The Top 30 MENA Game Makers of 2022 | Pocket Gamer.biz
Welcome to something brand new and very exciting! After 14 years of running the legendary PocketGamer.Biz global Top 50 Game Makers initiative, we’re growing the family with more focused, regional siblings – the Top 30 lists.
It’s no coincidence that MENA is our first port of call. Analysts at NewZoo say MENA is the fastest growing region in the entire c.$190 billion global games market, both in terms of revenues ($7.1 billion forecast for 2022, up almost 11%), and player base (488 million, up over 8% YOY).
The passion of the local game makers has always been in evidence since our first trip to the region, but the huge growth of the industry has surpassed even our expectations! And we firmly believe this really is just the start of an exciting story.
We’ve considered a wide string of factors while compiling this list, from the obvious financial performance and downloads to the more subjective review scores and game quality, plus the less tangible innovation and cultural/industry impact Forecasts for the year ahead and latent potential are also fed into the mix, as well as anonymized input from local experts.
We’ve also filtered out large companies who have a subsidiary office in the region but their HQ elsewhere (sorry Sony and Ubisoft!). Suffice to say, the first outing of anything is always a prototype and we’re sure there’ll be plenty of debate about the decisions, but we see this as the first step in a much longer journey of celebrating and promoting the MENA games industry.
We very much hope you’ll join us!
PS… So what does MENA mean?
One of our first tasks was to define what exactly MENA means. There are many different political, economic and cultural aspects to consider. For the purposes of this guide we focused primarily on the Arabic-speaking nations in the Middle East and kept more mature, European-leaning markets like Israel and Turkey on the sidelines. The result is that 14 different countries were considered for the list and 7 are represented (although some may have parent companies and subsidiaries elsewhere). For geopolitical reasons, Iranian companies were also withheld.
Click here to view the list »
