The heist as thesis
In June 2025, on the Day of the Devs stage during Summer Game Fest, a Johannesburg studio unveiled a game that reads like a manifesto. In Relooted, you assemble a crew — scientists, coders and MMA fighters rather than career criminals — and plan non-violent break-ins to reclaim 70 real African artifacts, from Kenya's Vigango statues to the Maqdala Crown, still held in Western museums. It is Africanfuturist fiction built on non-fiction grievance. "Trying to find a reference for non-violent heist games was tricky," its creator Ben Myres told OkayAfrica; the writing came from Mohale Mashigo, one of the continent's sharpest speculative-fiction voices.
Relooted is the work of Nyamakop, the same Johannesburg studio whose 2018 debut Semblance became the first African-developed IP to ever launch on a Nintendo console and landed inside Metacritic's top 100 PC games of that year. Seven years on, the follow-up shipped a public demo in September 2025 and arrived as a day-one title on Xbox Game Pass. That arc — from historic first to platform-native launch — is the whole story of African gaming in miniature: the culture is being authored on the continent, and the fight now is over who captures the value.
What makes Relooted a useful lens is that it refuses the two lazy templates for African games. It is neither a Western engine skinned with kente patterns nor a charity-coded "impact" title. It is a commercial, mechanically ambitious console game whose politics are load-bearing — restitution as a puzzle you actually solve, artifact by artifact. The medium, in other words, is being used to argue rather than decorate.
The number that reframes everything
Africa's games market reached $1.8 billion in 2024, growing 12.4% year on year — roughly six times faster than the global average of 2.1%, according to data compiled by Carry1st and Newzoo. Mobile is not a segment here; it is the market. Handsets account for $1.6 billion, close to 90% of revenue, and 304 million of the continent's 349 million gamers. Africa added an estimated 32 million new players in a single year. Egypt ($368m), Nigeria ($300m) and South Africa ($278m) lead, but the fastest revenue growth came from smaller markets like Eritrea and Niger.
"Africa is leapfrogging traditional platforms," Carry1st CEO Cordel Robbin-Coker noted of the findings, calling the continent "one of the few places to find secular growth." In an industry where global spending has flatlined, that last phrase is the pitch that opens Western wallets. The strategic question is whether the money flows into African-owned infrastructure or simply through it.
The publisher building the rails
The company positioning itself as the toll booth is Carry1st. Founded in 2018, the pan-African publisher has raised roughly $57 million, headlined by a $27 million round in early 2023 led by Bitkraft Ventures with Andreessen Horowitz, followed by a strategic investment from the Sony Innovation Fund in 2024. Its cap table now reads like a who's-who of global games capital — a16z, Bitkraft, Google and Riot — betting on a distinctly African insight: that the binding constraint isn't demand, it's payments and distribution. Carry1st's full-stack model handles localisation, user acquisition and, crucially, the fragmented local payment rails that global studios can't be bothered to solve.
That infrastructure is now doubling as a culture platform. The Carry1st Africa Cup 2025, a Call of Duty: Mobile tournament, became the first African event officially recognised by Activision as a qualifier for the CODM World Championship — meaning the continent's slot in a global bracket with a $1 million pool now runs through a Lagos LAN final, not a Western one. Regional qualifiers spanned South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Egypt, Morocco and Francophone West Africa, drawing more than 200 teams and 1,000 players. "This tournament is a significant moment for African esports, offering the region's top players the chance to break through and compete on the global stage," Activision's Jeffrey Gullett said of the tie-up. The domestic prize pool — $15,000 — is modest; the sovereignty of controlling the qualifying pathway is not. It is the difference between African players being invited to someone else's stage and owning the door to it.
Studios writing the culture in
Below the publisher layer, the IP is getting more confidently African. In Lagos, Maliyo Games builds culturally rooted mobile titles — Whot King, Crazy Ludo, Safari City — that Apple spotlighted for Africa Day. In 2024 it became the first African developer to collaborate with Disney Games, co-creating Iwájú: Rising Chef off the back of the Pan-African animated series. Maliyo's quieter long game is talent: its GameUp Africa training programme marked its fifth year in 2025, functioning as one of the continent's most reliable on-ramps into professional development, and it co-authored a 2025 Africa Games Industry Report with KPMG.
Maliyo's Safari City: Renovate & Design went on to be named Most Impactful Mobile Game at the 2025 Games Industry Africa Awards — recognition that a Lagos studio can win on craft, not just representation.
Talent is also the whole thesis at Kucheza Gaming, whose name means "to play" in Swahili. It targets 6-to-18-year-olds, pairing original-IP development in Kucheza Studios with a Games-in-Education platform and, with partners Mettlestate and Big5 Games, a School Esports League engineered for national rollout — the kind of grassroots pipeline that turns casual mobile players into competitors, developers and, eventually, an industry. "We're building Africa's future through play," CEO Bukola Akingbade told PocketGamer.biz. Free Unreal Engine bootcamps sit alongside the leagues — a bet that the fastest way to own an industry is to grow the people who build it, in schools, before global platforms do the recruiting.
Even football, the continent's true religion, is being gamified from the top: CAF and KONAMI struck a deal making eFootball the official gaming partner of the Africa Cup of Nations for 2025 and 2027, recreating AFCON inside the game. A useful reminder that where African-owned IP is thin, global publishers will happily license the culture instead.
The gap between mobile and everything else
The uncomfortable subtext of the $1.8bn number is its shape. Ninety percent of it is mobile, which means the continent's players overwhelmingly rent access to global titles — battle passes, gacha pulls, Call of Duty skins — rather than buy games made at home. Nyamakop's console ambitions and Maliyo's original mobile catalogue are still the exception, not the rule. Carry1st's answer has been to import proven models and localise them; it brought the Mobile Premier League to Africa, wrapping skill-based competition in local payments and languages. That is smart business, but it also underlines the asymmetry: the fastest path to revenue today runs through other people's games. Closing the gap between where Africans play and what Africans own is the entire strategic project of the next five years.
The MonoKromatik read
The demand story is settled — 349 million gamers and the fastest growth on earth are not in dispute. What's contested is the stack. Right now the continent authors the culture (Nyamakop's artifacts, Maliyo's Whot, Kucheza's leagues) while much of the value — app-store cuts, engine licences, championship formats — is captured off-continent. The African-owned bright spots are the ones building infrastructure: Carry1st's payment rails and qualifier pathways, Maliyo's and Kucheza's talent pipelines. Games ship and fade; rails and trained developers compound.
The frontier, then, isn't a bigger download number. It's ownership of the layers underneath the download — distribution, payments, tournament rights and the studios that hold their own IP. That is the difference between Africa being gaming's fastest-growing audience and its next industry.