"Mobile web-based gaming is set to play a significant role in our future"

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.

In an exclusive interview with Sea Monster Entertainment CEO and co-founder Glenn Gillis, we discussed the company's focus on Impact Games, the role of EdTech, tapping into the African market, prioritising resources, and plans for 2025.

Pocketgamer.biz: Can you tell us a bit about Sea Monster and what you’re up to right now?

Glenn Gillis: We're an impact gaming company based in Cape Town, South Africa, and we continue to believe that games can make everything better – from learning experiences to how big brands engage with their audiences.

Games are simple in their premise: they put users back at the centre of experiences and inspire behavioir change at scale.

Right now, we are continuing to do what we’ve been doing for the last 13 years – we are working on some exciting projects that demonstrate the transformative power of play, proving that games can not only entertain but also drive meaningful impact in education, marketing, and beyond.

How many staff do you currently employ, and what are you doing to foster collaboration and recruit local talents?

We currently employ 45 people: 30 people in our bespoke business, which is Sea Monster, and then 15 people in our product business, which is called Hailr.

We’re a remote-first studio so most of the team is based in Cape Town but we also have other team members based in Jo’burg and partners based in different parts of the continent. We’re dealing with all of the realities around, how to deliver creative solutions remotely and asynchronously.

Through our work with Games for Change Africa and the Pan-African Gaming Group (PAGG) specifically, we've been working with a variety of stakeholders – from encouraging young people to pursue their dreams to working with grantmakers and big corporations to realise the potential of games to drive business goals and social outcomes.

We think of ourselves as a role player in the ecosystem to unlock the potential together because of course, we cannot do it alone.

Sea Monster has developed over 80 impact games. What criteria define a game as "impactful," and how do you measure the success of such projects?  

We often make reference to a typology that is used globally by the likes of Games for Change and others that outline the different types of impact goals that can be driven through games (and other media).

This includes: learning and skills development; raising awareness around issues; creating social movements and building stronger communities; promoting behaviour change and promoting mindfulness and/or offering neuro training.

At its core, for us, an impactful game is really about two things: something that goes beyond pure entertainment and something that ultimately makes the world better, so we're very intentional about building games that create a positive change in some way.

Every game we develop is designed with a unique set of specific goals in mind, ensuring that our experiences enable users to learn something new, feel something meaningful, or gain a skill they didn’t have before.

To achieve this, we often integrate detailed monitoring and evaluation frameworks, allowing us to measure these outcomes at a highly nuanced level.

Your games are mainly tailored towards kids. Is Sea Monster primarily focused on creating games for younger audiences, or does the company have plans to expand and develop games that cater to all age groups?

So actually, our games have catered to a very wide range of users. Some of them have been focused on younger audiences like the impact games we’ve recently developed in Roblox for example. Still, we've also made games for young adults, 18 to 25 year olds.

In fact, we've also made games for adults to help with internal training in corporations and for boardrooms where we helped inspire credit committees to think critically about ESG, as another example (See Rising Tides). 

One of the huge advantages of games is that we know that they are able to cut across different cultures, age differences, literacy levels as well as degrees of technological accessibility.

How do you prioritise resources between developing mobile games and your other projects like AR and VR solutions and Roblox (metaverse) experiences?

We're never led by technology. We're led by what it is we're trying to achieve. So the easy answer to that is that we prioritise based on what is required by the project.

We're huge believers in the power of web-based, mobile-first games, particularly in an African and developing market context (also applicable more widely too). And yes, if a game requires AR or VR, we will build in that space.

The same is true for working in virtual worlds like Roblox. The project's goals and the audience's needs will always dictate.

Managing resources in the creative industry is always tricky. We work within an agile method, so essentially we assign teams to projects and collaborate closely with customers to align expectations with fixed timelines and budgets.

And when specialised technical skills are needed, we tap into our network of trusted suppliers and partners, ensuring we have the right capabilities to deliver on every project.

As an expert in the role of technology in storytelling, what are your thoughts on emerging technologies and do you have plans to incorporate AI into your game development process?  

We already absolutely do use AI in our studio today, and we continue to explore how AI can make us more effective at what we do best.

The trouble with AI is that it can very easily be used to make more poor quality, generic, bland experiences.

So the more that AI progresses, the more we need to keep users at the centre of the experience and use the technology to make our processes quicker but also more emotive and more empowering for our users.

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

We think Africa has a huge role to play in EdTech, mostly driven by need. Given that Africa is the youngest continent and given how dysfunctional our traditional education systems are, we have no option but to pursue innovative solutions that allow us to imperfectly prepare for the next war rather than perfectly prepare for the last one.

So I see this as a huge opportunity. I think solutions that work in Africa will work everywhere in the world and the opposite is not necessarily true. So in many ways, Sea Monster is an EdTech company.

An important question is who plays and who pays? We can definitely make games to make every part of learning better, but we've got to figure out how the business models around that work rather than the creative and technical models.

We're always thinking about how you do that in a way that's scalable and sustainable and cost-effective for people to access. We want to empower people who want to learn and our job is to bring back the love of learning and using games to do that.

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?

Absolutely, there are more smartphones in Africa than there are in Europe. One issue I see is that the traditional metrics that we use has made people underestimate its potential.

So many games have been ad-funded, but because Google doesn't know this audience well, it's therefore not as valuable to advertisers in the traditional sense and therefore the flywheel is not working as well as it should.

We've also got to fix up the plumbing because a lot of traditional games that are ad-funded require people to be able to spend and therefore it suits people who have credit cards, which is often not the case across the continent.

So you need to onboard new payment systems and mobile money solutions. That's on the one side. In the context of impact games, again, you need to understand that audience, value that audience, and then figure out a new business model. But that's true everywhere.

Mobile web-based gaming is set to play a significant role in our future. The advancements in progressive web app technology are particularly exciting, and we’ve been exploring how to leverage this to create browser-based solutions that are data-light, frictionless, and compatible with low-end devices.

These developments are opening up a world of new opportunities in a big way (watch this space)!

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

There's actually been almost no funding. South Africa has some advantages in that it is a middle-income country, by some measures, but the incentive structures to fund and support the local gaming ecosystem are broken from a policy perspective.

They simply do not work. And that's true, I think, across Africa. Most countries have realised the enormous job opportunities and the impact that gaming can have in dealing with so many challenges. But unfortunately, we've not had access to any level of sustainable funding - from the local government. And therefore, we've got to figure this out on our own.

What we have done is worked in partnership with other countries and other regions. The EU, for example, is aggressively looking into how they can foster partnerships between Europe and Africa.

The fact is that global problems need global solutions, and more and more people are recognising these solutions will come from the global South. We can be cost-effective. We can be real-world enabled.

But unfortunately, governments are missing an opportunity to create tens, if not hundreds of thousands of jobs, because they're still very much rooted in supporting yesterday's industries, not tomorrow's.

What are your plans for the year? Are there any specific initiatives or projects on the horizon that you should look forward to?

I mean, survival is a real thing, because what we're doing is hard to do. Running a creative business anywhere is hard.

So honestly, just continuing to be able to nurture the careers of the people who work here and continue to create solutions that are impactful, that's really goal number one. Goal number two is to deliver on some of the new and incredibly exciting opportunities we’ve got coming up.

As just one example of many, we've got a climate resilience game that we're building which we think we'll probably run on WhatsApp for optimal accessibility.

We're also working on building more games in the entrepreneurship space, because of course, entrepreneurship can't be learned from a book but it definitely can be learned through playing games, so we're looking forward to that.

I think the science of what we do is so substantial. The need is there, and increasingly, businesses are seeing the opportunity presented by games. People in the learning space, the social change space and the world of marketing are seeing this need and this opportunity, so we look forward to being part of that narrative and to producing solutions that tackle some wicked problems of our time.

We’re also super proud of the work we’ve done with Nedbank (one of Africa’s biggest banks) in Roblox with Chow Town which has just won an international Anthem Award for its impact, which we're very proud of and we’re excited to continue building that one out further and driving enhancements.

We also have a multi-year relationship with the Alan Gray Orbis Foundation to continue to build their entrepreneurship challenge, which is continuing to demonstrate insane engagement rates, completion rates, and value. So lots more to come.