The Awakening of MENA Gaming: Empowering Talent, Harnessing Tech, and Making Markets - Ahmed Sharif

[Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] we have a session called The Awakening of Mena gaming empowering Talent harnessing Tech and making markets and to host that we've got Ahmed Sharif from uh sandsoft sorry please take it away thank you [Applause] thank you hello hello testing testing yes okay hey Max okay so welcome everyone uh thank you for coming um thanks for the introduction so very quickly um we're gonna be talking about Mina a

little bit and the main kind of goal of this is not to just be another meaner presentation there's been a lot of those many before me and for many after me the goal though is to be a little bit telling about my story about how I came into the Mina Market um and my journey into it and why I personally chose to take the leap going from over 20 years in North America and the EU gaming industry and um into Mina um on a more serious note I got a ton of LinkedIn messages asking me this question why why Mina why Middle East why the golf so it'll be nice if they stopped coming my way hopefully this presentation solves that once and for all so really quick kind of breakdown of what they'll be talking about rough introduction of myself then going into three main areas the market Tech and talent and kind of sharing my Criterion for why I think the million Market is the place to be and if we have time some q a at the end

so who am I I'm CTO of sandsoft I've joined semi recently and this is a quick collage of where I've been and what I've done I began my career in mobile game Space Scotland and Dundee and I had been working on various titles founded my own startup with a small team learned a lot of lessons from that and then moved on to platform development so working on Sony r d uh on the PlayStation 4. mainly as a graphics rendering engineer that was always been my my forte um since then I've kind of been bouncing between both platforms and making games themselves um here's a another quick collage of all the things I've worked on and you can see it's quite a mix AAA titles and mobile games platforms consoles headsets consumer electronics and my journey is really taking me

around the world UK Sweden California Washington um and especially during my time at EA where I was technical director for the Need for Speed franchise and at meta where I headed up the VR AR metaverse division there for platform engineering I learned a ton about global markets from engineering perspective I initially after it wouldn't be very relevant to me but in fact as you'll soon find out I learned it was very relevant um so more recently I joined sansoft and this is quite a departure from well you'd expect a regular directory like mine to look like and again I've got a ton of questions as to why Mina why did you take that leap um and this is what I mean my LinkedIn inbox was really seriously flooded when uh the news went public um I was surprised particularly by my American friends and colleagues who just really didn't understand they couldn't compute um

so my LinkedIn inbox was certainly not prepared so why did I make the move um and it kind of began as an enigma for me throughout my career I had gone to you know again working a very large corporation shipping very large games and products and Mina had always been this Big Blob of land mass and people that we just kind of overlooked we were always straddling between the two big twins of EU and North America and uh just hopped over a little bit and focused the rest of our energy on Asia that was always the status quo for at least a good 10 15 years or so especially in the early 2000s and I just took it for what it was I didn't know I never really questioned it never really dug into it um and uh at least for me at least all the companies I'd worked for had generally kept Mina as a periphery or secondary Market not really much attention um and this was my perception oh it's just

deserts and camels right I mean what else is there uh Mina is not really known for its um well the media is not entirely friendly to the region and most of the time when we think about Mina we think these kind of images and um by and large uh rather than accepting the norm over my career I began to become more and more curious and I soon found out I was very wrong there's a lot more to deserts well to mina than just deserts and camels um to be clear there are camels they're everywhere and even next to very tall skyscrapers but um more importantly I began digging deeper into the market itself I wanted to understand how does it compare what is gaming like over there if Mina was truly an emerging market with all this potential blah blah um I needed to see that the demand for gaming should be high right and the spend on gaming should be going up

um and what I quickly Learned was that it was a very very appealing Market so what are the two things that I that personally for me attracted me to the area the first one was the eagerness to experiment um I was surprised to know that Mina has one of the world's youngest most useful populations uh which means that by and large over 60 of the of the region is under 30 years old um that is extremely young uh so that means that they're in generally very heavily inclined towards Digital entertainment with over 70 of the population playing games specifically mobile games that is not normal by global standards and more more relevantly the demand has consistently outstripped Supply so if we look at snapshot in 2017 total revenue in the region was only about 1.1 billion that's quite small in less than 10 years that's 7x to almost 7 billion that's really crazy growth really crazy

growth um and in part that's because of the sheer number of gamers in the region um and visualizing it like this it really gives you a sense of how Mina Stacks up to the previous juggernauts that we're used to working with in the games industry um Mina is almost as large as Europe from a from a gamer's perspective and that number is changing it's growing every day um we haven't I would say there's not quite as saturated as Europe or the American markets are more importantly um if you look at the game consumer spent it's been going up uh in 2018 uh it's unheard of to see an economy spend 700 million in in-game Mobile consumer spent uh this is from our friends over at data.ai and in the space of three years double 1.7 billion that is again not normal and sorry colleagues I know I promised I wouldn't put a meme in here but I couldn't resist

um it is quite bizarre the level of growth that the region is seeing from a gaming perspective and the Boston Consulting Group tends to agree not just them but many others and they also cited the very young population and they've also done some further data modeling to suggest that it's growing by 25 year on year that is for what it's worth three times faster than China which is about eight percent year on year so even from an Asian perspective the market is becoming very very very appealing um and to add some additional information 50 of all the apps downloaded in the region are games uh that again exceeds what is the normal global standard of 40 percent so people are using their phones on average majority for gaming um so here I was I finally understood that the market is a ripe Fresh open field um but so what I mean I'll be honest

there's been plenty of cases of markets that had high demand but there are other factors that have to be in place for it to actually be relevant um if we look at for example other Industries there have been many many examples of tech and otherwise where products have been in high demand but they the market could not actually sustain it or incubate that products due to infrastructure and other various reasons so I had to understand how the community adopted Tech what was the Region's mindset towards technology um gaming being a technical product I think that technology product it I had to understand how serious they were around adopting new technologies and bearing in mind I'm not talking about inventing technology I'm talking about harnessing it or reusing it or being willing to adopt it there's two very different things if the community was not did not care about this then it it it suggested a very different mindset and a different Market approach to what I was expecting

so why is technology uptake specifically important well there are three main reasons it drives Innovation when there's more adoption there's going to be more use cases found for a certain technology it reinforces Market potential again it's a usually a pretty strong indicator of Readiness to consume secondary or related products that depend on that technology and of course the multiplicative effect of the prior implies that there'll be new unique experiences built with those foundational Technologies here's an example of that so this is from our friends over at Erickson in the gcma report of 2022 what's pretty surprising here is that the leading 5G Market in the world you would assume would be North America or Europe or even Asia it's not it's the Gulf States they by 2030 will have the highest adoption rate of 5G and that's mobile connections not infrastructure so I was Keen to understand

how many people actually have physical access to 5G networks on their phone on a day-to-day and the Gulf States specifically will be at 95 percent and the rest of mina is quickly catching up emphasizing this further looking at mobile data traffic per smartphone um today well rather last year in 2022 uh 25 gigs on average was that was the consumption of the average mobile user in the Gulf so they're heavily dependent on mobile data on their phones and that eclipses Central Europe Western Europe North America only tied with the the Asian region so this community is very engrossed in their mobile devices and they're heavily relying upon them these are all very interesting indicators to me as an engineer to know how a community how receptive a community is to their mobile devices and there's much more data by the way but I just couldn't fit all into this presentation I'm trying to focus

specifically on mobile gaming but there's a ton more around General console gaming and many other factors that were very very interesting so the last thing I wanted to look into was if I was to categorize the last two slides as consumer uptake of of technology I wanted to see what external forces are doing in the actual region so uh when I was at meta before sandsoft I was very aware of uh one of the largest metaverse training centers that were being built in California um and that is today a kind of gold standard that we use to train people on web free Technologies VR and AR Tech as well um the second ever metavervest Training Academy is in Saudi Arabia um and that's the only other one in the world that is pretty big in my opinion and not to mention just two weeks ago Google announced a brand new Cloud region in Saudi Arabia so that involves very large data centers and a lot of a

ton of stuff um and not to mention tencent IBM and Amazon who have been also upping their investment in the region as well so this are all strong indicators that when Big Technical companies who are trendseters in the industry are investing heavily into core technological foundations in one of the largest markets or other largest growth markets in the world okay the very last and final one that I cared about was the last ingredient of the cake which is Talent um you can have all the technology in the world you can have uh you know all the funding in the world but if you haven't got people to execute on your vision it doesn't matter right to build an Enterprise to build a venture you need to have people as the backbone of your success and I'll be honest this area was probably the least conclusive as far as my findings go but I I do have a thesis that I want to share with all of you um

the two primary questions I wanted to answer here was was this just a consumer economy or was it a Creator economy is there a trend that we're seeing here where people are not just using technology for the sake of it but are they actually looking to uh you know produce and leverage and learn about this technology and maybe develop upon it so there's something called the STI index which stands for the science technology and Innovation index um broadly speaking the meaning region has historically been as still as today a net importer of STI products and services that's been the case for a very very long time and it's also been a net exporter of STI Talent which means that most scientists researchers technologists prefer to matriculate in Western institutions versus their own um so this in my view had to change um and uh there are a couple of factors that I think are important to justify or maybe predict if this change is actually happening in a certain region

But to answer that I had to answer the question first of what creates Talent and there are three main factors investment education and opportunity generally speaking both uh throughout history and even in recent history we know that you need these three things and if they're all in place then all that's left is time if we look at investment the Mena region is probably one of the hottest spots right now um 38 billion dollars alone deployed behind Saudi Arabia's National Esports and gaming strategy um very few other governments have that kind of money behind a very a very singular industry and it's also been driving 15 year on year growth doubling European growth rates education is also necessary and by and large my humble assessment Mina is educationally flourishing in the sense that here are a couple of examples

and Qatar alone there are twice as many females enrolling into universities and males that is kind of weird by global standards that's not usually the case um right and if you look at academic endowments and investments into institutions um again Saudi Arabia here tops the charts 23.7 billion in endowments across major universities in the Kingdom again not normal but there's these are all good indicators of change and lastly opportunity um you can have very educated people but if they haven't got a chance to flex their muscle or a job to apply to or a company to work for and to Aspire towards it doesn't matter so the multiplicative effects of both investment in terms of startups bringing other companies to the region will hopefully create that and there's actually pretty good historical precedent for this um I do believe Mina is starting to recalibrate itself back to its

historical zenith and to explain this a little bit more um some of you may be familiar with you know Middle East very very essential role in science and technology in fact for the majority of human history it's kind of um a fact that it's pretty much been the center of all science and technology um and the fact that it was a net exporter of STI was is only a very recent phenomenon for the majority of human history um Middle East was probably the place to be when it came to learning Sciences medicine mathematics physics technology automation robotics um this was not this is not a normal State as it were my actual favorite story about this is if you go back to the Islamic caliphate of I think 800 CE you'll find that one of the leaders there I believe his name is built the famous House of Wisdom or betel hekma in Arabic

this is by far in history the Mankind's first Millennium Capital of human cultural science one of the largest libraries in the world and well a nice story that I that I've read in uh in a couple of books that talk about this part of history is how this Empire motivated that kind of growth and uh it was very simple in fact the leader of the Empire would invite translators authors researchers Engineers from across the globe and very simply they would reward those researchers and various talent that came and migrated to the region with gold equivalent to the weights of their books and those are heavy books leather-bound very thick thick books um so a lot of money in funding and financing went into this region to make that kind of achievement possible um now this is maybe a bit a bit a bit far back from a heterical perspective but there are

other examples of this as well happening the American aviation industry is a very very good example of this if there are any Aviation Buffs here in the audience if we look at the North American Aviation Association I Look at California which is today the Hub of all Aviation uh pretty much California is regionally not a very good place to build industry like that it's very far away awkward time zones large deserts sound a bit familiar um there was a very distinct Push by the American government especially after World War One to create this industry um and actually began with Theodore Roosevelt at the time he was assistant Secretary General to the Navy to say hey we need to invest in Aerospace at the time it was minimally used for airmail at best um but again as a result of investment and various other uh means such as legislation acts of Congress protecting the industry from legal and international disputes

heavy amounts of financing and funding and incubation um uh you had cases like the Lockheed Brothers migrating to California to form as we know now Lockheed and later was merged to Lockheed Martin you have Boeing and so on um and funnily enough a lot of historians theorize that it was the foundation of the aviation industry that gave birth to the Silicon industry and then the valley Silicon Valley in the region so um there's a ton of History here and I and I believe that if we look at these patterns throughout different Industries we can quite clearly see that a lot of the same principles are being taken a minute today when it comes to gaming and Technology so summarize um uh I think after coming through all of this uh I was pretty convinced um uh it was uh pretty clear that I wanted to be kind of a part of this journey uh it's not often that you're a part of the industry that is booming uh and uh you're creating Talent companies infrastructure from scratch um and I really wanted to kind of be not only a witness but a part of the

evolution of a region into a gaming Powerhouse um hopefully you found this insightful and the deck has inspired you to look at you know maybe a bit more closely into the region and some of the activities there and the industry and uh within Mina but more importantly I hope people stop messaging me on LinkedIn now about why I decided to join sandsoft thanks everyone all right thank you thank you very much I really appreciate that I think uh there might not be time for questions but of course I'm sure if anyone has any burning questions that you'll be able to take some like of course right away of course just outside so yeah thank you so much thank you very much appreciate it thank you [Music]