Why monetisation in Africa is still a retention problem

• Retention failures, not pricing alone, remain the root cause of most monetisation problems in African mobile games.
• Rewarded video advertising continues to outperform in-app purchases in markets where payment access remains limited.
• Mobile dominates the continent's player base, but converting scale into sustainable revenue remains the industry’s central challenge.
• Payment infrastructure, not player willingness, remains one of the biggest barriers to monetisation.

The challenge facing mobile games in Africa is not demand but conversion. Millions of players exist, yet revenue remains constrained by infrastructure, scale requirements and business models that were never designed for local conditions.

We speak with FitNot Games founder Abdallah Elshabrawy about where monetisation strategies are breaking down, why retention matters more than pricing and what realistic success looks like for studios building in this market.

This interview is part of the ongoing debate in Africa's games industry on monetisation and which platforms offer the best opportunities. This was sparked by our interview with Masseka Game Studio founder Teddy Kossoko, who shared his views on the challenges of monetising players in the region.

PocketGamer.biz: Do you believe mobile gaming monetisation in Africa is structurally struggling or is the problem more about execution and business model? 

Abdallah Elshabrawy: I believe it is both, but they're not equal problems. The structural constraints are real and specific: Western ad networks that don't price African users fairly, currency volatility that squeezes margins when your costs are in dollars but your revenue isn't, and payment systems built around credit cards in markets where most people don't have one. No single studio fixes any of that. 

That said, studios targeting this market often miss a proper ad setup, have no systems to bring players back and have no pricing adjusted for local incomes. The game isn't ready to make money, even when players show up. That's not the market failing. That's the studio failing. 

It's often said that most Africans don't pay for entertainment, including games. In your view, what monetisation models are actually working in practice today? And can ad revenue provide sustainable returns where in-app purchases struggle to convert? 

Rewarded video is the model that actually converts. It's player-initiated, requires no payment method, and generates meaningful revenue when you've set up proper ad mediation across multiple networks.

It works because it fits the reality of markets where most players are simply not going to enter card details into a mobile game. IAPs can work, but only at much lower price points than most studios launch at. 

The barrier isn't the willingness to pay, it's access. Nigeria's credit card penetration sits around 3.5%, Morocco's around 2.7%. Egypt looks better on paper at roughly 20%, but under 10% of Egyptian adults actually use digital payments in practice. Ad revenue can be sustainable, but the user volumes required are an order of magnitude higher than most indie studios ever reach. 

African traffic commands substantially lower eCPMs than tier one markets, which means you need far more daily active users to generate the same revenue a Western audience game produces at the same scale. Most studios won't get there and the ones that do didn't get there by accident.

Is the "PC has higher purchasing power than mobile" argument convincing to you or does it ignore scalability constraints? 

The PC player who pays is spending more per transaction. But mobile accounts for 87% of African gamers and roughly 90% of gaming revenue. The PC market in Africa is a niche within a niche. The piracy argument is reasonable intuition, but the more grounded problem is simpler: PC distribution means competing for discovery on Steam against global studios with marketing budgets that dwarf anything an Africa-based indie can deploy. 

That's a structural disadvantage that exists, regardless of piracy rates. The one credible PC case is premium narrative games aimed at the Arab or African diaspora in Western markets, people with Western payment rails and a strong cultural identity they're willing to pay to see reflected.

That niche is real. But it's thin as a business thesis and it requires building for an audience that lives outside the continent you're supposedly targeting. 

What are the biggest monetisation blockers you face in your market: payments, ARPU, retention, CAC, ad revenue or something else? 

Retention is the root cause that doesn't get enough attention. Studios jump straight to "how do we make money" before solving "how do we keep people" and most monetisation problems in this market are downstream of a retention failure that was never addressed.

Once you have retention, you're still facing three compounding problems. The first is eCPM: African traffic commands significantly lower advertiser rates than tier one markets. 

The second is payment infrastructure: low card penetration and high checkout friction cap IAP conversion regardless of how well the game is designed.

The third, and the one that sits above all others, is scale. The monetisation models that work here need volume to function. Getting to that volume means either paid UA campaigns that don't fit the CAC/LTV math at current eCPM rates, or organic virality, which is not a plan but an outcome. 

Do you think Africa's mobile gaming revenue is overstated because of betting and gambling being grouped into broader industry figures? 

Depends on your source. Outlets like Newzoo and Carry1st explicitly exclude gambling and betting from their figures; their $1.8 billion market size for 2024 covers traditional games only. Other reports blend betting apps under the gaming umbrella, which inflates the headline number significantly, given that Africa's sports betting market alone is projected at $3 billion for 2025.

The practical damage is downstream: studios that size their opportunity on the inflated figures build business cases that look credible on paper, raise early money against those projections and then can't explain to investors why their traction doesn't match the market size they cited. 

If you had to choose today, and regardless of quality, would you bet on mobile or PC for sustainable revenue in Africa, and why? 

I'd choose mobile. 87% of African gamers are on mobile and revenue follows accordingly.

App stores solve distribution at zero marginal cost, development cycles can compress to 90 days with reusable infrastructure, and organic growth through social sharing remains possible in ways it simply isn't on PC in this market. 

That said, mobile across a continent of 1.4 billion people generating $1bn to $1.8bn in traditional game revenue is not a large number. This is a market in early formation with real structural constraints on monetisation, real scale requirements that most studios won't meet and real payment infrastructure gaps that demand specific technical decisions from day one. 

The studios that win here will be the ones who understood that going in and built for the conditions that actually exist, not the ones chasing a market size number that doesn't reflect their reality.