Game incubators in MENA and the risks of "polishing the wrong thing"

The Dubai Game Expo Summit powered by Pocket Gamer Connects returns on May 7th to 8th 2025, offering a chance to gain insights into the world’s fastest-growing games market, MENA.

Check out more stories from PocketGamer.biz's MENA Month special, where we interview the top companies and delve into the investment landscape, right here.

"The incubation process tells you how you’re supposed to move and when you’re supposed to start, stop, refine or go. A lot of times, the teams that join us may have a game in mind and it might be a good one, but they lack direction to actually get it somewhere," says GIGS co-founder Ashraf Abi-Said.

"So they just end up going in circles, polishing, polishing, polishing and they end up polishing the wrong thing."

He spoke on the value of game incubator programmes and the dev community in the Middle East more broadly at Pocket Gamer Connects Jordan 2024, joined by LUDiMUS Inc CEO and co-founder Sho Sato.

Their discussion covered the potential value of building games communities in the MENA region, why an incubation programme may be beneficial, and the challenges around establishing an incubator to begin with.

"In the current world, in order to be successful in the games scene you need to also know about the business side. It’s quite hard to make your game visible to a worldwide audience," said Sato.

Public or private

"Having someone external to your game looking at it and pushing you forward could really help. Knowing where you are going is what pushes you to finish everything you need to do," Abi-Said said.

However, he also acknowledged that games incubators are relatively new to the MENA region. There are already developer communities forming across Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, but Abi-Said noted that Quatar and Kuwait have a way to go. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are "very excited" to join these types of communities.

"It’s still growing. It’s still a very budding area," he said. "My interest in communities is not just in the people but also in the stories they’re trying to tell with the games they make."

Sato added: "To make a new game incubator, usually you need to work with one of two kinds of sponsors, public or private. In Europe, most of the games incubators are publicly funded, but in Asia most are privately funded."

Sato has also been working with the Ministry of Economy in Japan to start the first government-supported publicly funded game acceleration project in the country. He noted that despite many of the industry’s biggest names being based there - Nintendo, Konami, Square Enix - there are plenty of struggling, smaller developers too.

"In Saudi Arabia we have several divisions and incubators. It’s also important to get support from international funds - for example, in Uzbekistan in central Asia, they have a game dev programme supported by the German Culture Agency," he said.

Abi-Said noted: "The Saudi Game Champions Incubator focuses on helping a few local and a few international teams get to a vertical slice - basically to help get a polished part of a game so that people can see it and have an idea about what it is."

During the Dubai GameExpo Summit powered by PGC 2025 we'll be hosting The Investment Summit, welcoming a host of expert speakers to discuss the funding landscape in MENA, as well as connecting developers, publishers and investors together for potential deal-making.