Masseka Games founder Teddy Kossoko on why mobile gaming monetisation is failing in Africa

• Mobile gaming monetisation in Africa is structurally broken, with low purchasing power and unsustainable unit economics.
• PC gaming already supports paying audiences in Africa, despite being largely ignored in official market data.
• Oloroun is positioning itself as a mobile money first alternative to global PC storefronts.
• The platform is targeting players with real discretionary spending rather than chasing mass scale.

The Dubai GameExpo Summit powered by Pocket Gamer Connects returns on May 20th and 21st 2026, offering a chance to gain insights into the world’s fastest-growing games market, MENA. 

While mobile gaming is often positioned as the continent’s primary growth engine, monetisation remains a persistent challenge. PC gaming, not mobile, now seems to hold the key to sustainable revenue in Africa. 

To understand why, we caught up with Masseka Game Studio founder Teddy Kossoko to discuss his shift away from mobile gaming, what years of on-the-ground data revealed about player behaviour, and why he believes PC gaming offers a more sustainable path forward for Africa. 

Why mobile monetisation stalled

Speaking on why he initially built his distribution platform Gara around mobile and not PC, Kossoko said Gara’s early mobile focus was driven by market studies that largely ignored PC gaming. However, testing across more than 10 African markets revealed weak monetisation as only about 8% of players converted into payers.

“That number may seem high, but it implies massive investments in advertising to reach the necessary scale,” said Kossoko. “Since advertising generated almost no revenue, we couldn’t monetise the 92% of users through traditional ads. We eventually built our own ad network to secure budgets from local companies, but we couldn’t do everything ourselves. 

Kossoko said carrier billing partnerships proved slow and costly, requiring heavy marketing spend despite low successful billing rates and high revenue shares for telecom operators. 

“When we managed to secure these partnerships in Senegal and Burkina Faso, we had to invest at least €50,000 ($59,000) per month in marketing. For a startup like mine, that level of spending is simply impossible,” Kossoko continued. 

“This model is simply difficult for me to accept. On top of that, on the Play Store itself, there are millions of substitute and copycat games, making it extremely hard to stand out. We also came to realise that some companies in Africa inflate mobile gaming statistics by including betting and gambling activities. This distorts both the data and the on-the-ground reality.” 

Kossoko said the team continues to develop its own mobile titles, including Jabari and Mini Coupe, the latter showing strong early traction inside a telecom super app in Benin without marketing. However, Gara has stopped distributing third-party mobile games and is refocusing on parents as its core audience, while repurposing its payments and analytics stack as a standalone monetisation layer for African developers. 

The PC opportunity hiding in plain sight

Kossoko then spoke to us about Oloroun, a new game distribution platform built on the belief that PC gaming, not mobile, offers a more sustainable revenue base in Africa by targeting players with discretionary spending and stable access to hardware. 

Early community engagement across YouTube, Facebook, and WhatsApp revealed active PC gaming ecosystems, with players regularly spending $18 to $23 per month, contradicting mass market mobile monetisation assumptions.

“In Africa, any product designed for the mass market must address a vital need, Kossoko explained. “Video games, as they exist today, do not fulfil a vital need for the majority of the population. As a result, trying to monetise gaming at scale across the entire market inevitably leads to weak purchasing power, high churn, and fragile business models.”

Kossoko said Africa’s PC gaming ecosystem has been largely overlooked in official data, while mobile narratives overestimate the spending power of under-18 users. He added that PC players, typically urban and middle class, show a stronger willingness to pay, seek deeper experiences, face less competition, and identify more strongly as core gamers.

“From a revenue standpoint, this changes everything,” he added. “PC allows for higher ARPU, better retention, and clearer value perception. More importantly, it enables monetisation models that actually respect unit economics, without relying on extreme scale or aggressive acquisition spending. While PC gaming is often perceived as niche in Africa, that perception is misleading. 

“The market is smaller in absolute volume than mobile, but it is significantly stronger in purchasing power. We are not targeting “everyone”; we are targeting the segment that can pay, repeatedly and sustainably. The ecosystem that shaped previous generations is fading, and a new one is emerging. Platforms that wait for this transition will arrive too late.”

“Our strategy is to be present before the inflexion point, already embedded in behaviours, communities, and infrastructure, when the market fully unlocks. This is why Oloroun is not built for short-term traction, but for long-term dominance. We intend to be part of the fabric of PC gaming culture in Africa and MENA as this generational transition unfolds. And when, after 3 years of discussion, the European Union decided to put half-million in this switch, it was the last signal for us.”

“Creating demand where there was none”

When asked about platform fees, Kossoko said Oloroun’s 40% fee is designed to fund market creation rather than maximise margins, arguing that PC gaming infrastructure in Africa does not yet exist at scale. He said the fee reflects the cost of building payments, DRM, support, fraud prevention, and education systems from scratch, rather than operating within an established market.

“40% feels high. But that comparison assumes something that simply does not exist in Africa today, a ready-made market,” said Kossoko. He added, “This work is not done for ourselves; it is done to open a new growth market for developers and publishers. In reality, if we look purely at cost and risk, developers should be paying us to do this work, because it removes barriers they are unwilling or unable to tackle alone.

“The deeper issue is that many actors in the games industry live in ecosystems built by previous generations. As a result, they underestimate what it truly means to open a new market from zero. Africa is not a “new storefront”; it is a frontier market that requires long-term commitment, local execution, and capital-intensive groundwork. 

“Oloroun is for partners who understand that Africa requires long-term vision. If the mindset is short-term optimisation of global margins, then this market is simply not ready for them, and that’s fine. Our role is not to compete with global platforms on comfort. Our role is to make Africa viable. And that has a cost.”

Execution before scale

The Masseka Game Studio founder said Oloroun’s immediate addressable market is the 35-45 million PC equipped users across Africa and MENA, with an estimated 27-31m active PC gamers. He added that traditional upfront pricing does not fit local realities, prompting Oloroun to focus on alternative monetisation models informed by observed player behaviour.

“The traditional $10-$50 upfront purchase model does not align well with African realities, due to payment friction, price sensitivity, and the lack of “try before buy” mechanisms,” he said. “Rather than forcing that model, we built Oloroun around observed behaviour. We know local games drive engagement, which is why we invested first in our own content.”

Oloroun will launch with free-to-play PC shooters supported by microtransactions, alongside a €0.80 Daily Pass and optional premium purchases. The model assumes limited conversion but targets sustainable revenue through mobile money, with a long-term goal of 2.45m MAU and a blended ARPU of €8.18 per month.

“The single biggest blocker is payments, and everything else flows from that,” Kossoko explained. “Steam is built around credit cards and a limited set of global payment methods. In most African markets, credit card penetration is below 5%, while mobile money adoption exceeds 70%.”

Oloroun’s first year will focus on Dakar, Abidjan, and Accra, markets with strong PC usage and mobile money adoption. In parallel, the company is pursuing PC pre-installation partnerships to seed future expansion across Africa and MENA with plans to reduce customer acquisition costs ahead of wider launches.

Balancing local and global

Kossoko said Oloroun will follow an 80-20 content mix, prioritising international titles while selectively featuring African developed games that meet clear quality or community benchmarks. 

“International content is essential to meet player expectations and anchor the platform in globally recognised standards of quality and gameplay,” Kossoko added. “At the same time, African games are not there to fill quotas. They have to earn their place. For African-developed titles, we apply two strict criteria. 

“Either the game meets a clear quality threshold in terms of production, design, and stability, or the developer must demonstrate a real ability to mobilise a community. If neither is true, the right place for that project is an open platform like itch.io, not a curated storefront. That said, when African games meet our standards, we give them strong visibility.

“Our goal is not to dilute African creativity inside a global catalogue, but to curate it seriously. Quality comes first. Visibility is earned. And when African games are ready, Oloroun is designed to help them scale, not just locally, but internationally as well.” 

Kossoko said Oloroun is focused on sustainable growth driven by repeat paying users rather than inflated user numbers, with plans to reduce acquisition costs through organic distribution. 

“A push from one major international publisher, not all of them, even just one, could help accelerate this, for example, by bringing an older well-known triple-A title that runs well on mid-range PCs and is perfectly suited to African hardware realities. Hopefully, a publisher with a true pioneer spirit will step forward to support us on this journey.”