Session: Dubai, Your MENA Launchpad for Gaming & Web3 Business - Belal Jassoma, DMCC.

[Music] so uh I would like to uh welcome to the stage uh uh very special speaker uh I'd like to welcome balal Joma from uh dmcc uh of course dmcc are our Platinum sponsors for this event so of course their uh their you know support is very much appreciated as a w yes if bow would like to come to the stage and we like to he's going to be talking about uh uh Dubai and uh web free gaming and of course I know uh web free isn't

particularly monetization related however it's a it's a nice Prelude to what kind of content you can expect for tomorrow so yes welcome below and I'll let you take it away good evening game Expo it's great to be here it's it's great to be back in this amazing event for the third year in a row and thank you all for joining me here today so okay that's my picture I guess there are many gaming hubs around the world and I had the privilege to meet leading gaming companies from almost all the countries that you see on the screen in fact I recently actually this morning came back from our back-to-back Japan and Korea roacho and I was privileged to meet some of the leading gaming companies and very impressed to see the gaming technology over there that said the UAE in particular has emerged in recent times as one of the leading gaming hubs and why one would ask why there are many reasons but to start with

Dubai has really positioned itself as a global business Hub and as the gateway to Middle East Africa and South Asia and some of the things that gaming businesses find very interesting about it is that it's very centralized being able to manage East and West in terms of time zone as well as logistical and flight connectivity as you can see from the screen you're about 4 to8 hours flight from some of the very interesting markets but aside from that Dubai really uh is ranked higher number one in most cases around the world or in the region in a number of a key areas such as the economic competitiveness the ease of doing business economic performance and also as a status as a great place to live Dubai is also a top destination for events and as you know in events like this today events are very important for promoting your business and in the last couple of years we've seen the rise of crypto gaming and Tech events in here last but not the least Dubai is a very

Cosmopolitan place I mean if you look around the room you can see people from all over the world and the business language here is English so it makes it easy for expats to come and live and blend in now before I move to the next slide I'm really curious to know how many people in this room live in Dubai can you please raise your hand okay so about 50% so moving on if you look at the startup ecosystem over here when looking at things like the capital raised and the number of scale-ups you can see that the UAE tops the charts when looking at the other countries in the region and hopefully this will only grow further now talk about gaming in particular in this region uh we recently published a gaming edition of our future of trade report which has predicted the G Mina gaming revenues to almost double by 2027 to reach $6 billion and that is supported by a number of key areas

such as the UAE having a young and techsavvy population who's very passionate about gaming and watch a lot of game uh related content also we've noticed that or we found that in a period of six years there were over 170 gaming investment deals reaching almost $400 million us and that is supported by all those points that is mentioned on the screen now we see a rise of web 3 games in particular in the dmcc and we see our member companies enjoy a lot of monetization options ranging from okay they seem to be a animation on the screen so I'll go back so from play to earn to asset ownership and nfts to as well having blockchain marketplaces within the games but we also see other games monetized by subscription models that said there are still challenges for web3 games

and some of those challenges is the scalability of the web3 technology and the complexity that requires a lot more skills and talent to have within the organization as you can know as you can see uh the access to a game developer Talent is not always easy that doesn't mean that the future of web3 game isn't promising because we certainly see that it is now talking about gaming in general in the U there are a lot of opportunities and the reason for those opportunities is that there's an attractive regulatory landscape over here especially when looking at the web3 regulation which helps companies monetize and access the web3 space and in addition to that the UAE government has really put gaming technology and disruptive technology on the national agenda and we see that focus with the many strategies that were launched across the metaverse the gaming and more recently with the Universal plan for AI

that will help accelerate the adoption of AI across government organizations the the gaming spent per capita in the uee is amongst the highest in the region that also helps make it attractive for gaming companies over here but there's always challenges and some of those challenges is the availability of talent like we mentioned before as well as the need to create an awareness about the gaming industry and how key stakeholders should see it as a tool for many Industries and not just as a game that can have people spend time on and so on now because of the opportunities and to overcome those challenges the dmcc has decided to focus on the gaming ecosystem and set up a gaming center but before we talk about our gaming center for those who don't know what dmcc is we're leading international business district with over 24,000 companies coming from all over the world and from all sectors and

as an area it's about 200 hectare of land or 2 million square meters with 87 Towers from commercial residential and hotels so it's like a city within a city where people can work live and Thrive it's located in the area called JT for those who don't know it's right opposite Dubai Marina so it's centrally situated now our journey with tech and gaming has started long time ago almost 10 years ago in 2015 when we partnered with astrolabs to create a tech Hub and this Tech Hub has helped accelerate the growth of over 800 companies since Inception with over three exits and more than 300 million dollars of funding raised by startups in the ecosystem a good number of those companies were gaming and Esports and gaming related Tech the space offers ongoing access to investors and you can see the brands of those investors on the screen but with the rising demand of gaming companies expanding here we actually set up a dedicated space called The dmcc Gaming

Center which is a nice and cool co-working space that will give you the license the registration the desk space for your company but that's not it as a member of the gaming center you get access to acceleration programs Market entry programs uh access to investors and ongoing events networking opportunities and mentorship these are just some of the pictures from the regular meetups that we do for our gaming uh Center and these are photos from our last game Jam that was organized by one of our member companies we plan to do more of these as well as hackathons this is an overview of the license activities that are possible for gaming companies and as you can see they're quite diverse in terms of the sectors from game development publishing content creation influencer to Esports related activities such as Esports teams League operator uh Esports management and the list go on

and as a result of that we have a very diverse gaming ecosystem with over 100 gaming companies now from all the sub sectors of that space and some of the uh members uh in the gaming ecosystem are presented on the screen and we have ecosystem partners that help us deliver the value proposition of our gaming ecosystem we talked about Talent challenges earlier and our ecosystem partner level up will help specific specifically recruit for gaming within our space um Brink and astrolabs help with access to funding and Epiphany help us deliver the events so we talked about web 3 and having a crypto ecosystem which is more mature than the gaming one since we had it for the last three years now will help our gaming companies scale up and access the web free liquidity and we're seeing a lot of that for example our Tech partners especially Boba and Solana

have a a particular focus on gaming companies and they offer grants for companies that operate in our gaming and crypto centers if they develop their web 3 game on their infrastructure Brink and TDY run our acceleration programs and some of those programs were focused on web3 games bybit is our listing partner and they can provide an expedited service to list your token on Exchange and it could be also of course your web three token and none of this will be be possible of course without the support of the local and federal Regulators that we work closely with to help navigate through those challenges these are pictures from our last acceleration program and as you can see there are cash prizes that were given to the top three winners we also had a crypto Innovation Challenge a hackathon which was actually the largest crypto hackathon in the US last year the top three winners took

home $100,000 in usdt and we plan to do this once again this year none of the three winners were web three games but I I saw that some of the top 10 uh that made it to that were actually web three games I know that because I was one of the judges and these are the licens activities that are possible in the crypto ecosystem they're also diverse there are some regulated activities and there are some which are more on the technology and the metaverse and acceler ation side and as a result of that of course we have a diverse also web3 ecosystem more than 600 companies now this needs to be updated and that makes us actually the largest web3 ecosystem and the largest concentration of web3 companies uh in the region on the right side of the slide you will see more of the metaverse and gaming related companies now at dmcc we play an active role in making sure that all of those companies actually collaborate and engage with one another

another we also published a crypto defi a metaverse edition of our future of trade report where we predicted the size of the metaverse market to reach $4.4 trillion by 20130 and that is supported by the rise of the AI technology and how it can scale up this Tech this uh industry as well as the many Road tested use cases that support the growth of the sector so in conclusion if you're a tech web 3 crypto or gaming or all of the above company and you want to join an ecosystem that where you feel like you can belong where you can find your Comm Community your industry peers you can join dmcc thank you very much for listening that's it for my side brilliant thank you so much bow uh we have time for a few questions if anyone has any just pick uh put your hand up if you've got any questions

Dave do you have anything I normally I know you normally have something to say uh hello um just a just an observation there are sure um I I've been in Dubai only for a couple of weeks now but I was very privileged to be invited to a number of web 3 events in the in the region uh we just had token 249 in the in the region and the Arts now Fest why why is Dubai particularly strong for um web 3 blockchain and Innovation like that that's a good question thank you so one of the reasons is that um from the beginning Dubai has decided to be a crypto-friendly city and dmcc was actually at the Forefront of that we pioneered the crypto ecosystem we were the first to issue licenses we opened up to that market and the good thing about the leadership in the UAE is that once we set our mind to something and once we put an agenda in place we don't scale back and we've seen actually you know governments both and or or jurisdictions I would say both in the east and west kind of you know moving forward and kind of having a change of heart and and and scale back a little bit and that gives

uncertainity to Big players and and you know doesn't give them the Comfort to invest their resources and hire people even further and that hasn't happened in the UAE and that helped us attract even more of the key uh players and the more big players you attract the more of course uh it helps grow and and and make the ecosystem complete so I think that's one of the key reasons uh for that the second is that the the the push for Innovative Technologies so we really see that Technologies like blockchain and AI they can really take trade Investments and Industry to the next level and that is what we want to see actually it's not just about having the crypto transactions but also scaling up other businesses conventional businesses and having have them uh you know gain further traction using those Technologies and that's the reason for the push from the government side and from our side as well thank you does anyone else have any questions we still got a little bit of time if anyone does any any questions uh okay I I have one so um

more of just a general question where where do you see uh blockchain and web free games in the next 5 to 10 years uh in the minor region and uh globally sure so the use cases that we see currently I mean they they're only going to grow further so we see them in in in action basically we see them being used but the traction isn't there as much but you can see that the practicality of those use cases are working so we see a lot more adoption and we see a further spread across wider sector especially when looking at the metaverse and what it can do to a lot of the sectors and dmcc itself I mean we're also exploring uh the metaverse and very soon we'll be launching something in that space and if you if you think about it I mean the number of users that we have and the the the amount of services that we offer to our members and if we can gamify that if can make it more appealing to our users and more interactive that's only going to you know make our service uh more appealing for our end

user all right uh there there's still uh time for one question so if anyone has a final comment to say uh please put up your hand y one over there thank you um I was interested in the The Hub aspect that you started with with the world map um trying to build a hub here in Dubai um a lot of what we've seen in Europe specifically around places like Malmo in Sweden dundy in Scotland Guilford in in England the hubs are actually um they are sort of self-grown so they are a result of local talent being taught nurtured and grown in those regions I wonder if you see that happening in Dubai like in those other regions where places like AB University in Scotland have really been the driving force behind a lot of the

development that's gone on up there so do you see that that that nurturing going on in Dubai at those levels the sort of Grassroots I guess You' call it sure so if if I'm to compare uh UAE to other players in the region I would say that the growth here is more organic so and it it happens over a period of time it's not happening very basically fast but I would have to admit that education is an area that we can improve on and it is the the single most important um pillar basically that we have to focus on to have a a more sustained growth I would say so your observation is absolutely right and um it is basically an area of focus both on the government side on the MCC side brilliant uh could we give uh bow a round of applause please thank you [Music]