Mekan Games founder Evans Kiragu on targeting global markets, prototyping strategy and embracing web-first development

• Mekan Games is pioneering a web-first, cross-platform development approach from Nairobi.
• The President became a global hypercasual hit with over 20 million downloads.
• “Hypercasual games thrive when built for high-revenue ad markets like the US.”
• The studio shifted from casual to mobile-first gaming in 2021 to focus on monetisation.
• Mekan Games’ next big step is a multiplayer web game, already showing strong promise.

Pocket Gamer Connects Jordan returns on November 8th and 9th, 2025, offering a chance to gain insights into the world’s fastest-growing games market, MENA.

As part of our MENA coverage and run-up to the event, we caught up with Mekan Games founder and CEO Evans Kiragu who discussed prioritising hypercasual games, focusing on revenue-driven markets and the need to double down on prototyping.

PocketGamer.biz: Could you tell us a bit about Mekan Games and what you're up to right now?

Evans Kiragu: Mekan Games is a mobile game development studio in Nairobi, Kenya, established in 2016. The name comes from a loose translation from Swahili to English of the word “Ninaweza” which means “I am able to”. But a loose translation word for word arrives at “Me-Can” to now “Me-Kan”. It is an affirmation of our ability to make games.

Since inception, we mainly focused on casual games and PC, contractual gigs in AR and VR. In 2021 we made a shift and moved entirely into mobile gaming. We felt a need to specialise for better monetisation. This led us to hypercasual where we worked with the majority of the top publishers resulting in our biggest hit “The President”, which is to date, still a chart topper in many countries.

The President was a first for Africa, and is still an inspiration to many developers out there. Right now we are still working on mobile games, but with a web-first approach.  Web games have loads of potential in Africa, and there is no better time to dive in than now!

How many staff do you currently employ and where are they based?

The team is made up of eight employees, the majority are here in Nairobi, minus our lead 3D artist who is in Nigeria. Being a small team, we value partnerships, which has allowed us to focus on what we do best.

The President has amassed around 20m downloads on mobile. How have your games been received internationally outside of Africa?

At the start, around 2016, the reception was rather stale. Our quality was not the best and we also did not quite understand what it took to scale a game. However, right now with loads of experience in the field, our games do much better. We take inspiration from some of the best game studios in the world, which has allowed us to up our games drastically. 

Mobile games are some of the hardest games to scale out there, so for us we focus on what we do best, which is making the games, then partner with publishers who scale these games globally. For a small team, doing it on our own would be tricky. However, at the end of the day the goal is to be able to have all the required talent and capital to allow for this to happen entirely in-house.

Many developers in Africa focus on creating games for local audiences, but The President was aimed at the US market - and that strategy paid off. What made you decide to target a different market?

Before working on The President, we had made over 80 mobile games, and the majority were themed for external audiences. So has it paid off? Certainly.

However, this is more so a business model approach than it is anything else. Hypercasual games make money through ads, and so it became important that whatever games we made needed to appeal to the most profitable ad audience out there, which is the US. 

This is what informed our decision. Honestly, if Africa as a whole were a better revenue generator, we would have tailored the game for this market. With that being said, we are testing African-themed games within the continent.

It is quite an interesting space where the market itself is vastly rich in common culture, but at the same time equally different. So finding a common interest to base a game on means lots of prototyping, iterations and feedback. But slowly, I believe we are getting there.

What potential do you see in EdTech for Africa's future? And does Mekan Games have any ongoing or planned projects related to EdTech?

Africa is at this time the most youthful continent. Quite literally anything that touches on the youth - from Education, Entertainment, and Sports - is on the rise and will continue to be for years to come. I think there is a great opportunity there. While the opportunity is there and open for grabs, the hack here is knowing how to enter the market. 

As mentioned, with 54 countries at play, over 3000 languages, thousands of ethnic communities, 54 different governments and bureaucracy structures, etc, entry to market is not the easiest. It is getting easier by the day as more and more youth get online. As a company we are CLOSELY monitoring the space, but as of now, we do not have a product out there. But I can say this is a conversation we have as a team quite frequently.

What changes have you observed in the local games industry and consumer behaviour towards games?

The biggest change has been the uptake of game development as a career. Back when we started, we were a handful of individuals who were brave enough to weather the storm. These days, I feel like I meet a new developer almost every other day! It is quite cool to see this. Developers getting jobs to work with studios all over the world also speaks to the talent that is brewing locally.

Consumer behaviour is interesting to observe as well. As mentioned, the youth are getting online fast! As of 2030, there will be about 800 million mobile devices Africa, and that will only be a 45% penetration rate. With this audience coming online, many are keen to experience some form of entertainment, which is where games come in.

The previous generation used mobile phones more as a utility item or tool to get things done. The spending power is also going up, and with easier payment methods such as mobile money penetration (75% penetration here in Kenya), it is a good time to be making games!  

Africa clearly has the numbers. What do you think is the key to tapping into this audience? And why do you think some still overlook the market despite its growth potential?

Yes, indeed we do have a user base that is on the rise. When we hit 45% penetration with 800 million devices, mature markets such as the US will be at 98% penetration. Strictly from the numbers, it seems like an explosion of people coming online.

From a game dev perspective, we are yet to see a local game that has harnessed this potential to make a huge continental hit. In my view, we have all that it takes to do it; we just need to keep prototyping and doing direct market testing to really understand what angle works. Furthermore, it is not like this same audience is not playing games.

Candy Crush, Temple Run, Fortnite, Subway Surfers, etc have been huge hits across the continent. While many factors contribute to this, one key item is packaging. How we package our games also needs to adhere to the rules of the market.

External partners still overlook Africa and understandably so. The game scaling formula that works in the West will not work in Africa. A good example, here is East Africa, where making payments in-game using banking cards is not something we do. Mobile money is huge.

So scaling a game here and expecting to make a killing with card transactions is being too optimistic. But adding in mobile money payments is an extra mile which not so many external players think about. That is only in East Africa. You also have to go West, North, South and integrate whatever works there.

In terms of funding and support for game studios in Africa, what has been your experience navigating the funding landscape? And how do you think the African games market could attract more investment?

Funding is minimal, if any. Over the last few years, globally, funding for game studios has been on a steep decline. As a studio, we have adapted to keeping lean but moving fast. While funding is good and welcomed, it is a full-time job as well to get it. As a result, most studios find it easy to bootstrap a game in hopes that it will blow up. 

The above has worked for us as well, but with a small twist. That is, we are prototyping a lot more; instead of working on a single game for years, we do sprints of a month, market test and decide if there is potential or not.

This is a hack we have picked up from some of our external partners and has allowed us to see some good results. The President came out of this approach; it took 4 days to prototype, market test, and only then did we commit months of development once we saw potential.

What are your thoughts on technologies such as AI, AR and VR in games? And do you have plans to incorporate AI into your game development process?

I think AI to us as a studio has been “The Great Equaliser”. The quality of work we put out has drastically gone up. As things stand, visual quality, for example, is something we can match to top studios out there. It has allowed us to move at incredible speed. 

Prototyping is much easier as well. We have studios locally that have grown out of some of these technologies as well: AR and VR. If we could do it all, we would. But for the sake of keeping our sanity, we keep to what we do best, which is mobile free-to-play games.

What are your plans for the rest of 2025 and the coming year? And are there any specific initiatives or projects on the horizon that we should look forward to?

Yes! We recently made a switch to web-first, cross-platform. This means we prototype and test on the web first, then scale to mobile and the rest if metrics allow. We have a multiplayer game in development that is looking promising. We cannot wait to share with the world when the time is right.