Industry experts foresee an imminent1

Industry experts foresee an imminent explosion in the development of mobile and online gaming services as Nigerian techies begin to wake up to the prospects inherent in the $23.9 billion market, BusinessDay investigations reveal. The global mobile gaming market is expected to grow 27.3 percent annually, doubling in the next two years. The worldwide video games industry, worth more than $63 billion in 2012, is expected to reach nearly $87 billion in 2017, PricewaterhouseCoopers said in a recent study. Industry analysts told BusinessDay that software developers in the country were beginning to see the enormous market potentials there-in, with many of them now channelling their energies and resources towards developing locally-relevant
mobile gaming services. “There are lots of gaming applications in the market but no local content from Nigeria,” said Kelvin Fangkai, who manages Data Hosting Services for Huawei Technologies. That trend is already changing as two Nigerian start-ups, Maliyo and Kuluya, are already making significant strides in the development of mobile and online gaming services. These technology companies are setting the tone for an imminent boom in mobile gaming. They are currently tapping into the quirks of daily life in Africa to create online and mobile phone video games that are winning fans around the world. Industry watchers say the game “Mosquito Smasher” has earned huge comparisons to “Angry Birds”, the worldwide mobile application success of recent years. According to them, the graphics are simple, the objectives clear and the reward immediate. Essentially, the game involves squashing as many of the blood-sucking parasites as possible under your thumb. Another, the highly popular “Okada Ride”, has players guide a motorcycle-taxi driver around roadside street vendors, roadblocks and police in the notorious traffic of Lagos, a sprawling metropolis of nearly 20 million people. Drawing inspiration from life in Lagos