The Rise of the Game Industry in the MENA Region - Kamal Aittah, CEO & Founder at Game Hermits.

[Music] thank you the next session we have is Kamal from game Hermits and he's going to be talking about the rise of the games industry in the Mina region uh come on come on stage please hi all thanks for coming here uh thanks for seeing media for hosting me um and I hope you're enjoying your event so far I'm here I'm Carmel eight I CEO of game Hermits a company based in Egypt but I'm going to talk about it uh just in a bit and this is the rise of the game industry in the middle region AKA why you should invest in local developers in the region and yeah this is us game

Hermits we are mainly an Outsourcing Studio working for Publishers and investors and game developers we've been founded seven years ago we pretty much saw the transition from where there were no mentors or little to no mentors especially in Egypt to the booming that is happening right now in the industry and the talents that are emerging from uh well everywhere um we make games we make simulations we make VR and AR and we're pretty much interested in the booming that is happening and trying to make sure that it's going in the right direction uh let's talk a bit about the history of the industry um from my perspective at least I like to think of the industry in three ways the history of the industry in

three uh separate periods the first the very first being the veteran hobbyists those are where game developers working for big companies coming back and trying to build the game for their own uh this period was from 2004 to 2010 uh and they were like replicating popular games like GTA or Need for Speed but with an Arabic flavor to it and uh in this period there wasn't really uh free game engines yet uh very popular uh specifically unity and unreal and so again the game industry was really hard everywhere and especially hard here in demeanor but then game engines came and this introduced a whole lot of different opportunities to Indie creatives here in in demeanor especially in Egypt Jordan and uh Lebanon at first and then Saudi Arabia and UAE came into into the play and then soon the entire region and so

there was a lot of experiment uh games I've seen a lot of creative ideas really really creative ideas that I've never seen anywhere before there was the game engines just accelerated uh the the the industry here in in Mina and let creatives really go crazy with their designs and then there was the exponential growth um which we're seeing right now events like these being held in the middle region in Riyadh Summit uh we're seeing events everywhere in Egypt in Jordan in Saudi Arabia and you know in the United Arabs of Emirates so it's it's really amazing what's happening and I think we're going in the right direction uh in terms of amazing talents emerging now the the tools that accelerated this rise are free game engines of course we've talked about this the online courses I remember when I when I started

out there wasn't really someone who could Mentor me or available knowledge so I had to go online all the time uh and and see what forums are talking about uh uh online courses on udemy on on YouTube even and uh but now we have so many institutions just as we saw in the opening uh targeting kids to to enter the industry which is very very good and uh um also the community events uh I'm going to speak here biased in Egypt uh there is the Arabic events every in the entire Mina region it's a very an amazing event it was held in the AUC in in Cairo last month actually not last month just a couple of days ago um there was also a run double jump and Global game jam with the biggest Global game Jam in the entire world is held in Egypt as well many creative games like

this was crazy you couldn't even imagine how many games and how many different ideas people could come up with uh government support which is very recent and very nice uh of course Jordan gaming lab as we've seen uh Savvy investing 38 billion dollars in in a new gaming studios here in the Mina region there's five six labs having a dedicated department for gaming and media in general and so all of this is really accelerating the rise but there is still of skills facing the industry and the Very biggest the the biggest obstacle facing the industry right now is the awareness many gamers really are not still aware that there is an industry booming in the Middle East and this is for a lot of reasons that we'll talk about but awareness is definitely one of the biggest obstacles that is facing us right now

and the next obstacle is investment investment isn't as easy to get as say for in the west so um I think this is something that we have to work on uh and keep working on until we make it easy or easier for actual potential developers to get investment also marketing um we have success stories with tomato with joacher as we've seen very amazing people um but uh in terms of developers working on maybe potential original IPS that that they believe it's really good and it's good but they don't have the marketing tools to really get it out they they flop and really good games just disappear and and go to waste and that's a shame we need to figure this out

and um how how do we figure this out is by having more and more events like this where we invite experts from from from all over the world to share their experience and we in turn tell them about our culture and show them the booming of our industry and so this will help fix things um now maina Market I'm sure of you I'm sure all of you know by now but the minute Market is the biggest growing industry uh I mean Market in the entire world uh made 1.78 billion dollars in 2021 uh it's currently in 2021 it was 300 more than 300 million players of all ages and genders so that's very amazing uh by 2025 we expected to make 5 billion dollars very uh fast growing 15.1

percent compound annual growth rate uh so there there is no doubt that this region is the next big region in gaming in general and so targeting this region is critical to any developer and um uh we also see amazing events every year we see we've saw we've seen Gamers eight in Saudi Arabia it was very big very elegant uh a lot of people came and show up uh Insomniac in Egypt really really amazing Vibes a lot of indie games were shown there as well as International games of course you've got super dumb one of the biggest Esports uh for valorent and League of Legends for example uh you've got Jordan egg e games I was held back in 2019 it was also a big thing and many many more and in Saudi Arabia and UAE

and so these events tells you that there is a hunger for gamers here for these events and to play games and um and they show up to Indie Games made by the region and they genuinely want to show support and this is what local developers here have to know that um the market here is is really uh yours to to to to experiment with they want to support you they they like the idea that there is uh local developers from their country or their region making good gains so don't hesitate to start here in the main region don't hesitate to show your game here before taking it abroad so why invest in the local developers especially I mean we can invest in games like targeting the amino region but why the local developers well first it's an

unsaturated market right now I mean less than 50 local div Studios proficiently competing in the entire region versus 8 000 studios in the US and Europe alone there is just a very huge gap that you can't imagine with this huge Market it's just a golden opportunity for any investor and publisher uh obviously the unique culture we've seen a lot of games from from the north from Nordic uh or or sort of uh uh the Viking culture we've seen a lot of games from Western culture Eastern culture Chinese Japanese we've seen a lot of games with these cultures and it's very cool games but little to know uh or little games from our culture that speaks out loud uh one game that pops to mind is Assassin's Creed but there's very rich history very I mean the entire region combined is 7 000 years of worth

of History so infinite pool of ideas to draw inspiration from uh so I'm sure that we can come up with games that no one has seen before in terms of Concepts uh we've talked about the huge Market a lot I need to talk about it again because uh here's my advice for local developers uh you can leverage this Market to boost your International success I genuinely with our newest IP called psycho express it still includes beta just from three uh local events that we did nothing but just showing the game we've got easy 500 people registering for our beta so it's really really easy to show your game to the local market and get feedback really quickly and player base so I think people need to focus more especially

local developers showing their games inside the events like this uh meeting government Vision as it as I said uh Saudi Arabia Jordan UAE and Egypt they're all moving towards supporting gaming and the game industry with a lot of events funds Venture capitalists are interesting in this interested in this so it's really a golden opportunity for any uh passionate uh uh Studios to to capitalize on on this vision and yeah that's about it I think I've talked a little bit faster so if any of you have any questions I need to answer all right maybe I was very clear [Applause] all right hello uh thank you Kamal for the great

presentation thank you uh this is umut from Amazon web services for games so uh I would like to know more about the data which developers and the Publishers are making in the region because we are all the time talking about the including the end users you know how the people are or how much money people are spending on the games and the hardware and the ETC I think the important you know data about the region uh you know what about the developers and Publishers so what is their revenue is there any data around this thank you very much thank you so there's data about uh if you're asking about Egypt specifically uh Egypt has contributed eight percent of the entire uh uh compound annual uh the entire 1.78 billion dollars 2021 that's a huge number and uh currently Egypt is

approaching 120 million uh people uh we are 40 40 of these uh 120 million people are under the age of 25. so there's a huge huge Market for games and entertainment industry in general detailed data can be found with the I think using tools like Facebook insights especially because a lot of if not all Egyptians are on Facebook so I think Facebook Insight would be the best solution tool to get more insights on the Egyptian Market any more questions hello sir thank you so much for the informative and actually motivational speech thank you uh my question goes as

you've mentioned the three you've mentioned the three challenges that we have to overcome uh the marketing the uh investment and uh the awareness and my question goes is uh what are the steps that you think that should be let's say utilized to overcome these challenges as well as uh what is the a time frame that can be estimated to uh how can we how soon can we actually let's say catch up with the Western uh gaming industry yeah thank you so uh in terms of investment we're doing very good uh with more and more governments moving to invest in local developers so I think this will figure itself out in the next five years uh in terms of awareness uh local developers as I said they're still a little shy to showing their games there's a lot of amazing games out there there's a lot more games that I've seen that I see on regular basis that are not

shown and uh this is something that I think it goes into the mentality of us thinking that we're not good enough yet and so don't be don't hesitate to show your game don't hesitate Don't Fear the feedback actually take it take the feedback even if it's negative and work on it and make your game even better I think this is very important step for all local developers in the Mina region show your game don't be afraid to show it don't be afraid to talk about it everywhere because if if not I've seen multiple game local game developers actually say we are the first game studio in insert an Arab country so this trend shows you that they're not aware of of each other yet and because they we don't speak enough so I think this is if this is the responsibility of local developers to speak more in terms of marketing uh the

best solution I see is to encourage local developers to work with International Publishers uh because they are more experienced they will Guide local developers into the international success so and we will we can learn from them uh to to do these things so in terms of marketing I think it might take 10 to 15 years if if we keep doing it right foreign [Music]