Regional games market yet to fly

The potential for developers, programmers and designers in the Middle East is enormous. The problem is, few here have the required skills to make and then take new titles to market.

Amir-Esmaeil Bozorgzadeh, left, and and Hossein Jalali founded Gameguise, which localise videogames for the Middle East market. Antonie Robertson / The National

In September, at last, the Xbox One arrives in this country, which is good news for the region's gamers.
The Middle East is a huge market for games - the region's developers, coders and investors are sure there is plenty of money to be made here.
"The market size is currently approaching US$1 billion in terms of revenue across software and hardware sales, as well as online subscriptions and micro-transactions," says Mahmoud Ali Khasawneh, the chief executive of Quirkat, a Jordan-based company that specialises in games specifically designed for the Middle East market.
"The growth is estimated at 10 per cent year on year. Today we see a lot of players entering the mobile and social games space, particularly on Facebook."
But, despite the enthusiasm, a number of obstacles are holding back the development of a local games industry, including funding and coding.
"There's huge spending and a very big mobile market with massive internet and smartphone penetration" making the region ripe for mobile games developers, says Amir-Esmaeil Bozorgzadeh, the chief executive of GameGuise, which localises games for the Middle East market.
"This market is big - we see healthy player traffic growing at a higher rate than other markets, and it's an exciting market because other markets have plateaued in size. "So the demand side is there."
Lars Hagelin, the chief executive of the Sweden-based developer FunRock, says he wants to open an office in Dubai precisely because of the opportunities in the UAE.
"The market is underserved. That's basically the opinion of everyone I've talked to in the GCC. There's a demand for games but not that many great local games."
However, for many developers, it is just not worth targeting the Arab video game market - despite the large audience. Electronic distribution makes it easy to hawk your wares internationally, without big distribution costs: the Apple App store and Google Play provide ready access to an international audience. And a game in English has a bigger target market than one in Arabic.
This has made localisation - converting existing games to cater to new audiences - financially unattractive for many developers, says Aman Sangar, the interactive entertainment business lead at Microsoft for the Middle East and Europe.
For most young gamers, "their influences are still based on a lot of global media", he says. "Sometimes, localization involves forcing them into buying a product they don't want - when they're just as happy with a global product."
This might explain the somewhat peculiar regional success of Call of Duty - a series of games that recreates the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
"In a lot of instances a publisher has shown a lot of interest and desire to localise a game but as they get closer to the game going gold [the release date], this gets cancelled, because the priority is to deliver a high-quality game. The decision involves weighing the [benefits of additional] quality testing, against the benefits of stretching resources to localise," says Mr Sanger.
Bugs and errors are a quick way to undermine fans' faith in a developer, he says, as consumer expectations increase all the time.
It is not just that international developers lack incentives to launch Arab games. For local developers, getting your hands on the technical expertise needed is a problem.
As with many industries in this region, the UAE has significant skills shortages. There is, as Yannick Theler, the managing director of Ubisoft's Abu Dhabi studio, says, plenty of "raw talent".
Mr Bozorgzadeh agrees: "There are lots of grassroots guys learning hands-on ... they use open-source resources and to code in Unity," he says. Unity is a programming language that can write software for mobile phones, iPads and PCs simultaneously. But these local coders are not industry-ready. "You need institutions that have programmes and teachers," Mr Bozorgzadeh says.
Mr Sanger sees the problem the other way around. "The skills issue is more of a symptom of an underdeveloped local games industry than a reason for it," he says.
"It can be rectified as long as the commercialisation and model of the industry are robust and healthy. Especially in a market like the UAE, where there are quite a lot of expats - the region is very good at filling in skills gaps. In any other market, [it would be] a bigger bottleneck."
Mr Theler says more opportunity to learn the skills needed would help to address the issues. "To develop the region's industry, education is super-important. More and better [industry-specific training] would be a big help for us," he says.
However, Mr Hagelin is optimistic. "It's only a matter of time until the region has enough coders" to support a viable games industry.
Still, grassroots developers face another hurdle: financing. "It's very easy to burn your hands when investing in games because games are really binary. One out of 10 will make it, nine will not," says Walid Hanna, the managing partner of Middle East Venture Partners, a tech-focused venture capital firm.
"And you never know what the game is going to look like from the user experience point of view, in terms of how appealing it is, before it's developed and launched.
"We have invested in a couple of gaming companies - one did really well, one didn't. Unless the team has already [released a game], we wouldn't invest in the company," he says.
The games industry is "too niche for regional investors", says Mr Bozorgzadeh. "There's not enough precedence in the market - investors want to see statistics and figures and forecasts."
The region's developers cannot yet hope to compete with console games developers producing "AAA games" - big budget, intensely marketed releases, expected to sell in bulk at high ticket-prices. These games are developed in the US and the EU, where workforces are large, track-records long and financing plentiful, say Mr Sangar and Mr Bozorgzadeh.
Still, the regional industry has real potential to become a major force in the future.
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