GameUp Africa rebrands as GameUp Academy with always-on learning platform

• GameUp Academy will target learners globally rather than focusing exclusively on Africa.
• AI and gamification will become core parts of the learning experience.
• The platform will initially open to the 2026 cohort before becoming available to everyone.
• Maliyo says GameUp Africa has reached more than 6,000 people over the past five years.

Maliyo Games has rebranded its GameUp Africa initiative as GameUp Academy to expand the programme from a regional talent development initiative into a global always-on learning platform.

The Lagos-based developer said the change follows five years of running GameUp Africa, during which the team gathered data and insights into how people learn and what skills they need.

“The name shift essentially reflects our understanding that the need or the solution we're providing is not only relevant to people in Africa, but relevant to people everywhere in the world," Maliyo Games founder Hugo Obi told PocketGamer.biz.

“And rather than being exclusionary with our name, we want to be a lot more inclusive. We still maintain GUA identity, but now we're more embracing, we're more inclusive."

Learning at your own pace

Obi went on to add that the original GameUp Africa programme was based on a 2020 design and was traditionally delivered as a five-month boot camp. 

GameUp Academy will instead allow users to learn at their own pace, while shorter facilitated programmes will continue alongside the platform.

“We recognise that people don't want to spend a crazy amount of time on a training programme," Obi continued. “Our traditional training programme was five months long. You know, people had to invest five months into learning. 

“And the way the world is today, people don't have that attention span. So, we wanted to create an always-on platform, which means you can learn at your own pace whenever you want."

Obi added that AI is going to be “core" to everything the studio does within both its creative and non-creative sectors. 

The platform is expected to launch by the end of September, initially opening to the 2026 cohort to “make sure that all the systems that we've designed work as intended" before becoming available to anyone.