Several African video game studios have joined forces in PAGG, Pan Africa Gaming Group, to develop and harmonize the continent’s sector. And one of the problems to be solved for these studios is games to generate money, knowing that the US online stores, Apple and Google do not work for African payments. Studios must fight to find alternative solutions.
In Africa, selling a video game is much more complicated than developing it. The obstacles are many and creators are looking for the right payment system. The solution can come from telecom operators, telcos, which use mobile money. But from one country to another, harmonization is not easy, as explained by Olivier Madiba, founder of the Cameroonian studio Kiro’o Games.
“We can not even make transfers easily between Cameroon and Côte d’Ivoire, because there are quarrels between banks and telecommunications companies behind. So we at Kiro’o took the problem from the other side. Currently, Olivier Madiba explains, there are companies that create aggregators by region. , for example, you have “flutter wave” (the Nigerian payment aggregator Ed) that allows us to access ten countries where they merge telcos, so we will rely on this model, this allows us to avoid the struggle of going one phone at a time. We come across an aggregator, we work with it and integrate its solution. ”
Teddy Kossoko, founder of Masseka Games, took the bull by the horns. Since developers can not monetize their games through Apple and Google stores, they can just as easily create one.
A payment open to the whole of Africa “What we have decided to do is to develop the equivalent of a” Google Play Store “, which will be based on the payment solutions that Orange, MTN and others have. Thanks to this, says Teddy Kossoko , a content creator in Mali will sell their content in Kenya, and thanks to Mpensa (the Kenyan mobile payment Editor’s note) we’ll be able to get a Kenyan to buy the game and then send the money back to the Malian.
This store is still in the development phase. And its ambition is to be open to all African countries and thus to all currencies, which is a real challenge in terms of regulations and taxation, according to Teddy Kossoko.
“In principle, once the money comes out of the customer’s wallet, at the end of the process, the money ends up in a bank account. And what is happening is that we have chosen not to move the money between African countries. If someone in Senegal has generated money in South Africa, we take the money from the ECOWAS zone to pay for it. At the end of the month, we will rebalance the flows to compensate for the money that has been moved from one area (monetary, editor’s note) to another.
Video game makers expect the new alliance they have just created, Panafrican Gaming Group, to accelerate the payment revolution across the continent.
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