest web3 ecosystem followed by the gaming and more recently the AI center and in total we have about 3,200 technology companies operating in the DMCC in total. Now what we offer the tech ecosystem companies aside from the basic offering which is registration license visa which everybody needs and a

co-working space or or a service office at our center companies who operate in our space have access to ongoing opportunities such as networking events, knowledge sharing events. We have acceleration programs, access to funding as well as PC programs for those technologies that are looking to connect with corporates and get business. Wow. Now, talking about gaming in particular, we realized that access to funding is one of the areas that everyone is interested in and that's why we put more emphasis to working with partners. Exas, our great partners with writer sitting here in front as well that is going to support our companies with acceleration and funding along with other partners such as Artisian Studios, Astrolabs, Brinks, and Level Up who help with recruitment. With those partners, we give companies access to exclusive discounts and perks that other members don't have. Now, there's a diversity of license activities that our companies can apply for, starting from game developing and game publishing and other

activities in that space, but we also have a growing esports community with league operators and league uh events management and analytics and other support services. And as a result of that, we have a very diverse gaming community today. And it's 130 companies that is growing every month. And as you can see on the screen, there are different brands uh from the different subsectors and se segments of the gaming space. Events are very important and this is a way that we get our own companies to network and mingle and create collaboration opportunities. We organize about 10 events a year and sometimes even game jams and acceleration programs within our gaming center as well as well as other venues within the community. We also have a strong uh crypto ecosystem with partners that support us deliver proposition such as

the names that you see on the screen. On the media side, we have Cointelegraph that help us spread spread the word but with other partners as well. They have the different perks that you can see on the screen where we give our members access to. And the good thing is that if you're a gaming company and you're interested in crypto, you can also access the crypto center benefits and vice versa. But on the crypto side and for those interested in web 3 games, we have a lot of partners who are happy to offer grants for them to be built on their chain such as Solana amongst others. And there's also a diverse license activity range in the crypto space. If you are a blockchain developer or a metaverse service provider or if you're a prop trader in the crypto space then you can have the activities that you see on the left hand side of the screen. While on the right hand side you have the regulated activities that require DMCC license as well as a VA license the regulator and that's something that we can also support with. If you're an exchange, a broker dealer, um an investment manager or into the

remittance or custody, all of this would require uh regulated license from VA as well as a commercial license from DMCC. We also have a very diverse community in the crypto space and today we have more than 650 web3 companies and we were very happy to welcome recently Animoka brands into our community and as you know Animoka is one of the biggest investors in the crypto and gaming space and we had the pleasure of hosting their Animoka brands portfolio day in our office uh last week and we see a lot a lot more interest from Animoka and the others in investing in local projects. We also have a lot of events in the crypto space and as I mentioned it's also open to the gaming uh ecosystem and we have ongoing cohorts of acceleration by the different partners that we run within the crypto space and one of the things that we started recently paying even more attention to is because we realize that our companies are

international and they're interested in accessing global markets we have come up with ecosystem bridges between different centers. So with Switzerland, if you're a member of DMCC, you have access to CV Labs and vice versa. And with the Unicorn Factory in Lisbon, we recently signed a deal whereby their members can also access certain benefits of our space as well as working from the space. And our members can also access the various ecosystems. And we also work a lot with the Solana founders and the different uh hubs. Um, we're also proud to see that over $155 million of funding was raised by 21 member companies of our crypto space since we started. And that number has already gotten bigger since the last time I updated the slide. And we also provide support as I mentioned with access to funding. Last but not least from my side, this is our flagship event, the web 3 unleashed in partnership with

Bybit. We had the second edition last year and we gave away $160 worth of prize money and that was basically for five winners that pitched out of the 10 or 15 that participated on the day. We plan to do this again uh next year. Web 3 gaming is also one of the categories that can participate in it and we hope to see some more web 3 games hopefully win uh this year. But later on today, if you're still around, we're gonna host the pitch play as the co-organizer. DMCC is also participating to the prize pool and we're gonna see some exciting uh games pitch as well. And hopefully if you're pitching today, I wish you all the best. That's it from my side. Thank you for listening and uh look forward to meeting you later hopefully. Take care. Thank you so much, Bala. We'd have time for one or two quick questions. Does anyone in the audience have any questions for Bala? If you do raise your hand very high.

No, I think you covered everything, Bal, but like one thing I wanted to say was, you know, you've talked about the over the last year of of of what you've been working on with with DMCC, but uh can you hear me? All right. Is is that okay? I can, but I was just um there was some noise. Am I talking too I'm probably talking too fast. Um but what so what's next for the year ahead to then take the the next step for uh for for your programs? Sure. So look, we we're going to continue to add value and this is for us the most important thing. So we listen to our members and see what what are the areas that they need support with and then we look for ways to create the value proposition within that space. We're also interested in doing more in the esports side and we're looking forward to also organizing or co-hosting with our partners an esport tournament. Um, aside from that, we want to also support our companies with adoption of AI. We have a growing AI community of more than 80 AI companies. We ourselves as DMCC are looking at various AI projects and we understand that AI is

going to change the shape of course of of how games are developed. So we want to see more at the intersection of AI and gaming and how we can also play a role in that evolution. Brilliant. And yeah, you just mentioned about AI as well, but is there anything like other any other like sectors that you're sort of looking at? For instance, browser HTML 5 gaming. Is that something that you're looking at? Look, there's a lot of technologies and there's a lot of so there's nothing specific to highlight at the moment. Okay, brilliant. Thank you so much, Balo. Can we give him another round of applause, please? Heat. [Music] [Music]