Market predictions for gaming in South Africa

Comments

• dislekcia

  10:47am 19 Sep 2015 edited 10:54am 19 Sep 2015

  These reports are very squarely based in what they expect consumers to focus on, not local developers. From the perspective of local devs, they're not all that meaningful.
  
  Case in point: Desktop Dungeons has sold 458 units on Steam in South Africa. Out of 100K sales, that's not a lot. I'm not saying it's nothing, but it's indicative of how indie games reach niches instead of mainstream markets. You're reaching fractions of each geographical market, so focusing on a single area of the globe is generally a bad idea - you want to cast your net as wide as possible.
  
  Sure, you could try to make something that's going to set SA on fire and everyone in the country will try to get the game on their phones or whatever - but that's not very likely. The top selling mobile games in the local space are all the usual suspects: international juggernauts with monthly marketing budgets larger than the annual turnover of our entire local industry. Trying to compete that way is business suicide. If you do build a game that's going to do well in SA, it'll be able to do well in other markets to.
  
  While the article itself does mention MGSA and the stats from our survey, I don't think the PWC report used those at all. The MGSA figures aren't *local earnings*, they're global earnings for the studios working here, so they'd be beyond the scope of the report AFAIK. That seems to be something that the writers of the article added in.
  
  However, if you're getting valuable insights from these sorts of reports, I'd be keen to hear what they are.

  Thanked by 3dammit critic dark_seth