"The key to infiltrating a market is being able to understand it"

• "One of our goals is to create games specifically for our region, starting in Egypt and expanding to the rest of the Middle East"
• "The amount of revenue games generate in Egypt - and the MENA region - has been trending upwards for a few years. Which indicates that all it takes is a kickstart to accelerate this growth"

Pocket Gamer Connects Jordan returns on November 9th and 10th, 2024, offering you 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 Tafra Games CEO and founder Ziad Elgabaly who spoke to us about the company's upcoming action-adventure roguelike game, localisation efforts and creating games for a global audience.

PocketGamer.biz: Tell us a bit about Tafra Games and what you’re up to right now.

Ziad Elgabaly: Tafra Games is an independent game studio based in Egypt, founded in December 2020. Since then, we’ve been targeting the global mobile market. We develop our own games and collaborate with publishers to handle the marketing and growth part. Every game we create goes through multiple market tests to verify its viability in the current market. 

Games that pass those tests will be globally launched as we’ve done with Zombie Survivor! which currently has over three million downloads on Google Play and Apple App Store combined. As of today, we’re working on an unannounced mobile roguelike game which is our biggest project yet. 

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

Tafra Games consists of 11 team members, all of them based in Egypt.

What do you do to foster collaboration and recruit local talents?

We always prioritise recruiting local talents and we often organise community gatherings and game jams to help bring the community together. Once we reach our next milestone, we’ll be in an even better position to start organising community events more frequently.

Some of your games are exclusively available on the Apple App Store while some are only available on Google Play. How do you decide which platform to target for a new game?

Due to the market validation process, some of our games exist on Google Play only. Those are typically the games that didn’t make it to later stages in the process. If a game does make it, we expand to the iOS market.

The current list of games in our store accounts are games that either didn’t make it through the validation process or are currently being worked on. Games that are globally launched are transferred to the publisher’s account.

What are some of the biggest challenges you've faced in the localisation process and how have you ensured a culturally relevant experience for players?

For me, there are two directions a game could take in terms of localisation. I like to call them authentic localisation and generic localisation. Since we’re currently targeting the global market, we tend to generically localise our games, which means we simply translate the words into different languages.

One of our goals is to create games specifically for our region, starting in Egypt and expanding to the rest of the Middle East. We can't accomplish this without taking the authentic localisation approach. This would mean that the game has to follow our culture and be influenced by it in every aspect, not just in visuals and sounds but in gameplay, characters and plot, to say the least. 

How have your games been received internationally outside the MENA region and what changes have you observed in the local games industry and consumer behaviour towards games?

Our games have been received quite well outside the MENA region, since this is generally our target market for the meantime. The MENA region has always been on my mind as a market that I should eventually target. 

I always believed - and still do - that the games-consumer market in our region has the potential to be magnitudes bigger than it currently is. And with the way things are trending, this seems to be closer to the truth than it ever was!

Africa has a vast number of mobile users. 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?

The key to infiltrating a market is being able to understand it and provide it with what it really needs. It is evident that our region values entertainment, and games are as good an entertainment source as any. 

This makes it clear that the blame for the way the market is currently limited is not on the consumer, but in fact, on the providers that are still yet to understand what the market needs and how to fulfil those needs.

What do you see as the current opportunities and challenges facing the games industry in Egypt and the wider MENA region?

The amount of revenue games generate in Egypt - and the MENA region - has been trending upwards for a few years.

Which indicates that all it takes is a kickstart to accelerate this growth. And the way I see it, this push will only come from the local game industry. Once a local studio cracks the code, and pushes a game to the local market that is really meant to be consumed by our local consumers, things will change significantly.

And at that point, both the local games industry and the consumer market will flourish. However, this is a difficult task since that studio would have to release a local game that generates enough revenue to survive for a long time, not just a flash trend or a marketing stunt. 

In order for the game to actually crack the market, it has to be interesting and engaging enough so that it can take its time teaching the consumers that this is a source of entertainment they can easily spend their money on, just as easily as they do with any other source of entertainment.

And building a habit takes time and requires consistency. So, for a studio to develop such a game, they would need to have the experience needed to produce engaging and monetisable games, understand the local market and what it really needs, and have enough funds to see the game through.

And as you probably can tell, every step of this process is quite a big one. Especially since the funding part is not really present in the industry right now, or its presence - in the grand scheme of things - is negligible. Which means a studio has to somehow self-fund itself through this extremely difficult process.

In terms of funding and support for gaming studios in MENA, what has been your experience navigating the funding landscape?

Since the industry here is relatively fresh, and its return on investment isn’t locally proven, it is understandable how the funding landscape is lacking the ability to have any kind of impact. Until now, Tafra’s funding sources are from outside the MENA region. 

As it is right now, it will not be the spark that ignites the market’s flame of growth. The majority of the local investors lack the experience in working in the game industry and therefore they tend to have unrealistic expectations. Being unable to identify studios or projects that have the best potential is also a deterring factor. 

Being unable to understand the reasonable budget to allocate depending on the game they’re funding, and therefore it often happens that they turn back from funding a game that they assume has asked for a bigger budget than it actually needs. Local studios don’t have a financially proven track record and so have nothing to assure investors that their investment will be rewarded.

The points above feed into each other, resulting in a dilemma that will only be resolved if something abnormal happens. Either an investor would make a leap of faith with the right studio at the right time, or a studio would miraculously break through and produce a game that is a financial success locally or globally. As a game studio founder, I’m aiming for the latter.

What are your plans for the rest of 2024 and the coming year? Will you be exploring new platforms? And are there any specific initiatives or projects on the horizon that we should look forward to?

While we love working on mobile games, our ultimate goal is to also branch to PC and console games where we will start the full production of a project that was on hold for a while now.

This will happen once we have enough profitable mobile games to justify this expansion. For the rest of 2024, we’ll be continuing our work on the roguelike game in hopes to eventually launch it globally.