Around the world, gaming communities have been at the vanguard of the current Web3 boom and have been instrumental in shaping the social dimensions of new decentralized technologies.
Although Africa may not be as well known for its gaming ecosystem as other regions, emerging studios in countries such as Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda and South Africa are raising the bar for African games development, while the continent’s gamers set their own agenda independent of their peers in America, Asia and Europe.
Read more: How Local Developers Are Driving Gaming Innovation Across MENA
In the world of Web3 and blockchain gaming especially, African gamers have proven they have plenty of appetite for games like Axy Infinity and Thetan Arena, with their decentralized organization and play-to-earn tokenomics.
See also: Is Play-to-Earn Killing Blockchain Gaming?
Calling itself the largest gaming community in Africa, Metaverse Magna is a rising player in the space which proves just how open the continent’s gamers are to Web3 technologies.
Having started out life as a gaming guild offering play-to-earn scholarships to around 1,000 players of various web games, Metaverse Magna has grown into a 100,000-member-strong multi-guild platform that recently raised $3.2 million in a seed token sale, valuing the project at around $30 million.
Related: Jury Still Out as Web3 Takes Shape
With ambitions to launch new games and a crypto-gaming guild-management platform, Metaverse Magna takes its cue from the likes of Yield Guild Games and Avocado DAO, which have pioneered a community-driven approach to blockchain gaming.
The new gaming communities typically pool their resources using the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) model to purchase non-fungible tokens (NFTs), launch and invest in selected games and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) projects, and coordinate to support and grow the market for their shared assets.
Learn more: From Movies to Fast Food, DAOs Are Bringing Decentralization to Investing
As an indication of the global interest in Africa’s blockchain gaming market, when Metaverse Magna raised funding earlier this year, participating investors included South Korean videogame developer Wemade, Japanese venture capital firm Gumi Cryptos Capital, Honk Kong-based digital asset manager HashKey, India’s biggest gaming guild IndiGG, and a handful of other international investors from across the gaming and crypto space.
Setting the Stage for Africa’s GameFi Boom
Research by gaming market data firm Newzoo found that in 2022, the total number of gamers in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew by 8.2%, more than any other region. The MEA also experienced the highest year-on-year growth in market size at 10.8%. In South Africa alone, Newzoo estimates there are around 24 million gamers.
Meanwhile, countries like Nigeria and Kenya have some of the highest adoption rates for cryptocurrency and are among the most advanced in terms of peer-to-peer transactions, as Chainalytics has found in its study of the Sub-Saharan crypto payments ecosystem.
On two fronts then, Africa’s emerging economies have shown some of the most impressive growth in recent years. Both in terms of number of gamers and adoption of cryptocurrency, countries like Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa have been rapidly expanding their markets, setting the stage for the two trends to converge in the nascent GameFi space.
See also: Does Web3 Bring Hype or Value to the Internet?
As NFTs, in-game currencies and elite eSports continue to dispel the fallacy that in-game value is somehow detached from the real-world economy, Africa’s gaming ecosystem has a chance to foster wider economic growth and attract attention from Web3 investors and developers around the world.
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